“I write to make people understand and alert”

How is your return home, after rubbing shoulders with extreme violence?

When you take the side of really seeing what you see, it is printed. We come back different. Each time, the transformation is a little larger.

Why are you going?

To tell the life of men and women confronted with extreme violence is for me to face the challenges of our time. My Catholic culture and my experience of violence counted in this journey: my grandparents have transmitted to me the RAM of the Shoah, and I have a Cambodian brother, survivor of the Khmer Rouge. Houn arrived with us when I was 12 years old. He, a prediction coming out of the camps and terror, hunger, death, seemed 7 or 8. He was screaming at night. These cries have penetrated me.

When I saw him for the first time, I said to myself: “He will never be my brother”, he liked it so ugly, the skin on the bones. But very quickly, it became. He is in my heart. This experience of otherness changed me. I understand with my flesh that we can all recognize ourselves as brothers. And love us. Going in the war zone is also to save the Houn today by telling and publishing their stories.

How did you become a journalist?

I taught history in a college at the time of the genocide in Rwanda in April 1994. All summer, I wrote texts for Secours Catholique, in order to mobilize public opinion. In August, I proposed a platform to The cross, showing that the event was predictable. She was accepted. And it changed my life. I wanted to write to understand, to make people understand, and to alert.

“Fury and ecstasy” : Why this title for your last book?

I witnessed the atrocious lynching of a man in Bangui, in the Central African Republic, in 2013. By ordinary men and women, taken from an orgasmic excitement. This violence specific to the human outcrops on a daily basis in our puffs of anger.

Can speak too?

Absolutely, when you hurt the other by speech and have fun. The epistle of Jacques (3, 8) denounces the langue of the Medant, “filled with deadly venom”. School harassment, scapegoat phenomena are part of this reality.