When French journalist Florence Aubenas was kidnapped in Baghdad on January 5, 2005, along with her Iraqi colleague Hussein Hanoun al-Saadi, she was one of France’s leading war correspondents. Over the course of eighteen years at Libération, a left-leaning French daily founded by Jean-Paul Sartre in 1973, Aubenas had covered conflicts in Rwanda, Kosovo, Algeria, and Afghanistan. But the rallies, protests, and media campaigns carried out in France in support of Aubenas while she was in captivity would make her a household name in her country. After her release she would go on to use her new celebrity to become a fierce advocate on behalf of French hostages. This was vital, because Aubenas’s abduction came at the beginning of a surge in kidnappings and hostage-takings by criminals and terror groups. The successful effort to bring Aubenas home helped define France’s approach to hostage-taking, and shaped the global response.
After Aubenas and Hanoun were taken at gunpoint, they were driven to one private home and then another. They never learned the name of the group that was holding them. We are “mujahidin combating the Americans in Iraq,” was the only thing her kidnappers told her. They locked her in a tiny, dank room in a building’s basement and made her wear a grey sweatsuit emblazoned with the word Titanic. She was blindfolded and forbidden to speak. Hanoun was kept in the same room. Because the hostages were held in near complete silence neither was aware of the other’s proximity.
In France, Aubenas’s kidnapping was a huge national story. Portraits of Aubenas and Hanoun were hung in the Place de la République, and from public squares in France and across all of Europe. Supporters rallied in front of the Eiffel Tower. Muslim students from all over France organized a meeting of solidarity and support at the Grand Mosque in Paris. The press freedom organization Reporters sans frontières (RSF) and Aubenas’s newspaper Libération organized a benefit concert at the 2,000-seat Olympia theater, featuring top talents like Alain Souchon and Patrick Bruel. On the hundredth day of their captivity, every broadcaster, every French radio station, and nearly every media outlet in France made a coordinated public appeal. Brass bands across France participated in an event dubbed “1000 Fanfares” for the hostages.
The French government was prepared to negotiate, but it was not able to make contact with the shadowy group that had kidnapped Aubenas and Hanoun. RSF General Secretary Robert Menard traveled to Aleppo and Beirut of his own initiative and without government support, to meet with the Grand Mufti and representatives from Hezbollah. His efforts to open a communications channel came up empty.
On March 1, the kidnappers reached out in their own brutal way. They delivered a grainy video to news organizations in Baghdad. It showed Aubenas, gaunt and disheveled, begging for her life. “Please help me. My health is very bad. I’m very bad psychologically also,” Aubenas said in English, as she sat against a dark background with her knees pressed up against her chest. “Please, it’s urgent now. I ask especially Mr. Didier Julia, the French deputy, to help me. Please Mr. Julia. Help me! It’s urgent, help me!”
The reference to Didier Julia was an indication that the kidnappers were also looking for a communication channel. Julia was a member of the French parliament and an Arabic speaker. He had relationships with officials in the former government of Saddam Hussein, many of whom had joined the anti-U.S. insurgency. But the French government negotiators didn’t trust Julia and didn’t want to use him as an intermediary. On March 3, Julia was summoned to the office of the French spy agency Direction générale de la sécurité extérieure (DGSE) and questioned. He was later told to butt out. Incensed, Julia claimed the DGSE “didn’t want Florence to be freed because she knows too much.” His request for a meeting with President Jacques Chirac was rebuffed.
With Julia pushed to the sidelines, French negotiators hit a dead end. Didier François, a colleague of Aubenas’s, was concerned. Like Aubenas, François had covered conflicts from Kosovo to Chechnya. He was known as a “grand reporter,” an informal honor bestowed on France’s leading war correspondents. François had set up the Baghdad bureau of Libération following the 2003 U.S.-led invasion. When Aubenas arrived, she found the office looked like a student dorm, with “his karate films, his whole little universe.”
With the life of a colleague on the line, François made a decision to step out of his journalistic role. He hoped he could use his journalistic connections to open up a line of communication between the hostage-takers and the French government.
