Rémy Ourdan

Biography

Rémy Ourdan began as a reporter in 1992 in Sarajevo. He covered the siege of Sarajevo and the Bosnian war for four years, first as a freelance correspondent, then as a journalist for Le Monde. In the Balkans, he also covered Croatia, the Kosovo war, Serbia after the fall of Slobodan Milosevic, and the insurgency in Macedonia. He closed the decade with an account of his journey with Svetlana Broz, writer and granddaughter of Josip Broz Tito, though the former Yugoslavia, in search of Yugo-nostalgia.

In Africa, he wrote a long investigative story on the Rwandan genocide, and covered conflicts in the Great Lakes region and in Congo, as well as the Eritrean-Ethiopian war and the Sierra Leone civil war.

He also covered the rise of the international criminal justice and the trials for crimes against humanity and war crimes at the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia in The Hague and the International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda in Arusha.

Ourdan edited the collective book Après-guerre(s) (Autrement, 2001).

After the September 11 attacks by Al-Qaeda in 2001, Ourdan covered the American wars in Afghanistan and in Iraq, and worked on Al-Qaeda and global jihad. He entered Kabul with the mujahideen (November 2001) and was in Baghdad during the American-led invasion of Iraq (March–April 2003). He covered the Iraq war for two years, investigating the American war crimes committed during the invasion and the torture and prisoner abuse committed during the occupation, as well as the Fallujah Iraqi insurgency.

He wrote about the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq for the photo book WAR, edited by the VII photo agency (A War, and Ricochets, VII, WAR, de.MO, 2003), and for Dispatches, edited by Gary Knight and Mort Rosenblum (America vs Al Qaeda: A Foe's Best Friend, dispatches, Beyond Iraq, 2008).

Ourdan has been Le Monde foreign editor (2005-2008).

He covered the Arab Spring - Egypt at the fall of Hosni Mubarak and the Libyan Civil War -, the war in the Central African Republic, and is covering the conflicts involving the Islamic State.

Ourdan organized on April 6, 2012, for the 20th anniversary of the war in Bosnia, a reunion called "Sarajevo 2012", for which hundreds of war reporters came back to Sarajevo. He published, with Jon Jones and Gary Knight, the photo book Bosnia 1992-1995 (edited by Jon Jones, 2012), for which he wrote the foreword Sarajevo, a love story.

An international foundation on contemporary conflicts, WARM, started as a project during "Sarajevo 2012". WARM, founded and headed by Ourdan, has been launched in Sarajevo in 2013. WARM is organizing an annual festival in Sarajevo and is publishing a WARM Review.

Rémy Ourdan is the director of the documentary film The Siege (co-directed with Patrick Chauvel, Agat Films & Cie, 2016).

Awards