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TITLE: Brice Fleutiaux |
AUTHOR: Steve Crawshaw |
PUB: The Independent |
DATE: May 5, 2001 |
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One bitter paradox of Brice Fleutiaux's life was that it was his suffering, not his work, which made him most famous. That fame, in turn, brought him both happiness and despair. The freelance photographer worked in south-east Asia and then in the Balkans. But it was his eight-month ordeal as a hostage in Chechnya which brought him to the attention of a much wider public. Suddenly, the unknown Fleutiaux was a well-known name. His arrival in Chechnya in 1999 could be said to show courage and foolhardiness in equal measure. Kidnapping of foreigners was common at that time; foreigners who remained in Chechnya were usually protected by armed escorts. And yet Fleutiaux made his way unprotected from the Georgian border to the Chechen capital, Grozny. He seemed at the very least to be tempting fate by accepting a lift from an unknown driver in a BMW just hours after his arrival in the city on 1 October. In an outlying suburb, they were soon joined by a black Mercedes. As Fleutiaux later recalled: "The big guy got out of the Merc, smiling. He looked at me, but not in the eyes. He looked at my cameras. When I saw him I thought: 'I've fallen into bad hands.' " Indeed. Initially, Fleutiaux was kept chained and blindfolded. There were strange connections between his captors and the Russian security forces, the FSB: a man showing an FSB identity card was present when Fleutiaux's captors videoed him in his cell. "I don't know if his ID card was fake or real," Fleutiaux said later. "The point is, he took the tape and a few days later the tape was shown by the FSB in Moscow." Gradually, Fleutiaux became partly accepted by the group which was holding him. He became the cook and photographer. ("You have the luck to have me here. Why don't you give me a camera?") Under attack from the Russian forces, the Chechens were constantly on the move in the mountains, often in freezing conditions, sometimes with no food; when the Russians were very close, the group would stay hidden in the same place, chilled to the bone, for days at a time. Sometimes he was treated brutally; at other times, his captors allowed him unexpected concessions. In April, he was allowed to make a satellite phone call home. ("Is it you?" his astonished mother asked.) His wife Dana, travelling on her Romanian passport, travelled secretly to Chechnya, where she made contact with her husband's captors. Even after the French authorities demanded that she return home, she came back a second time, at the request of the go-betweens. The terms of Fleutiaux's release remained unclear: Chechens continued to talk of a ransom demand of $1.5m, though the Russians insisted that the release was not dependent on money but on the exchange of a Chechen commander. It is still unclear whether money was handed over (which the French government is generally reckoned to have done on previous occasions). Either way, Fleutiaux was finally released on the morning of 12 June 2000. He was handed over to four Russians from the interior ministry, and flown to Moscow, where the authorities happily paraded him before the cameras. In a sense, it seemed to be a happy ending or, at least, it seemed to pave the way for better things. Fleutiaux's work was now more widely published; at last, he was recognised. Fleutiaux had always been a loner; above all, though, he seemed a man of constant enthusiasm and goodwill. He was born in Toulouse in 1967, his mother a teacher and his father a scientist. Though his father wanted him to study economics, he was interested, above all, in photography; he studied history of art and photography for a year at Toulouse University, before following his father, who worked at the French embassy in Thailand, to Bangkok. It was here that Fleutiaux began to work as a photographer, especially in Cambodia and Vietnam. In 1992, inspired by the dramatic events that had turned eastern Europe upside down, he moved to Romania, where he met his journalist wife, Dana. From there, he travelled to Bosnia and Croatia, photographing the Balkan wars. In 1995, the couple returned to Toulouse, where their daughter was born. However, Brice Fleutiaux's freelance photography barely earned him a living; other jobs were necessary to make ends meet. He always hoped that the next trip would bring the dreamed-of breakthrough. In many respects, that breakthrough seemed to come as a result of his experiences in Chechnya. On his return, he seemed philosophical about what he had gone through. He condemned the "cynical and cruel actions of this Chechen mafia and their Russian accomplices". Yet he felt sorry for the Chechens. "Here I am, at home again, in a rich and peaceful country, while those I have left behind do not have that choice." He was stern in his criticism of more commercially minded colleagues, those who "pay for information, corrupt people, and play the game of sensationalism", concluding: "I am far from being perfect, and I have made many mistakes. But I would never regret having gone to Chechnya." Alexandre Lévy, who collaborated with Fleutiaux on a recently published account of his ordeal, Otage en Tchétchénie ("Hostage in Chechnya"), says he was in high spirits on his return from Chechnya. "I've never seen him in such good form." Within the book, however, there are already hints of the darkness that would engulf him. "The reader should know that this story has a price. This experience has brought me an enormous amount but also deprived me of what I held most dear." His marriage to Dana who had herself become well known in France during Fleutiaux's captivity broke up. Reporters sans Frontières, who had campaigned for his release, spoke later of the "deep depression" which ended with his suicide. In a terrible way, Fleutiaux himself hinted at the impossibility of coming to terms with the events that had turned his life upside down. "As for me, I must get used to the idea that nothing can ever again be as it was. Certain fragments of my life can never be put back together again." END |