Veilleur de Nuit

For the first time, light is shed on the Inkotanyi politico-military movement that ended the genocide of the Rwandan Tutsi in 1994 and is led by Paul Kagame, currently President of Rwanda.

Everyone in France knows the films of Bertrand Blier. From "Les Valseuses" (Getting it Up) to "Merci La Vie" (Thank You, Life), his work has become part of French cultural heritage. Every French adult can recall a scene or a line of dialogue from one of his films. But what about the man himself? Who exactly is behind the singular, sometimes unsettling work, which is often intentionally truculent or downright provocative?

Uganda, 1989. A young Acholi rebel guided by spirits, Joseph Kony, forms a new rebel movement against the government: the LRA, The Lord’s Resistance Army. An “army” that grew by abducting teenagers – more than 60 000 over 25 years – of which less than half came out of the bush alive. Geofrey, Nighty and Mike, a group of friends, as well as Lapisa, were among these youths, abducted at 12 or 13. Today, in their effort to rebuild their lives and go back to normal, they revisit the places that marked their stolen childhood. At the same time victims and murderers, witnesses and perpetrators of horrific acts that they did not fully understand, they are forever the "Wrong Elements" that society struggles to accept. Meanwhile, in the immensity of the Central African jungle, the Ugandan army still continues to hunt the last scattered LRA rebels. But Joseph Kony is still out there, on the run.

The history of the Sahel region in West Africa is that of an explosive chain of countless misfortunes: drought and soil degradation, maximum insecurity and violence, Tuareg independence uprisings, drug smuggling, institutional corruption and jihadism; but also that of a civil society in constant demographic growth that is waking up and trying to change things.

On November 13, 2015, ten months after the attacks on Charlie Hebdo and the Hyper Cacher at the Porte de Vincennes, three jihadist commandos, divided between the Stade de France, the Bataclan and the terraces of the 10th and 11th districts of Paris, spread death in the capital. How were these men, mostly French and Belgian, some of them actively sought, able to cross Europe and carry out their plans without being worried? Faced with the loopholes revealed by the attacks, fourteen European countries, supported by Europol and Eurojust, the EU's police and judicial cooperation agencies, pooled information and resources on an unprecedented scale to identify and track down the culprits, accomplices and sponsors of these attacks.

What should we do of former jihadists returning to the country, who have been fed on radical ideologies and extreme violence for the past five years?