Home > Kidnapped Frenchmen worked closely together
by Nicola Clark
PARIS For most of the last three years Christian Chesnot and Georges Malbrunot have been largely inseparable.
The two French journalists became fast friends when they met in Amman, Jordan, in 2001, according to colleagues who have known and worked with them. The two men, both fluent Arabic speakers, have collaborated often over the years and traveled frequently together on assignments that have taken them to the far corners of the Middle East. They have covered subjects ranging from irrigation policy in the West Bank to the rehabilitation of Iraq’s Baath party leaders after the fall of Saddam Hussein.
"They are two specialists and great friends who have worked closely for many years," said Alain Menargues, international news director at Radio France.
So when Chesnot, 37, and Malbrunot, 41, got word in Baghdad on Aug. 20 that the rebel Shiite cleric Moktada al-Sadr had agreed to disarm his militia occupying Najaf’s Imam Ali Shrine, it was only natural that they should travel to the scene together. It was on their way to Najaf that the two men were kidnapped by Iraqi militiamen.
Chesnot, a freelance reporter for Radio France International and the Swiss newspaper La Tribune, is based in Amman but has made dozens of trips into Iraq to cover the war and its aftermath. Malbrunot has been reporting out of Baghdad, primarily for the French daily Le Figaro, since the spring of 2003.
Chesnot is a graduate of the Centre de Formation des Journalistes in Paris and spent three years in Cairo studying Arabic. While there he worked for a French-language newspaper, Le Progrès Egyptien and as a radio correspondent for France Inter and France Culture. In 1993 he wrote his first book, "La bataille de l’eau au Proche-Orient" (The Battle for Water in the Middle East) about the strategic role of water in regional politics. In 2000, he moved to Amman, where he continued to report about events in Jordan, Syria and Iraq.
Menargues of Radio France described Chesnot as outwardly "reserved," and "phlegmatic" in temperament, yet at the same time "passionate about Arab civilization."
"He is the kind of person who prefers much more to listen than to speak," Menargues said.
Malbrunot graduated from the Institut Practique de Journalisme in 1986 and has spent the bulk of his career in the region based in Israel. Thierry Oberlé, a colleague at Le Figaro, described Malbrunot as a hands-on reporter who, when he was covering the Intifada, kept apartments in both Jerusalem and in Gaza in order to remain as close as possible to the story and his sources.
Chesnot and Malbrunot have co-authored two books in French about Saddam Hussein, both of which were published last year. According to Oberlé, the two were working on a third joint project before they were abducted.
Their first book, "L’Irak de Saddam Hussein: Portrait total" (Saddam Hussein’s Iraq: A complete portrait), was published shortly before the U.S.-led invasion. It chronicles Saddam’s 24-year reign and is based largely on interviews with former members of the Iraqi leader’s entourage. The two also ghost-wrote a second book, "Les années Saddam: Révélations exclusives" (The Saddam years: Exclusive revelations), a memoir by Saman Abdul Majid, who was Saddam’s personal interpreter for 15 years.
The kidnapping of Chesnot and Malbrunot has come as a shock to the French media and the public at large, which had considered its citizens largely immune from the violence in Iraq, thanks to Paris’s refusal to send its soldiers there.
Even Malbrunot himself had commented recently that French journalists felt considerably safer than their colleagues from other countries whose governments have participated in the occupation.
"Many American journalists or British are passing themselves off as French when they go into strongholds of the resistance," Malbrunot wrote in a dispatch for Le Figaro on July 3.