The process took months, and involved travel to both Jordan and Syria. French officials insisted that François sign an agreement that he would not use any information obtained through his mediation efforts in his reporting. Once the line of communication was open, the French government negotiating team, led by the DGSE, took over.
On June 12, Aubenas and Hanoun were freed. Aubenas was put on a plane to Paris. President Chirac traveled to Villacoublay Air Force base to greet her. Photos of their warm embrace were splashed across French media and around the world. Back in Baghdad, Hanoun’s family slaughtered a goat for a celebratory meal. Later, Hanoun traveled to France with his wife and son for a well-documented reunion with Aubenas.
Two days after her release, Aubenas, along with Libération editor Serge July, presided over a packed press conference at the Press Club in Paris. Dressed elegantly in an embroidered blue blouse, her sunglasses pushed up onto her dark hair, Aubenas struck a dramatic contrast with her harrowing image in the March hostage video. She was ebullient, funny, and self-deprecating. Aubenas thanked the media, the public, and her family for their unwavering support, even as she described her grim experience. “What it’s like to live in a cellar?” she said in response to one question. “It is a very long experience to live, but a very short one to explain. What would I do? I would count. Count the days, count the hours, the minutes, the steps, the words, everything.”
She was also able to count on the support of the French government. In the shadowy global world of hostage-taking, no country has more of a reputation for paying ransom than France.
The Times of London reported that France had paid $10 million for the release of Aubenas and Hanoun. Robert Menard told the AFP, “There is no hostage release without something in return and, among the demands, there is obviously a demand for money.” When I spoke to Menard, he told me he had no specific information. Officially, the French government denied paying ransom.
Twelve years later, I met Aubenas in a Paris café. The sun was pouring in through a plate-glass window, creating a nearly intolerable greenhouse effect. Despite the heat, Aubenas insisted on sitting in the sun. Unlike many kidnapping survivors, Aubenas has no desire to talk about her own experience. She has no doubt that a large ransom was paid, but does not know the details. She has never written about her kidnapping, and she has spoken about it only in passing.
Partly this is because she does not want to give any satisfaction to her kidnappers, who told her that one day she would write a book and be “more famous than Lady Di.” Partly, it’s a desire not to allow herself to be defined as a victim. “It’s sometimes difficult to have everyone see you as an ex-hostage every day,” Aubenas admitted. “I prefer to act for people still in dangerous situations rather than know what exactly happened to me. Now I’m safe, and that’s okay.”
As a leading journalist and the author of a best-selling book on the fate of French workers, Aubenas has remained in the public eye. She is committed to using the visibility she gained through her own ordeal to help other hostages. Part of her commitment is heading what are called “support committees.” These are informal structures set up by the families of hostages. Aubenas is often the first choice to lead such efforts. “Families choose someone to be the head of the committee who is well known in this country,” Aubenas explains. “It’s better if it is someone without problems and not too controversial. Someone who knows the topic and better still if they are a kind of friend.”
Of course Aubenas’s willingness to lead the support committees reflects her commitment to the families of French hostages. But it also reflects something larger. Aubenas believes that a willingness to negotiate and even to pay ransom is an affirmation of French democracy. She is concerned that the resolve of the French government to bring hostages home has sometimes wavered and that it is her responsibility to remind the French leadership of its obligation.
Aubenas’s abduction was part of a wave that swept through Iraq beginning around 2004. This wave marked the emergence of a new era of political kidnapping that has posed extraordinary challenges to governments around the world. Kidnapping for ransom and to extract concessions has been a political practice for thousands of years. It has helped fund large-scale criminal enterprises, from the Barbary Pirates to the Mexican drug cartels. In recent decades, it has been a key source of funding for militant and revolutionary groups, ranging from Basque separatists in Spain, to the Red Army Faction in Germany, to the Montoneros in Argentina. The inherent drama of kidnappings has often captivated the public imagination, like the Lindbergh baby and the Patty Hearst case.
