Biography Festival in Nîmes: “Despite death, fear, danger, we are going back…”, the confidences of Dorothée Olliéric and Marine Jacquemin, war reporters

For years, their names have accompanied us from the ends of the world under bombs at the time when we eat soup in front of the high masses of 8 p.m. TV on TF1 or France 2. But why do we become war reporters? “When I was a child, I dreamed of adventure. At 25, I became a war reporter, I felt immortal. I was not afraid of anything. I discovered fear with my children but I always left even though I was devastated to leave them”says Dorothée Olliéric who wrote “Maman s’en va-en guerre” (editions du Rocher).

Marine Jacquemin went to see the pain of the women of the world to heal her own. “I dreamed of having 5 children and making cakes. I was never a mother, my tragedy”, she reveals in “My Wars” (Observatory editions).

“Be more courageous”

Two motivations so distant but two lives so similar in the end, as close as possible to bombs, death, war, the worst horrors in Sarajevo, Rwanda, Afghanistan, Angola, Moscow… “There, we meet people who give us everything,” says Marine Jacquemin who admits to having “was more afraid of dying in a report in the suburbs than in war.”

But as women, they had to “work three times as hard”, “show no weakness, be more courageous even when in Rwanda, I walked in fields of corpses cut in two”, adds Dorothée Oliéric.

Teamwork

They talk about the strong bond with their cameraman “two steps ahead of us” and their fixer, the omnipresent danger, the sometimes tense relations with the army or local embassies, the gap with the editorial offices in Paris, the often Spartan living conditions “camp bed under the stars, military ration and shower with a bottle of water”.

And the return difficult to negotiate. “I need time to land”smiles Dorothée Olliéric. Marine Jacquemin does a decompression airlock “to empty my bag of tears. I want to go home unscathed.” Even if their nights often remain haunted…