PARIS: Lara Marlowe attended the funeral Mass in Paris for Patrick Bourrat, who died in Kuwait the day after he was hit by a tank while covering US war games
The first victim of the coming Gulf War was a modest man, and Patrick Bourrat would have been stunned to see the thousands of journalists, government ministers and television viewers who attended his memorial Mass in Saint-Sulpice Church on the Left Bank yesterday.
A star foreign correspondent for the French network TF1 for nearly a quarter of a century, Patrick died in Kuwait City on December 22nd, the day after he was hit by a 70-tonne Abrams tank while covering US war games. Aged 50, he leaves a widow, Marie-Lou, and a 17-year-old daughter, Valentine.
In October 1993, when Russian mutineers, attempting to overthrow then president Boris Yeltsin, attacked the radio and television station in Moscow, Patrick saw his cameraman, Yvan Skopan, shot dead before his eyes. He crawled on the ground to try to reach Skopan, and was himself shot twice in the arm. Though he did not talk about it, Patrick was haunted by Skopan's death.
It was to save his cameraman in Kuwait, Bernard Guerni, that Patrick died. The dramatic footage shot by Guerni shows the US tank speeding towards him. In the cloud of fine beige sand, with limited vision, the American tank driver could not see the Frenchman. And the cameraman was too intent on video-taping the manoeuvre to realise how quickly the tank was advancing.
But Patrick saw what was happening, and pushed Guerni out of the way. The tank threw him into a pile of barbed wire five metres away.
US doctors in Kuwait City diagnosed four broken ribs, and said Patrick's life was not in danger. He was conscious throughout the afternoon and joked from his hospital bed with Guerni and their soundman, Elie Bonnet. "Don't call Paris," he told them. "It's nothing. I'll be OK."
It was only that evening, when he complained of intense pain, that doctors conducted a scan and discovered he had a ruptured spleen. He died of internal bleeding the following morning, after surgery. French medical experts have since questioned publicly whether he was properly cared for.
Patrick Bourrat joined TF1 in 1979, after studying law and political science. The Iran-Iraq war was his first foreign assignment. In 1982, he set up TF1's Jerusalem bureau, and covered the Israeli invasion of Lebanon. His daughter was born in Jerusalem three years later. In 1989, he brought his wife and daughter, then four, to Berlin so they could witness the fall of the Cold War wall with him.
Patrick looked out over the fraternity of war correspondents yesterday, with his broad, familiar grin, from two large colour posters flanking the altar. His close friend, TF1's anchor man Patrick Poivre d'Arvor, reminded us that Patrick was a fine athlete, and was planning to climb Mount Everest next May. His heroes were Albert Londres, Antoine de Saint-Exupéry, Joseph Conrad and Ernest Hemingway.
In recent years, Patrick covered conflicts in Chechnya and East Timor. I first met him in "Operation Desert Storm" in 1991. At the end of that war, he was held with several other journalists for six days by the Iraqi Republican Guard.
I last saw him in Afghanistan and the Gaza Strip in 2001. When you ran into Patrick, it was a sign you were in the right place. He was an excellent logistician, as well as a fine reporter, and had a knack for finding food, drinking water and supplies in the most dire places.
"Farewell, my friend," Patrick Forestier of Paris Match wrote in a three-page tribute. Forestier described Bourrat's determination, incurable optimism, total lack of snobbery and affection for his native south-western France.
A good reporting job, Bourrat had told his daughter Valentine, is "90 per cent luck and 10 per cent professionalism". Perhaps, but Patrick Bourrat was a real pro. His absurd death has plunged the French journalistic community into sadness.