I will never forget a seventy-year-old grandmother’s account of how she no longer dared go to the fields after having been raped repeatedly. Or the 35-year-old woman telling me how she was raped by several men in front of her children and her husband, who were then killed. How could I ever forget the words and tears of that eighteen-year-old girl who was raped, with a knife stuck through her foot to prevent her from escaping? Her two-year-old girl – the child born from the rape – had also been raped. I still remember her screams when her mother started undressing her to show me her wounds.
Dr Mukwege is a deeply committed man who has seen it all but it is still as shocking to him as ever and his voice trembled when he spoke of the recent increase in the number of children being raped. His weariness was apparent, after twenty years spent sewing up women whose vaginas have been torn with broken glass bottles or with weapons.
Along with all the pictures of my humanitarian work, the faces of these women have been erased from the Élysée website, but they live on in my memory.
Dr Mukwege is under constant protection – he has twice been the target of attempted murder. In a country torn apart by civil war, denouncing a crime is in itself a crime. Women do not dare come forward and testify.
It was Osvalde Lewat, the wife of the French ambassador in Kinshasa, who introduced me to Dr Mukwege. A former journalist, Osvalde is a talented director and photographer, and we immediately got on. At the time she was supporting an association called VTA which worked as a refuge for young girls living in the street after their families accused them of witchcraft and threw them out, sometimes even subjecting them to torture. The association protects them from the inevitability of being raped while living on the street.
One day, the young girls sang for us in the embassy garden. One of them had a truly beautiful singing voice: ‘No, no, we are not bewitched children.’ Nearly all of the young girls were crying: music was a way of sublimating their pain. Everyone who at the embassy that day – the delegation, the embassy staff, and the journalists in attendance – felt that intense ripple of emotion: it went through us all like a wave. I went to get François: I wanted him to hear the song. The young girl sang again. The picture of that moment has been reprinted countless times. François and I are sat on a bench next to two little girls. François is staring into space: he is elsewhere.
Where?
A few months after my first visit to DR Congo, in October 2012, I returned to Kinshasa to join François Hollande for the Sommet de la Francophonie.25 It was then that Osvalde introduced me to Dr Mukwege. I was immediately impressed by the doctor’s charisma; he had commanding presence. It was as if his face had been modelled by his sheer humaneness.
Dr Mukwege asked me for my assistance. He did not want any money, what he wanted was for me to spread awareness about the fact that tens of thousands of women were the victims of crime and that almost nobody was doing anything about it. He was convinced that my voice would be of some use. I promised him I would get involved. We ran an opinion column in Le Monde, signed by a number of key figures. Through the Danielle Mitterrand Foundation, we sent four French doctors to teach and support the staff in Dr Mukwege’s hospital. After that, we sent four Congolese doctors to Angers for four months.
I accompanied Dr Mukwege to the Human Rights Council for a ‘fringe event’, to appeal for the cause of women in the Congo. For the first time, I made a speech in front of an audience of ambassadors and NGO leaders. My voice trembled. I spoke again in New York, at NATO, to foreign affairs ministers. My voice was still shaky. It was the most nerve-racking experience of my life.
I asked for Dr Mukwege to be part of the French delegation so that he could meet the President in the Élysée plane, while I stayed behind in New York for twenty-four hours – at the request of the British Foreign Secretary. I was able to see François before his departure to let him know what my plans were. He did not ask me one question about what I had just accomplished. I knew that Nicolas Sarkozy had come to listen to Carla Bruni-Sarkozy. I did not ask for much, but François’ repeated indifference truly was astounding.
On 6 December 2013, I continued the fight for the cause of raped women from the DR Congo. On the occasion of a summit in Paris on security issues, I organised a get-together for the wives of the African heads of state. We discussed the violence women are exposed to during armed conflicts. Osvalde, Arnaud Sélignac and I had produced a film to raise awareness and we screened it for the twenty-five spouses in attendance at our ‘women’s summit’. Victims came from Central Africa and Libya to testify. We all signed a charter committing to fight violence against women in the DR Congo. The Finnish Prime Minister’s wife and the Japanese Prime Minister also signed the charter and I was hoping to get all the First Ladies around the world on board as well.
In the event, Nelson Mandela died that very day and naturally it made worldwide news. Unsurprisingly, the press hardly made any mention of our event. That evening, during the official dinner honouring the African heads of state, several of their wives spoke to François about our work. He was wide-eyed and seemed to be hearing about it for the first time.
Because being a First Lady does not afford any particular status – the role itself is very loosely defined and each First Lady embodies the role in her own unique way – I was still finding my footing. It was a daily learning curve: I was discovering what worked for me, and – above all – learning how to avoid negative publicity.
I have fond memories of a public holiday which my team and I spent filling boxes with books and toys for Mali. We had collected a lot of donations, dozens and dozens of kilos of donations, which the French Army sent off to Bamako and Gao. Military operations had been stepped up and it was becoming dangerous to work in the field.