Political kidnapping requires a level of organization and infrastructure: A group must be able to capture the hostages, hold them for an extended period, communicate demands, and manage the ransom payment. Hostage-taking was a favored tactic of radical leftist groups operating in Europe and Latin America in the 1960s, was adopted by pro-Palestinian militants in the next decade, and became a defining feature of the Lebanon conflict in the 1980s. Between 1970 and 2013, there were 1,021 political kidnappings in Colombia, according to the Global Terrorism Database at the University of Maryland, which is compiled from open source records. Colombian human rights groups, which track kidnappings carried out by leftist guerrillas, right wing paramilitaries, drug traffickers, and run-of-the-mill criminals, put the number astronomically higher, at 40,000 kidnappings during this period. The discrepancy between the two figures suggests why it is prudent to see the available data as a comparative baseline rather than a definitive tally. The Global Terrorism Database, which provided much of the data for the 2015 report on global kidnapping published by the Combating Terrorism Center at West Point, recorded 732 kidnappings in India from 1970 to 2013, largely carried out by Kashmiri militants. There were hundreds each in Pakistan, Afghanistan, the Philippines, and Iraq. Most of these were carried out by Islamist groups, some linked to global networks such as Al Qaeda. Following the September 11, 2001 attacks and the invasion of Iraq in 2003, there was a surge in kidnappings carried out by non-state actors, which rose from an average of 164 incidents a year to a high of 630 incidents in 2013. However, nearly all of the increase can be attributed to increased kidnapping of local nationals, not Westerners.
Unquestionably, the rise of interconnected Jihadi movements transformed the landscape. Jihadi networks discovered that they could use new communications technology to place unprecedented pressures on governments, by releasing or threatening to release terrorizing videos that could be broadcast and shared all over the world, engendering fear on a global scale.
In January 2002, Al Qaeda militants in Pakistan kidnapped and murdered Wall Street Journal reporter Daniel Pearl. Previously, Al Qaeda had cultivated the favor of international journalists, hosting press conferences and granting exclusive interviews, like the ones Osama Bin Laden once gave to CNN and ABC. Pearl’s abduction marked a shift (though it was largely opportunistic, as it came about because a source that Pearl contacted in the course of his reporting was actually an Al Qaeda operative). Pearl’s murder was a spontaneous and improvised decision taken by Al Qaeda’s propaganda chief, Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, the mastermind of the 9/11 attacks. Pearl’s videotaped beheading—which was actually a reenactment because the camera jammed on the first take—sent a message to Jihadi groups around the world that kidnapping Westerners was now a sanctioned tactic.
Kidnapping and hostage-taking next emerged amid the post-invasion chaos in Iraq. The 2004 videotaped beheading of U.S. contractor Nick Berg by Al Qaeda in Iraq leader Abu Musab al-Zarqawi along with the execution of the Irish-born aid worker Margaret Hassan set a brutal tone. But the kidnappings that swept through the country were carried out by a range of intersecting political and criminal groups with varying motivations. Some who had earlier executed their victims without demanding a ransom began looking for a payout.
An analysis carried out by Norwegian researcher Thomas Hegghammer looked at 63 kidnappings, involving 159 victims in Iraq during 2004. Hegghammer described a classic case of “contagion,” in which terrorist groups copied and learned from one another. Kidnapping, Hegghammer noted, is an effective tactic because it demands relatively few resources compared to suicide attacks and car bombings. It’s useful as a propaganda tool because specific demands can be made and widely publicized. Because hostage situations play out over time, these demands can be “recycled” and used again and again. Unlike bombings, abductions can be used as a basis for negotiation, which may bring political and material benefits. The newly developed ability to publicize demands online allowed kidnappers to bring them to a global audience without relying on traditional media.
The “contagion” would soon spread through Islamist networks around the world, fueling international kidnappings in Afghanistan, Syria, Somalia, Yemen, and North Africa. A 2017 study carried out by New America Foundation counted nearly 1,200 separate kidnappings carried out by terrorist and militant groups between 2001 and 2015. This is certainly a low estimate, as many such incidents were never publicly reported.
The question of how to respond to kidnapping by terrorist groups and whether to pay ransom raises a host of political, moral, and strategic complications. Different countries respond based on their own laws, political traditions, and interests.
