A rally in support of Olivier Dubois organized in Avignon
About 200 people gathered this Thursday to support the Martinican journalist held hostage for nine months in Mali. The mayor of Avignon, the city where he was in high school, was present.
“Faced with the obscurantism of ideas”, a support rally for Olivier Dubois was organized Thursday in Avignon where the journalist of Martinican origin, hostage for more than nine months in Mali, was a high school student. “If today we call for mobilization for the release of Olivier Dubois, it is because we have designated that it is essential to fight against those who would keep information limited”, declared the socialist mayor of Avignon, Cécile Helle, present at this rally which brought together 200 people according to the organizers.
Many students from Lycée Mistral, where Olivier Dubois obtained his cinema baccalaureate in 1995, had made the trip, as well as the association of former students. Two high school students read a text they had written on freedom of the press, explaining how this very theoretical notion takes on its full value here.
A portrait has been deployed on the Town Hall of Avignon for ten days as in other cities in France.
Last French hostage in the world
The 47-year-old freelance journalist, living and working in Mali since 2015, announced his kidnapping himself in a video posted on social networks on May 5. He then explained that he had been kidnapped on April 8 in Gao, in northern Mali, by the Support Group for Islam and Muslims (GSIM), the main jihadist alliance in the Sahel, linked to Al-Qaeda.
At the beginning of January, his family had denounced a silence “insupportable” of the French authorities on his case. A few days later, President Emmanuel Macron assured that France was “fully mobilized” to obtain his release and his Foreign Minister Jean-Yves Le Drian recalled that with the hostages, “we always end up getting out of it but the main law is silence”. Last Monday, Martinican footballer Wendie Renard challenged the government on the fate of the journalist.
Since the release in October 2020 of Sophie Pétronin, a septuagenarian deleted in December 2016 in Gao also, Olivier Dubois is the only French hostage abroad.