This Saturday, October 8, 2022, it has been exactly 18 months since Olivier Dubois was taken hostage in northern Mali. Eighteen months, 78 weeks, 547 days. Since the hostages in Lebanon in the 1980s, more than thirty years ago, no French journalist has been held captive for so long. Olivier Dubois is a journalist, a profession he exercises in Mali, a country where political and security tensions are high and have only worsened since the day of his disappearance.
Like many journalists, to try to make a living from his profession, Olivier Dubois works for several media. He notably collaborates with Liberation, Le Point and Jeune Afrique. But for eighteen months there has been silence. We don’t read it anymore. We don’t hear it anymore. And it’s no longer bearable. His children have already celebrated two birthdays without their father. Eighteen months of silence. Worry. Questions. We don’t know much. We know that he had gone to interview a jihadist leader in Gao, in the north of the country. That he has since been held hostage by the Al-Qaeda-affiliated JNIM, the Support Group for Islam and Muslims. Only two Olivier videos have reached us. The last one aired last March. Since then, nothing.
Today we renew our appeal to the French authorities to intensify their efforts to obtain his release as soon as possible. We call on journalists and the public to continue to talk about Olivier Dubois, to say and write his name, so that no one, anywhere, forgets him.