OUAGADOUGOU, Burkina Faso — For Mariam Ouédraogo, retelling the tales of the lashings and rapes of girls by armed teams in Burkina Faso might be as traumatic as when she was documenting these atrocities as a journalist.
However it’s a horror she is requested to replay time and again, at an incredible toll.
Ms. Ouédraogo, winner of probably the most prestigious worldwide award for struggle correspondents, is regularly invited to debate her reporting, and the ordeal of doing so by no means will get simpler.
“These interviews are troublesome for me as a result of I do know the questions they’ll ask me,” she stated. “Once I discuss it, I relive the state of affairs once more.”
On Oct. 8, Ms. Ouédraogo, 41, turned the primary feminine African journalist to win the Bayeux Calvados-Normandy Award, for a sequence reporting on Burkina Faso’s devastating battle towards armed jihadist teams.
The combating has killed hundreds, displaced shut to 2 million civilians and left at the very least 40 p.c of the nation’s 21.5 million residents dwelling exterior of state management, in accordance with analysts and authorities officers.
Ms. Ouédraogo’s studies targeted on the struggling the combating has inflicted on Burkina Faso’s girls and ladies, in a battle the place rape has been used as a software of terror and management. Simply this week, the federal government stated that about 50 girls in northern Burkina Faso had been kidnapped by armed insurgents.
Her prizewinning sequence advised the tales of internally displaced girls who had been raped by armed teams and whipped whereas fleeing their villages. A few of these raped have given beginning to youngsters and have been rejected by their households and communities, and at the very least one of many girls tried to kill herself.
In one of many prizewinning articles, Ms. Ouédraogo writes a couple of 28-year-old mom of 5, who, after being raped by males from an armed group and left bleeding on the bottom, walks to a neighboring village — solely to find all of the well being staff have fled due to the assaults.
The person raped her as six others pointed their weapons at her. “It was a horrible second for me,” she murmured, her eyes crammed with tears. They wouldn’t cease even when she cried in misery. “Be quiet, or we are going to kill you. Your life is value nothing to us,” they responded to her pleas.
Ms. Ouédraogo is the second African journalist to win a Bayeux award within the 29-year historical past of the prize, which is given by town of Bayeux, France, and the Normandy Area, and which generally rewards work produced for main French and Western media businesses. She writes for a nationwide state-run newspaper, Sidwaya, with a print circulation of between 3,000 and 5,000 copies a day, making her win all of the extra outstanding.
Her achievement will “go down within the historical past of African journalism,” stated Guézouma Sanogo, the pinnacle of the Burkina Journalists’ Affiliation.
Regardless of the devastating toll on civilians, Burkina Faso’s battle hardly ever makes worldwide headlines, an absence of consideration that Ms. Ouédraogo attributes partially to its “monotony.”
“Perhaps persons are uninterested in us as a result of the disaster has been occurring since 2015, whereas the disaster in Ukraine is latest and it’s between two European nations,” she stated. “Usually, we discuss geographical proximity, and one dying in the US is value a thousand in Burkina.”
The notification that she had received the prize got here amid an eight-month pause from reporting within the area, due to a resurgence of the post-traumatic stress dysfunction she developed whereas reporting her sequence.
A part of her nervousness, she stated, is a results of being unable to alter the state of affairs of most of the girls she has interviewed.
“These persons are in misery. Each time they name you, they let you know about their issues and hardship,” she stated. “It’s onerous for me as a result of I see their wants however I don’t have the means to assist them.”
Ms. Ouédraogo doesn’t see herself as a struggle reporter within the basic sense, nor does she have the standard trappings of 1, like a bulletproof vest emblazoned with “Press” or a Twitter profile image of herself carrying a ballistics helmet.
Whereas she has encountered gunfire in her life, it was not throughout her reporting journeys however in the course of the civil struggle within the early 2000s in neighboring Ivory Coast, the place she was born. Her struggle reporting has all the time targeted not on the frontline combating, however on the struggle’s impression on civilians.
“Being a struggle reporter is simply too scary,” she stated. “I’m only a journalist who’s eager about human life, who cares about different individuals.”
