A Former Hostage Worries for Those Left Behind in the Desert
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Version 0 of 1. NÎMES, France MORE than two years after she, her husband and five others were taken hostage by Islamists in the desert of Niger, Françoise Larribe clings to hope that her husband, Daniel, is still alive, relatively safe, relatively unharmed. His captors are members of the militant group Al Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb, which is fighting the French and Chadian armies in northern Mali. French officials believe that he and three other hostages are still alive, and are probably being held in the same vast, mountainous region where the fighting is at its most intense. Adding to Mrs. Larribe’s uncertainty is the possible death of Abdelhamid Abu Zeid, the militant group’s deputy commander and the man who seized the hostages, who was said to be killed in a French airstrike last month. No one knows who, if anyone, is in charge of the hostages now. About the only solace Mrs. Larribe, 64, can take is the sense she developed for the situation during the more than five months she spent in captivity following the abduction, in September 2010. She was lucky, in a way. Ill with breast cancer, she could not be treated in the desert, and Abu Zeid agreed to her release in February 2011, though for what sort of ransom remains unclear. Mrs. Larribe thinks the hostages, employees of the French nuclear giant, Areva, and of Sogea-Satom, a subsidiary of the French construction group Vinci, are too valuable to Al Qaeda to harm. “We can imagine that they are sheltered,” she said in an interview. “But sheltered from what? From whom? Is it positive? I don’t know.” Her daughter, Marion, 31, was more explicit on French television recently. The news of France’s intervention in Mali has been “terrifying,” she said on the daily “Grand Journal” program. “If you have examples of hostages liberated by military force, with hostages who emerge alive, I don’t.” Since her release, Mrs. Larribe has had to cope not just with her husband’s absence, but with a lack of information and a persistent anxiety that the war in Mali might be putting the hostages’ lives even more at risk. She fears for their health, their nerves and their resistance to the crushing heat and frequent sandstorms. “It’s unthinkable, it’s unbearable, it’s such an injustice,” Mrs. Larribe said, sitting in a rooftop restaurant in Nîmes, in southern France. “It is hard for us to admit that no one has found a solution.” SHE is working tirelessly with the families of the other hostages to keep government and public attention on the plight of her husband, now 62, and the three others who remain in captivity: Pierre Legrand, Thierry Dol and Marc Féret. She has even abandoned her natural reserve to participate in gatherings, put up banners on city halls across France and send letters to lawmakers to raise awareness of the hostage situation. Mrs. Larribe is one of the few Westerners to have met Abu Zeid, who was said to have taken hostage more than 20 Westerners since 2008 and ordered the killing of at least two of them: a Briton, Edwin Dyer, and a 78-year-old Frenchman, Michel Germaneau. “He has a certain charisma in his own way,” Mrs. Larribe said of Abu Zeid, an Algerian who is thought to have been 47 or 48. “I have no evidence of his cruelty. But he certainly impressed me by his strength, and the impression I had that he was everywhere.” Mrs. Larribe says she met him twice, and through a translator Abu Zeid even asked her questions about her life in Arlit, an industrial city in Niger near the Algerian border, where she and her husband had settled in 2003, and where they were abducted. Mr. Larribe, a geologist, had spent nearly 40 years working throughout Africa, in Togo, Burkina Faso, Mali and Chad. So the idea of living in a mining city tucked away in one of the most arid and inhospitable deserts of Africa did not frighten them, Mrs. Larribe said. “We were thrilled,” she said. “I had always dreamed of the desert.” UNTIL their abduction from their home in the middle of the night, the couple felt safe in Niger. They knew little about Abu Zeid and had not been especially concerned about kidnapping. But they did become afraid, she said, when they realized that their captors’ truck was heading west. “We were very worried that they would bring us to Mauritania,” Mrs. Larribe said. “It is there that Al Qaeda executed Mr. Germaneau.” She and the other hostages spent more than five months in the desert, dressed in military clothes to remain undetectable, sleeping on the ground and eating a native oatmeal dough that was contaminated with sand. She recalled, with a certain detachment and attention to detail, the endless trips from one camp to another, the videos the hostages were forced to make to show the world “tangible signs of life,” the infinite solitude of the desert, and the moments of exaltation each time a flock of turtledoves would swoop low. “We told each other that we had to hold on for six months,” Mrs. Larribe said. “We counted the days like prisoners. But we weren’t prisoners in the traditional sense — we were prisoners although we hadn’t done anything.” To deal with the boredom, they tried to find innovative ways to “structure time,” she said organizing mental “trips” to the African countries they both loved or fashioning travel plans to the countries they wished to discover. “We told each other, ‘Let’s go back to Namibia,’ and then we thought about what we would do there, what we would want to see again,” Mrs. Larribe said. “We tried to remember the places and organize ourselves.” Their captors, she said, did interact with them a few times, to ask them about their jobs, to learn some French and to criticize a Western world that they were positive hated Islam. One day, when one of their captors showed up with a teapot, Mrs. Larribe said she was genuinely thrilled at the idea of having something to do, at last. “We would prepare the afternoon tea,” she said. “All of a sudden, we had the impression of plunging back into Western life.” In February 2011, she was freed for “humanitarian” reasons, after news reports said she suffered from a pre-existing breast cancer, which she would not discuss. Upon her release, she was greeted by the chief executive of Areva at the time, Anne Lauvergeon, and by former President Nicolas Sarkozy of France. TODAY, Mrs. Larribe, who once worked as a social worker in France, lives in a house in Mialet, a small town near Nîmes. She sings in a choir and does oil painting. But her mind, she said, is still “there.” In May, a year after her own liberation, she received a letter from her husband. He wrote that he was fine and being treated “decently.” In a video posted in September on a private Mauritanian news agency close to Al Qaeda, Sahara Media, Mr. Larribe, who appeared tired and hollow-cheeked, said he regretted that he could not be in France to celebrate their 40th wedding anniversary. Asked about her state of mind, Mrs. Larribe said she finds it well expressed in a poem of Guillaume Apollinaire, “Le Pont Mirabeau.” “How slow life is, and how violent hope is.” |