Many continental European countries, including Spain, Italy, Germany, Austria, and Switzerland, place an emphasis on the “right to life,” a concept enshrined in European human rights law. They recognize that ransom payments can be used for terrible purposes but these countries are guided by a different set of strategic considerations. France, for example, did not participate in the invasion of Iraq and for the most part the insurgent groups operating there were not directly targeting France or French interests. When Islamist militants in North Africa kidnapped a group of thirty-two tourists that included sixteen Germans in 2003, the German government facilitated a 5 million euro ransom payment disguised as aid money. Following the beheading of Italian freelance journalist Enzo Baldoni in August 2004, Italy put in place an intelligence network to facilitate ransom payments. It was used to liberate Italian aid workers Simona Pari and Simona Torretta, and journalist Giuliana Sgrena.
But there was another reason France and other European countries ponied up that had nothing to with moral principles or strategic interests: It was politics. When French citizens are kidnapped, the public often mobilizes to demand their release. It’s a tradition that goes back to the Lebanese hostage crisis, one that the French authorities initially encouraged. During a decade-long period from 1982 to 1992, cells linked to Hezbollah, Islamic Jihad, and ultimately the revolutionary regime in Iran took more than a hundred hostages in Lebanon, most of them from the U.S. and Western Europe. Among them were U.S. journalist Terry Anderson and British envoy Terry Waite, whose cases generated considerable interest and attention in their respective countries. But the fate of four French hostages, seized in the spring of 1985, became a national obsession.
On May 22, 1985, kidnappers from Islamic Jihad intercepted the airport taxi carrying journalist Jean-Paul Kauffmann and sociologist Michel Seurat. The kidnappers trundled them into a car and took them to an underground parking garage. They were held along with a pair of French diplomats who had been nabbed two months before. When Seurat died of cancer seven months later while still in captivity, his captors lied and claimed he had been executed. The ruse was intended to increase public pressure, and it may have worked. The three remaining hostages were released on May 2, 1988, in exchange for significant political concessions by France. These included the unfreezing of Iranian assets, the expulsion of the Iranian opposition from France, and the eventual pardoning of a prominent militant imprisoned for an assassination attempt against the former Iranian Prime Minister (who was living in exile outside Paris).
During their three years of captivity, Kauffmann and the other French hostages “were featured every night at the beginning and the end of the nightly news,” recalled Hala Kodmani, the Middle East editor at Libération. Their release was presented as a major victory for French diplomacy and for President François Mitterrand. A high-level government official greeted the returning hostages. “The French public is very sensitive to the idea of a French citizen being abducted,” said Kodmani. “Mitterrand made a big show at the airport. He set the precedent, and it continues today.”
Since then, the kidnapping of a French citizen abroad has been seen as une affaire d’état, not merely an attack on the hostage’s family or employer but an attack on French interests. At the heart of France’s political culture is the belief that the state has the responsibility to protect the well-being and security of French citizens. The power to take decisive action on behalf of French citizens abroad—including authorizing ransom payments—is conferred on the office of the president. In part, this is a legacy of France’s colonial past, but it is also a recognition that France’s soft power is expressed through its cultural and economic relationships throughout the world.
The context for international kidnapping has changed dramatically since the Lebanese hostage crisis. The kidnappings carried out by radical Shia groups like Hezbollah and Islamic Jihad in the 1980s served a fundamentally political purpose. Under the guidance of Iran’s Revolutionary Guard, the hostages were used to achieve strategic leverage in the ongoing conflict with Israel and also to win the release of jailed militants. Hezbollah and Islamic Jihad targeted prominent individuals and developed a clandestine infrastructure that allowed them to hold hostages for extended periods while they carried out negotiations. In this environment, public mobilization helped the French government put pressure on the hostage-takers—who sought some level of international legitimacy for their cause—while giving it the political cover it needed to engage in proxy negotiations with Iran.
