For reporters, trauma comes with exposing the ugly truths of a brutal conflict

OUAGADOUGOU, Burkina Faso – For Mariam Ouédraogo, retelling the stories of the flogging and rape of women by armed groups in Burkina Faso can be just as traumatic as documenting these atrocities as a journalist.

But it’s a horror she has to repeat over and over again, at a great cost.

Winner of the most prestigious international award for war correspondents, Ms Ouédraogo is frequently invited to discuss her reporting and the ordeal of doing so has never been easier.

“These interviews are difficult for me because I know the questions they’re going to ask me,” she said. “When I talk about it, I relive the situation.”

On October 8, Ms Ouédraogo, 41, became the first African journalist to win the Bayeux Calvados Normandy Prizefor a series reporting on Burkina Faso’s devastating conflict with armed jihadist groups.

The fighting has killed thousands, displaced nearly two million civilians and left at least 40 percent of the country’s 21.5 million citizens outside state control, according to analysts and government officials.

Ms Ouédraogo’s reports focused on the suffering inflicted by fighting on women and girls in Burkina Faso in a conflict in which rape has been used as a tool of terror and control. Just this week, the government announced that around 50 women had been in northern Burkina Faso kidnapped by armed insurgents.

Her award-winning series tells the stories of internally displaced people who were raped and flogged by armed groups while fleeing their villages. Some of those raped have given birth to children and have been rejected by their families and communities, and at least one of the women attempted suicide.

In one of the winning articles, Ms Ouédraogo writes about a 28-year-old mother of five who, after being raped and left bleeding on the ground by men from an armed group, goes to a neighboring village – only to discover everything the health workers are due to fled the attacks.

The man raped her while six others pointed their guns at her. “It was a terrifying moment for me,” she murmured, her eyes filling with tears. They didn’t stop even when she cried in pain. “Shut up or we’ll kill you. Your life is worth nothing to us,” they replied to their pleas.

Ms. Ouédraogo is the second African journalist to win a Bayeux Prize in the 29-year history of the prize, which is awarded by the city of Bayeux, France, and the Normandy region and normally rewards work done for major French and Western countries media agencies were produced. She writes for the national state newspaper, Sidwaya, which has a print circulation of 3,000 to 5,000 a day, which makes her win all the more remarkable.

Her achievement “will go down in the history of African journalism,” said Guézouma Sanogo, chair of the Burkinabe Union of Journalists.

Despite the devastating toll of civilian casualties, the conflict in Burkina Faso rarely makes international headlines, a lack of attention Ms Ouédraogo attributes in part to its “repetition”.

“Maybe people are fed up with us because the crisis has been going on since 2015, while the crisis in Ukraine is new and is between two European countries,” she said. “Often we talk about geographic proximity, and a death in the United States is worth a thousand in Burkina.”

The notification that she had won the award came amid an eight-month hiatus from reporting in the field due to the resurgence of the post-traumatic stress disorder she developed while covering her series.

Part of her fear, she said, stems from not being able to change the situation of many of the women she interviewed.

“These people are in need. Every time they call you, they tell you about their problems and needs,” she said. “It’s hard for me because I see their needs, but I don’t have the resources to help them.”

Ms. Ouédraogo does not see herself as a war reporter in the classic sense, nor does she wear the typical trappings such as a bulletproof vest with the imprint “Press” or a Twitter profile picture of herself with a ballistic helmet.

While she has encountered gunfire throughout her life, it wasn’t during her reporting trips but during the civil war in neighboring Ivory Coast in the early 2000s that she was born. Their war coverage always focused not on the battles at the front, but on the effects of the war on the civilian population.

“Being a war reporter is too scary,” she said. “I’m just a journalist who cares about human life, who cares about other people.”

But whether the reporting is done while surrounded by troops on the frontlines, or after a city has been raided by armed jihadist groups, the stress can be extreme, and Ms Ouédraogo has campaigned for both journalists and the media organizations to do so Take them on, take reporters’ mental health more seriously.

Liradan Philippe Ada, a TV journalist in Burkina Faso who is part of the country’s military, said he experienced nightmares after returning from risky trips, and he agreed that newsrooms needed to be more sensitive to the challenges reporters faced facing place. But he resisted Ms Ouédraogo’s encouragement to see a psychologist.

“Women are more sensitive, gentler, more vulnerable,” Mr. Ada said. “There are things that women touch more easily than men – men have a hard heart.”

She often encounters this attitude, said Ms. Ouédraogo.

“That’s how we women are always caricatured: as emotional beings,” she said. “We have sensitive hearts, just as there are sensitive men. I know that many men have not been able to read my articles.”

“He needs to prepare because it’s coming,” she said of Mr Ada and the aftermath of coming to terms with what he saw. “Anyone can become a victim of stress.”

The Bayeux Prize is among 15 awards Ms Ouédraogo has received since she began her career as a reporter for Sidwaya in 2013, which means “The Truth Comes” in Mooré, the local language of Burkina Faso’s dominant ethnic group.

After graduating from high school, Ms. Ouédraogo studied law for two years, but then switched to journalism because she felt it served the public better.

“In the law, according to the judge’s decision, there is always one who wins and one who loses. Besides, whoever is right doesn’t always win,” she said. While she noted in journalism, “You’re just giving information.”

“I want to write to make a positive impact,” she added. “I cannot endure human misery.”

Ms Ouédraogo is known at the newspaper for her persistent coverage of difficult issues, such as the rights of people with disabilities begging on the streets of the capital, Ouagadougou, and of prostitutes who have given birth to their clients’ children.

“We can tell she dares; She takes on difficult subjects,” said Sidwaya’s chief photographer, Remi Zoeringré.

While he frequently collaborates with Ms. Ouédraogo on her stories, Mr. Zoeringré did not photograph her award-winning series because she knew the women would not speak out in front of a man about the sexual violence they had suffered. Instead, a cartoonist portrayed the grim reality these women faced in illustrations that appeared on the front pages of newspapers in April and May last year.

Despite the sensitive issues she covers, Ms Ouédraogo said her work has never been censored and Burkina Faso’s relatively independent press culture has withstood the country’s authoritarian regimes.

But the country’s media is coming under increasing pressure as the Islamist insurgency intensifies in the north and east of the country – and gradually two military coups in 2022, one in January and the last in October.

Mr Sanogo, the head of the Burkina Journalists’ Association, said the two recent coups and the deteriorating security situation across the country, fueled by groups linked to al-Qaeda and the Islamic State, remain the top concerns for press freedom in Burkina Faso.

The leader of the January coup, Lieutenant Colonel Paul-Henri Sandaogo Damiba, who was in turn overthrown by Captain Ibrahim Traoré this autumn, had spoken out against the press, complaining about their portrayal of the conflict.

But even during the government of the democratically elected Roch Marc Christian Kaboré, the situation for the country’s journalists became difficult. In 2019, the Kaboré government passed legislation restricting reporting on military operations and criminalized publishing stories that would “demoralize the military.”

“The psychological pressure on journalists is increasing,” said Sanogo.

Ms Ouédraogo said she is concerned that national and international media coverage of her recent win, which comes with a prize of €7,000, could complicate her reporting and fears it could put her family members living in conflict-affected areas at risk .

“I’m scared like every Burkinabe and citizen who is in a country at war,” she said, using the demonym for people from Burkina Faso. “The enemy is everywhere.”

Constant Meheut contributed reporting from Paris.