However whether or not the reporting is completed whereas embedded with troops on the entrance strains, or carried out from the aftermath of a city raided by armed jihadist teams, the stress might be excessive, and Ms. Ouédraogo has been advocating that each journalists and the media organizations who make use of them take reporters’ psychological well being extra significantly.
Liradan Philippe Ada, a tv journalist in Burkina Faso who has embedded with the nation’s navy, stated he has endured nightmares after coming back from dangerous journeys, and he agreed that newsrooms wanted to be extra delicate to the challenges reporters face within the area. However he resisted Ms. Ouédraogo’s encouragement to see a psychologist.
“Ladies are extra delicate, extra comfortable, extra susceptible,” Mr. Ada stated. “There are issues that contact girls extra simply than males — males have onerous hearts.”
That angle is one she encounters regularly, Ms. Ouédraogo stated.
“That’s how we’re all the time caricatured, us girls: as emotional beings,” she stated. “We have now delicate hearts, simply as there are delicate males. I do know many males haven’t been in a position to learn my articles.”
“He must get ready, as a result of it’ll come,” she stated of Mr. Ada and the implications of coping with what he has witnessed. “Everybody generally is a sufferer of stress.”
The Bayeux award is among the many 15 prizes that Ms. Ouédraogo has obtained since she started her profession in 2013 as a reporter for Sidwaya, which interprets into “The Fact is Coming” in Mooré, the native language of the dominant ethnic group in Burkina Faso.
After ending highschool, Ms. Ouédraogo studied legislation for 2 years, however modified to journalism as a result of she felt it higher served the general public.
“In legislation, after the choose’s resolution, there’s all the time one who wins and one who loses. Additionally, it’s not all the time the one who is true who wins,” she stated. Whereas in journalism, she famous, “You simply give data.”
“I need to write to have a optimistic impression,” she added. “I can’t stand human distress.”
Ms. Ouédraogo is understood on the paper for her dogged reporting on troublesome topics, just like the rights of the disabled individuals who beg on the streets of Ouagadougou, the capital, and of prostitutes who’ve given beginning to the kids of their shoppers.
“We are able to say that she dares; she takes on troublesome topics,” stated Sidwaya’s chief photographer, Remi Zoeringré.
Whereas he regularly collaborates with Ms. Ouédraogo on her tales, Mr. Zoeringré didn’t {photograph} her prizewinning sequence as a result of she knew the ladies wouldn’t communicate concerning the sexual violence they’d suffered in entrance of a person. As a substitute, a cartoonist represented the grim realities these girls confronted, in illustrations that made the entrance web page of editions of the newspaper in April and Could of this 12 months.
Regardless of the delicate matters she covers, Ms. Ouédraogo stated that her work has by no means been censored, and Burkina Faso’s comparatively unbiased press tradition has withstood the nation’s authoritarian regimes.
However the nation’s media retailers are coming beneath growing pressure because the Islamist insurgency intensifies within the north and east of the nation — and after not one however two military coups in 2022, one in January and the newest in October.
Mr. Sanogo, the pinnacle of the Burkina Journalist’s Affiliation, stated the 2 latest coups and the deteriorating safety state of affairs throughout the nation, pushed by teams linked to Al Qaeda and the Islamic State, stay the largest issues to press freedom in Burkina Faso.
The chief of the January coup, Lt. Col. Paul-Henri Sandaogo Damiba, who was in flip ousted by Capt. Ibrahim Traoré this fall, had spoken out towards the press and complained about their portrayal of the battle.
However the state of affairs for the nation’s journalists was already changing into troublesome throughout the federal government of the democratically elected Roch Marc Christian Kaboré. In 2019, the Kaboré authorities handed legal guidelines limiting reporting on navy operations and criminalized publishing tales that may “demoralize the navy.”
“The psychological stress on journalists is changing into larger and larger,” Mr. Sanogo stated.
Ms. Ouédraogo stated she is anxious that the home and worldwide media protection of her latest win, which comes with a 7,000 euro prize, might make her reporting harder and fears it’d endanger her relations dwelling in battle areas.
“I’m afraid like all Burkinabè and citizen who’s in a rustic at struggle,” she stated, utilizing the demonym for individuals from Burkina Faso. “The enemy is in all places.”
Fixed Méheut contributed reporting from Paris.