But the calculus was different with Islamic militant groups. Neither they nor their international supporters were likely to be responsive to government pressure or Western public opinion. And there was a risk. Public protests can have a perverse effect by driving up ransom demands and complicating negotiations. Worse, they can enhance terrorist propaganda. I learned this the hard way in 2002, when I participated in a global campaign to win the release of Daniel Pearl. The campaign was intended to humanize Pearl, to rally public support, and to isolate the hostage-takers. In the end, this strategy played into the kidnappers’ hands by amplifying the visibility of Pearl’s eventual murder. Today, Pearl remains among Al Qaeda’s most famous victims.
The mass public mobilization around hostage-taking in France fuels the global perception that France will respond to hostage blackmail, even though other countries in Europe more readily pay ransom. But the French government is trapped by the dynamic that it created. The public rituals around hostage-taking in France—the mass mobilization, the personal involvement of the French president in resolving the crisis, and, if successful, the triumphant homecoming at Villacoublay air base—have created a challenging political dynamic. While not every hostage-taking sends the French public into the street, once the process is set in motion the government faces tremendous public pressure to bring the hostages home. This is exactly what Aubenas wants.
The role of the support committee is to raise the political cost of inaction. “The first interest of the committee is to fight with the government,” Aubenas explained. “If the government says, ‘This is not good for us, please don’t do it,’ I say, ‘I don’t care.’ Meanwhile, the family says, ‘It’s not us, it’s the committee.’”
When Aubenas is heading up a support committee, she organizes an action every few weeks. It could be a public rally, a concert, or an art exhibition. The idea is to generate media coverage. When a journalist is involved, she often works closely with Reporters Without Borders. The group advocates for the protection of journalists worldwide and has tremendous visibility in France. She meets regularly with senior government officials, including the president. The families and even the employers of the victims need to maintain a positive and constructive relationship with officials during the hostage ordeal, because cooperation and trust are essential. But Aubenas feels free to give those officials a hard time.
During an active kidnapping, families, friends, and employers are often told by government officials and security experts to keep quiet and avoid the media. The logic is that publicity leads to increased ransom demands. While she leaves the final decision to the family, Aubenas’s strategy is to make more noise, not less, in order to put pressure on the government, even if that means ransom demands go up. “Let’s say that it is something shocking, like $1 million or more,” Aubenas insisted. “It’s not a little money. But is it better to let someone die on a video on the internet?”
Recognizing that political imperative, the French government put in place an emergency response structure that makes a sharp delineation between political and criminal cases, according to Laurent Combalbert, a former hostage negotiator with the French National Police, and now the head of a private security firm. If the kidnapping is deemed to be strictly criminal in nature—for example, involving a French businessperson in Mexico—then the case is handled by the French National Police. But if a kidnapping is designated as political, negotiations are handled by a small group that might include the head of intelligence, the presidential chief of staff, and the minister of defense. The president is kept informed and personally approves any deal.
While the French government will always negotiate, it does not always pay. Sometimes the price is just too high. In other cases, the potential impact on French interests might be considered too negative. However, one result of this structure is that every hostage case is highly politicized. If the hostages are freed, the president will greet them at the airport per the ritual established during the Lebanese hostage crisis. Triumphant images will be broadcast across the nation and splashed across front pages. If the hostage is killed, it will be perceived as a personal failure of the president, followed by lawsuits and a public reckoning.
In talking to former hostages, their employers, and French government officials, I heard a variety of schemes about how ransom payments are funded. Dorothée Moisan, a French journalist and author of a book on international kidnapping, reports that ransom payments have been made from a special reserve fund approved by the National Assembly, a claim that has been widely reported and substantiated. I was also told of a standing slush fund, a sort of insurance pool, to which French businesses are asked to contribute. In other instances, employers pay the ransom and are quietly reimbursed; or aid money is diverted; or a third country pays on France’s behalf and is compensated in some manner.
The French government has consistently claimed it does not “pay” ransom, and in many cases this appears to be technically true. However, the emphasis on whether a government actually pays the ransom itself is misleading. The real distinction is between countries like France that facilitate ransom payments, and others like the U.S. that seek to discourage or even block them.
For Aubenas, however, the issue of whether to pay ransom transcends politics and goes to the very highest ideals of the French Republic. The willingness to negotiate with terrorists and even to pay ransom represents a commitment to democratic principles, she believes. “For me, you win if you get them out,” Aubenas told me. “That’s democracy, talking to even your worst enemy. It’s crazy not to understand that. The strength is to talk with them.”
