Marine Vlahovic was found dead at her home in Marseille on Monday November 25. The author of the brilliant Correspondent's Notebooks – a term that must be understood both in a journalistic sense and as an echo of her energy in giving and taking news from everyone she met on the shores of her adopted Mediterranean – had 39 years.
The last exchange I had with her was too long ago, just before summer. But it reflects how journalism, for Marine, was an ongoing commitment that didn't stop once the podcast was broadcast or the article was published.
“Hello, I certainly told you about my friends Heba and Islam from Gaza who lost their four children in an Israeli bombing in October 2023. Their lives, their hopes and their dreams were swept away, but they are determined to join the France. For our part, with friends, we resigned ourselves to paying their evacuation costs to an Egyptian agency. Islam and Heba are currently in Cairo and we are impatiently awaiting their arrival. To discover their story (in Arabic, English and French) and help them financially, click here. »
Just after October 7, Marine left for Egypt, where she stayed for several months to both cover the annihilation of Gaza and try to help the many friends she had in the Palestinian strip, since She had been a freelance correspondent in the West Bank for Radio France and RFI.
An experience that she recounted in a way that was both painful and funny in Correspondent's Notebooksbroadcast on Arte Radio, Scam prize at the Paris Podcast festival, a chronicle of life under occupation, but also a critique of media reason.
Marine Vlahovic in Gaza © Rami Abou Jamous
Enlarge image: Figure 1
For Mediapart, she had, from Egypt, published several papers under the pseudonym Julie Paris (to be found here, here or here). The last podcast she produced this summer on Arte Radio is also dedicated to the voices of Gaza.
Before that, we had signed together, in March 2023, several articles based on reports in the occupied West Bank and Gaza. At a time when tensions seemed to be concentrated towards Nablus and Huwara, she insisted that we also go to Gaza, both out of a desire to discover the land of her heart and feeling that this was where the game continued. , in depth, the fate of historic Palestine, under the veneer of an apparent normality which will be shattered a few months later, on October 7 of that same year.
The very first time that the name of Marine Vlahovic appeared in Mediapart, however, it was before her Palestinian adventure, ten years ago, when this Breton scouring the Mediterranean was based in Naples, for a report both written and sound on the way in which the economic crisis affected the Italian city.
I have three objects at home directly linked to Marine. A counterfeit 1 euro coin from a Neapolitan counterfeiter that this enthusiast of underworld worlds had introduced me to. A chipped trivet from a small shop in Hebron “because that’s where you have to buy ceramics, and only there.” And a pass from “Hamas Government in Gaza” that any journalist crossing the Erez border crossing had to obtain to work in the Palestinian strip before October 2023. And I do not yet realize that there will no longer be other objects linked to other reports. Rest in peace Marine.
