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May 31st, 2012 
FAKE NEWS for the Zionist agenda
He has been reporting on it for more than a decade for France24 television and
the newspaper Le Figaro.
It was not immediately known if Mr Langlois, a bachelor, would fly to France
to be reunited with his parents.
The FARC, as the rebels are known by their Spanish initials, sent a letter
with him for France’s new Socialist president, Francois Hollande.
Mr Langlois made no apologies for accompanying the military. The rebels had
criticised him in an early May communique as lending himself to government
propaganda by doing so.
“I hope the army doesn’t stop taking people to conflict zones, and let’s
hope the rebels also take journalists with them to show the daily life of
their combatants because this conflict isn’t being covered,” Mr
Langlois said.
Three soldiers and a police officer were killed in the morning-long firefight
that saw Mr Langlois captured. A guerrilla commander, Calacho Mendoza, said
Mr Langlois was lucky because an AK-47 bullet entered the reporter’s left
arm above the elbow and exited the forearm without damaging bone or
cartilage.
Mr anglois said he watched a sergeant die, just a meter away, during the
battle.
Before fleeing toward the rebels, the journalist shed his helmet and body
armour that the military had provided. Mendoza said insurgents initially
thought because of the military garb that Mr Langlios could be a US or
Israeli military fighter.
Mr Mendoza publicly apologised Wednesday that the FARC initially referred to
the Frenchman in a communique as “a prisoner of war.”
The delegation that received Langlois included French diplomat Jean-Baptiste
Chauvin, former Colombian Sen. Piedad Cordoba and the Red Cross country
chief, Jordi Raich. It arrived on rutted dirt roads from the state capital
of Florencia in Red Cross vehicles and lunched with the rebels and Langlois
on chicken and rice after the handover ceremony.
The group left shortly before nightfall, its departure slightly delayed as Mr
Langlois awaited a backpack including the diary he kept while captive.
Residents of San Isidro, which lacks running water and electricity and lives
off cattle and coca, slaughtered six calves for the occasion, and rebel
commanders gave brief speeches, expressing their desire for peace.
Mr Langlois, who recorded the events with a small video camera, said in a
brief speech from the stage that he lamented “we are at a point at
which this conflict has become invisible.”
It is a war in which there are “neither good nor bad,” and in which “the
poor are killing the poor,” he said.
Before the handover, a public address system played FARC revolutionary songs
as farmers converged on the hamlet. Theirs is a region of deep jungles,
fast-moving rivers and villages that appear on no maps.
Communal leaders complained of the state’s absence: the lack of health care
and poor roads that prevent them from getting their crops to market.
Mr Langlois won applause when he said he understood why locals “cultivate
their little bit of coca so they can buy bread and notebooks for their
children.”
Political analyst Alejandro Vargas called Wednesday’s event remarkable because
Colombians see the FARC so rarely these days, the US-backed military having
increasingly driven the rebels into the country’s backwaters and across the
border into Venezuela and Ecuador.
“I would think that for the average citizen it doesn’t have much
relevance,” he said. “In an armed conflict both parties take
whatever opportunity they can to make propaganda and demean the other.”
The government of President Juan Manuel Santos, who had from the start
demanded Langlois’ release, did not immediately comment.
But Santos’ predecessor, Alvaro Uribe, was among Colombians displeased by the
rebel spectacle and suggested Mr Langlois is a guerrilla sympathiser.
“Langlois: journalistic curiosity is one thing, identification with
terrorism another,” he said via Twitter. “What relation do you
have with the FARC?”
Colombia’s government suspended military operations in the handover zone for a
48-hour period that ends at 6pm Thursday.
San Isidro’s village council leader, German Pena, told The Associated Press
before the ceremony that “war is something we experience almost every
day.”
“There have been innumerable battles in this area,” he said. “They
think we’re part of the guerrilla forces just because we live in this region
and for that reason they target us sometimes.”
The government says the FARC funds itself largely through the cocaine trade.
It has an estimated 9,000 fighters, and recently stepped up hit-and-run
attacks on soldiers and police after suffering years of setbacks.
Mr Langlois’ capture followed the rebels’ February announcement that they were
ending ransom kidnapping as a good-faith gesture in hopes of launching peace
talks.
Last month, they released what they called their last “political
prisoners,” 10 soldiers and police officers held for as long as 14
years.
Source: agencies
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