By responding to the craven indifference to human life on the part of the kidnappers with a resolve to preserve it even at tremendous cost, Aubenas contends, French society is demonstrating its essential humanity and sending a vital message to the world that undermines the terrorist propaganda. “Paying a ransom is a victory, not a defeat,” Aubenas insists. She recognizes the ransom sometimes goes to terror groups that carry out other attacks. But preserving the life of the hostage must be the state’s paramount obligation. Aubenas feels it’s her role to make sure the government never forgets it.
While Florence Aubenas sees a willingness to negotiate and pay ransom as an affirmation of French democratic ideals, not everyone I spoke with shared that perspective. Others argue that the French government’s willingness to negotiate with terrorists is a vulnerability, a demonstration of the country’s lack of resolve, and a threat to French national security. Perhaps the most surprising adherent of this view is Georges Malbrunot, a correspondent for Le Figaro. Surprising because Malbrunot, along with colleague Christian Chesnot, was kidnapped in Iraq in August 2004. They were held for four months, and released just two weeks before Aubenas and Hanoun were nabbed. After Malbrunot and Chesnot were freed, President Jacques Chirac declared that the French public did not “know of the size of the efforts and the overall cost for the nation” of bringing them home.
As with Aubenas and Hanoun, there had been a massive public mobilization in support of the two kidnapped journalists. Soon after they were taken, their kidnappers issued an ultimatum. Unless the French government repealed its ban on wearing headscarves in schools, the hostages would be killed. The French government coordinated a global response calling on prominent Islamic leaders to speak out and denounce the threat. In Paris, crowds poured into the street to demonstrate. Malbrunot credits that rapid response with saving his life.
But he also recalls the impact that it had on his captors. Several had initially proposed releasing the hostages after they determined that the two were bona fide journalists and not spies. But another group, seeing the mass protests in France, now believed that the hostages were too valuable to release without a big ransom. “They discovered the publicity in France, and they really enjoyed it,” Malbrunot recalled. “They said, ‘You are more famous than your president.’ There was a huge mobilization in France; there was a kind of panic. And the ransom got higher and higher.”
After months of negotiation, a multi-million-dollar ransom was paid by the Qatari government on behalf of the French. (Malbrunot told me that Qatari Foreign Minister Khalid Bin Mohammed Al Attiyah later acknowledged to him that his country had paid the ransom.) Media reports put the ransom as high as $15 million. Malbrunot believes that the publicity about the ransom payment led directly to the kidnapping of Aubenas and Hanoun, who were abducted two weeks after his release. Aubenas told me her abduction was opportunistic, and that her kidnappers did not even know her nationality when they grabbed her.
Malbrunot believes Qatar is playing a dangerous double game. While Qatar hosts an American air base and has close ties to the West, it is also alleged to have provided direct and indirect financing to Jihadi groups around the world, including Al Qaeda. This is partly a question of ideological and religious alignment among some segment of the Qatari elite, but it’s also a way of extending strategic influence and putting pressure on their regional rivals. By brokering ransom payments for Western hostages, Qatar is able to channel funding to the Jihadi networks it supports while simultaneously earning the gratitude of Western governments. Naturally, Qatari officials say that in taking up the cases of Western hostages they are acting out of a purely humanitarian impulse.
France’s hostage politics fuels bad outcomes, Malbrunot contends. “France is a specialist in hypermobilization,” he insisted. “It comes from a good feeling but it leads to a not very good result. A kidnapping is a very exciting story for the press. It’s a sad story, a family story, an intelligence story. You have all the ingredients. But mobilization creates a kind of industry of mobilization.” Malbrunot specifically cites RSF under Robert Menard, which he accuses of using public protest around hostage-taking to increase its own visibility and influence.
Didier Le Bret, a prominent French diplomat and intelligence official who oversaw hostage response in the French government, also has issues with the French approach, which greatly complicates negotiations. Public mobilization means it “takes an extra six months to resolve a kidnapping and costs you a lot more money,” he claimed. What Le Bret detests most is the French tradition of having the president greet the returning hostages. “It’s a terrible idea that highlights our weakness,” Le Bret said. “Sure these people suffered a terrible ordeal, but that doesn’t make them heroes.”