My willing and able team spent that entire day cheerfully helping me sort through the gifts. Our task was to carefully divide the donations according to their recipients: schools, nurseries etc. There we were, on our hands and knees on the floor of the ‘Madame corridor’. I doubt any other First Lady before me had ever been seen in that position. The Republican Guards could not believe their eyes … and offered to help us!
Our work wasn’t all rosy, though. My team and I suffered our fair share of setbacks and crushing disappointments – tragedy was always lurking around the corner. Chain of Hope was one of the organisations that came to me for help. Chain of Hope performs heart surgery on children the world over. I met with professors Alain Deloche and Éric Cheysson several times – men whom I instantly respected for their deep commitment and enthusiasm. Together, we strove to find funding to open a cardiology unit for children in Bamako. We had nearly reached our target funding when the pictures of the President with his scooter helmet on were printed. I am not sure what became of our project after that.
One of my saddest memories of the humanitarian work I carried out as First Lady was with Chain of Hope – not that the people in charge there had anything to do with it, obviously. One morning in November 2013, news broke that a Malian child named Lamina urgently needed an operation. He would die without that operation but he had neither a visa nor any funds to travel. Chain of Hope called on me for help. I in turn went to the chief military doctor at the Élysée, as he participated in our humanitarian work.
In under twenty-four hours everything had been organised for surgery to take place at the Necker children’s hospital two days later. I felt like I had been handed a magic wand to save this child’s life. It was a surreal and wonderful feeling.
Lamina was operated on. His father stayed on in France to wait for him, while his mother remained in Mali. Forty-eight hours later, there were complications. Lamina fell into a coma and died.
I felt responsible for his death. Though the doctors assured me that he would have died had he stayed in Mali, I cannot forgive myself for the fact that Lamina did not die in his mother’s arms. I feel for that poor woman, who trusted us with her son and received a coffin by return post.
I felt so po
werless I was tempted to give it all up. My team rallied to cheer me up and the doctors did their best to find the words to console me – they were experienced in dealing with this sort of situation. I was not. I was utterly unprepared for such grief.
Being a First Lady also sometimes means being someone’s last resort. One evening while I was alone at our home on rue Cauchy, a young woman got in touch on Twitter. I answered. Sensing her anguish, I asked her for her phone number. When I called her, she responded in a barely audible voice, repeating only these words: ‘I want to die!’ I could not get her to engage with me and eventually suggested that she write to me what she could not put into words. I gave her my email address but all I received were fragments of sentences – the tone was always the same. I had her details so I passed them on to my Chief-of-Staff Patrice Biancone, asking him to get an Élysée doctor or the social services involved. In our email exchanges, the woman, who was a respected lecturer, had given me the address of the place she was staying: it was a cheap suburban hotel.
The next day she sent me an alarming email: ‘Thank you for everything, Valérie, I want to say goodbye.’ Patrice and I got the hotel to break her door down. She was unconscious when they found her. The fire brigade managed to save her just in time – despite the lethal mix she had swallowed: detergents, medicine and alcohol. She spent three months in hospital. Fate sometimes plays strange tricks on us: three months later it was my turn to spend some time in hospital and, that time, she was the one who got in touch to support me. We write regularly now. I have often wondered since whether I did the right thing when I responded to her SOS. Was she really suicidal or was it a cry for help – because she knew she had a sympathetic ear in me? How can you ever know?
Being a First Lady means dealing with all sorts of situations.
My staff was certainly smaller than any other First Lady team before it and therefore far less expensive – which did not stop critics from finding fault with it on the basis that it was funded with public money. Yet it would be unfair to accuse my team of sitting around twiddling our thumbs: over the two years we worked together, we received countless – non-stop – requests of every possible nature. The President’s staff even called on me for matters that would normally be dealt with by human resources. They knew I was on their side.
While humanitarian organisations always saw the useful side of my role, public opinion was not on my side. From day one, in the eyes of many French citizens, I was illegitimate. I had taken a spot saved for another woman, with a prophetic name that spelled out her destiny – a Madonna figure to boot.
Under the crossfire of information channels and social networks, my journey at the Élysée was paved with accusations. I would regularly discover that I had been summoned to appear before a judge for misappropriation of public funds. With time, as the expression goes, the skin thickens and the heart hardens. But those who claim indifference are lying – being deeply unpopular hurts.
A few seconds of a broadcast about a two-day trip the President made to Dijon in March 2013, for instance, were a cruel stab in the back for me. The trip was his team’s idea – a bid to help him restore a healthy relationship with the French people at a time when his popularity ratings were free-falling. The operation was a fiasco for him, and it was brutally painful for me. While the cameras were filming the President, an elderly lady came up to him in the street and said: ‘Don’t marry Valérie, we don’t like her.’
It was hardly tactful on her part, but after all she is free to say what she wants. Her pique was nothing next to François’ roar of laughter … My God, how I resented him in that moment! His cowardice prevented him from uttering a single sentence in my defence – or even just a kind word to dodge her comment – something he is usually so skilled at doing. It had me in tears in front of my television set.
