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Families of French journalists detained in West Papua beg Indonesia for mercy
Sydney Morning Herald - September 16, 2014
Valentine Bourrat's mother Martine, and Thomas Dandois's brother Marc, have told Fairfax Media that, 40 days after the journalists' capture, their families do not understand why their loved ones are facing criminal charges in an Indonesian prison for a mere visa violation. They also do not know how long the legal process might take, nor how long Valentine and Thomas will spend in prison if found guilty.
Martine Bourrat said her husband Patrick, Valentine's father, was a fabled French war correspondent who was shot and imprisoned during his career. He was eventually killed when he was hit by an American tank during manoeuvres before the second Gulf War in 2002. Valentine was 17 when he died.
"I'm used to this situation. You know it's journalists' life," Martine Bourrat said. But her daughter's detention was longer and more stressful than those events.
"I was not afraid at the beginning, but now I am afraid; and Valentine, of course, she is fragile, and I am afraid for her... it's hard. It's hard."
The pair were caught by police on August 5 working using a tourist visa. They were filming a documentary for Arte TV in France on the separatist movement – a notoriously touchy subject for the Indonesian state.
For West Papua, Indonesian authorities require both a journalist's visa and a special permission letter, which is difficult to get.
Even so, most reporters caught with tourist visas are simply deported, while immigration authorities say they want this pair jailed for the maximum five years. Dandois and Bourrat have both apologised to authorities and acknowledged their wrongdoing.
At first, Martine said, her daughter had been most worried about having her notes and videos erased, saying: "I lost my story."
"And then [she was saying], 'I am a prisoner'. Then, 'I will stay here for days and weeks, and perhaps now for months – and I hope not for years'."
"It's very hard for us to understand because... my husband... went many times in Afghanistan and Iraq, in some countries that were very, very dangerous, and he was exposed, just like this. But he was not kept in a jail for that... I thought Indonesia was a country not so severe with the rules of immigration."
Mrs Bourrat said her daughter had been doing what she loved, saying it was Valentine's dream to get a job with Arte TV. Mrs Bourrat said she wanted clemency for her daughter from the Indonesian government. "We think the sentence, even now, it's disproportional, compared to what they did."
Marc Dandois said his brother had two young twin children in France, a boy and a girl aged 2-and-a-half, who were missing their father. "For the family it's quite difficult to live with on a daily basis," he said.
"It's a heavy burden [and] always the same thing; we don't know what's going to happen to them. We do know why they've been arrested but... we don't understand why they weren't [just] kicked out of the country."
He said the two reporters had used tourist visas because if they'd sought permission to travel there, they feared they may have been followed by Indonesian security forces, preventing them from interviewing the people they wanted to meet.
"It would have been much more difficult for them to reach out to people and have interesting interviews and discussions and be able to report impartially on both sides," Mr Dandois said.
The point was underlined by their lawyer, Aristo M.A. Pangaribuan, who said the procedure for a foreign reporter to get a journalist's visa was "very difficult, and the bureaucracy is time-wasting".
"So, personally, I understand that the journalists usually only obtain a tourist's visa to do research and reportage in West Papua... Also, if you follow the procedure you will be followed by the authorities, so your movement is limited, and you cannot gather as much information as you wish."
He said he was hoping the criminal charge would be dropped and they would simply face deportation or, if the case did go to court, that the pair would be sentenced to time served. However, it would take at least another two months for the trial to be held, Mr Aristo said.
At one point, West Papua police were considering charging the pair with sedition after making an attempt to link them with an ammunition-swap gone wrong in which two Indonesian police officers were shot dead.
Mr Aristo said that was still a possibility, but seemed increasingly unlikely, because there was nothing in the evidence dossier to link the journalists to the shooting, which happened well before they landed in West Papua.
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