But the political dynamic linking mobilization to negotiation has been difficult to break. After all, the process began as a government-led effort to rally French society in response to the kidnappings of French citizens in Lebanon. But it has taken on a life of its own. Advocacy organizations like RSF, the support committees, and popular figures like Aubenas now drive the popular mobilizations. The media responds, providing generous coverage, and even working behind the scenes to pressure the government to resolve the case when journalists are involved.
The French government viewed this situation as tolerable, so long as the cases were resolved. After all, the more media attention, the greater the political benefit. But the dynamic began to shift with the emergence of a new group, Al Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb (AQIM), which formed in 2006 with a pledge to be “a bone in the throat of American and French crusaders.” The following year, Nicolas Sarkozy was elected president with a promise to shake up the French establishment and forge closer ties with the United States. Part of that involved a reconsideration of the French response to hostage-taking, including an effort to bring it more in line with the U.S. approach. At the same time, France was facing a genuine security crisis. According to data provided by the French Foreign Ministry, the number of French nationals abducted overseas quintupled from 11 to 59 a year between 2004 and 2008. While there was a debate about whether French citizens were being targeted as a result of France’s propensity to pay ransom, Sarkozy was committed to a more aggressive response. When a sixty-one-year-old volunteer aid worker named Pierre Camatte was kidnapped by AQIM in late 2009, the French government not only refused to pay, it began to put pressure on other European countries whose capitulations to the kidnappers France claimed were fueling skyrocketing ransom demands. In January 2010, French Admiral Edouard Guillaud complained to General William Ward, head of the U.S. Africa Command, that Spain “has a track record of paying exorbitant sums in ransom and now the demands of the kidnappers are massively inflated.”
A month later, Camatte was freed, following the release of four Al Qaeda militants from a jail in Mali. Sarkozy expressed his personal gratitude to Malian President Amadou Toumani Touré and pledged French support in the fight against terrorism. But the release of the four militants deeply angered a number of North African governments, including Algeria. Indeed, the newly released prisoners quickly rejoined the fight.
The tension between Sarkozy’s attempt to refine the French response to hostage-taking and Aubenas’s efforts to ensure that the government met what she viewed as its historic commitments coalesced around a single case. In December 2009 Hervé Ghesquière, a veteran war reporter for the French broadcaster France 3, was kidnapped in Afghanistan’s Kapisa province along with his cameraman Stéphane Taponier. Sarkozy and other senior officials were furious, alleging that the journalists had acted recklessly by leaving a military embed to carry out independent reporting. In a meeting with Sarkozy, Aubenas pushed back, arguing that the journalists were just doing their jobs, and that any criticism of their conduct could wait until they were freed. While the French government called for a “media blackout,” meaning the suppression of any mention in the press of the abduction, Aubenas was determined to use media publicity to apply pressure on the government.
At first, the hostages were cited only by their first names. Eventually, Aubenas, RSF, and the French media rallied around a major public campaign that defied the president, using the journalists’ full names and keeping their case in the spotlight. When the journalists were released in June 2011, allegedly in exchange for a huge ransom paid to the Taliban, it was a victory not only for the journalists, but for Aubenas and her efforts to defend the principles of French democracy. Sarkozy’s attempt to take a harder line had reached its limits. (I will return to this case in Chapter Four)
When its citizens are held hostage, a government must adopt a posture along a continuum—on one end, you walk away from a threat to kill a hostage, and on the other, you capitulate to it. Where a country lands is a reflection of both its strategic interests and its political culture. In the U.S. and the UK, talking tough to terrorists scores political points. In Spain it doesn’t, at least not on an international level. France clearly has global interests, but it also has a political culture that rewards popular mobilization. So long as a portion of the French public is willing to march through the streets to demand the return of hostages, the government’s options are limited. Thanks in part to Aubenas, any French leader who refuses to recognize this reality is bound to pay a political price.