Ever mindful of his own popularity – which was melting like butter in the sun – he could not care less what was said of me. Meanwhile, I had never let a scornful attack against him or an insult go unanswered. One winter Sunday, for example, as we were walking down the embankment near our flat, a passer-by heckled François twice in a row. François had to grab me by the arm to keep me from turning around and demanding an explanation. We went home in deadly silence. From that day on, there would be no more walks for us: François could not stand confrontation. And he knew all too well that the banlieue girl in me could resurface at any moment, as she had one day right before an election, when I shouted: ‘Come and say it here, arsehole,’ to a man who had just verbally assaulted François.
Six months later, the Léonarda case was one of the four or five moments in François Hollande’s mandate that lastingly dented his image – and I played a part in it, albeit a minor one. At the start of the school year, in September 2013, I had decided to read the ELA dictation in my old school, in Angers. The headmistress signed off on it and two of my old schoolteachers made the journey especially. One of them had meant a lot to me as a child. She was beautiful and she fascinated me. I wanted her to like me, and I wanted to be like her. That was almost forty years ago…
In those years, the school was in an area that had been earmarked as an urbanisation priority; things have not much changed since then. The Paul Valéry School had a lot of children of refugees, many of whom did not speak French fluently. The ELA team came with me, as well as a small boy who was severely disabled.
That day the ‘Léonarda case’ was all over the news: a teenage girl illegally living in France was deported to Kosovo with her family. Some high school students were protesting against the deportation order. I guessed that I would be asked to comment, and had prepared a balanced answer which I felt would avoid stirring up the controversy: ‘School is a place of integration, not exclusion, as it should be for disabled children.’
The second part of my answer was of no interest to the press and was widely ignored. I also said that Léonarda was not responsible for her father’s actions. No child should be held accountable for their parents’ wrongdoings. I was shocked that the police made that child come out of her school bus in front of her classmates.
I was immediately accused of stoking the fire. François’ rage stunned me like a slap in the face. He refused to see me when I got back, but I insisted that he found a moment so we could talk. He finally agreed to talk … to berate me for having made a statement before him. I was astounded. ‘So you plan on making a statement about the case?’ I asked.
‘Nothing has been decided yet, but yes, I will probably say something tomorrow.’
It did not seem like a good idea to me but I did not dare say as much. At that point, the President had not yet reached a decision: should the family be deported or not? He was undecided. He had a war on his hands between his Prime Minister and his Minister of the Interior and he had to find a way to make peace. I shyly suggested a solution: ‘What about the little girl? Can’t she finish school in France in a boarding school – as sometimes happens for isolated minors?’
‘No, that’s impossible,’ he answered with a shrug of his shoulders.
The next morning he had still not decided what to do. When I set off for La Lanterne to cycle, I saw the PM’s and the Minister of the Interior’s cars arrive through the garden gate. I cycled for longer that day. It was nearly one in the afternoon when I got back. I listened to the radio while I was in the shower and it was only then that I heard François was going to make a statement. He had not told me. I quickly switched on the television. I had absolutely no idea what he was going to say. I found out that he had gone with my suggestion, which he had ruled out as idiotic just the day before. In fact, it was not a choice he was making but a way of circumventing a clash between the Prime Minister and the Minister of the Interior.
François’ statement caused an outcry. Politicians and editorial writers alike fell tooth and nail on the President. His proposal that Léonarda should be allowed to stay was not understood, it was seen as an act of weakness. Protecting children seems like a brave decis
ion to me and even though it was unpopular, I am grateful to him for his proposal.
A month later I was awarding the Prize for the Danielle Mitterrand Foundation and I prepared a speech listing the actions I had carried out in her name. At the end of that list, I paid her homage by trying to imagine what the wife of the first Socialist President would have said in 2013 if she was still will us: ‘Would Danielle Mitterrand have kept quiet about the tragedy of the women who are victims of rape in the Democratic Republic of Congo? Would Danielle Mitterrand have kept quiet about Syria’s tragedy and its refugees?’ I ended my speech with the sentence: ‘I will be quiet no longer’ – a reference to the Breaking the Silence campaign to support raped women.
The AFP flouted the whole speech, keeping only that very last bit – taking it completely out of context. In a show of immense bad faith, the AFP interpreted my sentence as a statement about the Léonarda case, a reminder of the tweet during the La Rochelle election, and a desire to take part in the political debate again. Christmas come early again for the web and the news channels.
The mood at the Élysée that evening was stormy. Once again, I faced a volley of criticism – an uninterrupted flow of hurtful comments … all the way to our bed. I could not take it any more. François never paid me a compliment, never uttered a word of support – only cruel words of reproach came out of his mouth. It was almost midnight but I decided to get dressed and leave.
François first tried to stop me, then said he would call a driver. I left alone, walking out through the Court d’honneur. I did not look down to hide my tear-filled eyes in front of the policemen who gave me a polite nod when I walked through the gate. I left with no money, just the keys to rue Cauchy in my pocket.
Thank You for This Moment Page 20