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It is with great sadness that we learned of the disappearance of our colleague and friend Toufik Benaichouche. A reporter for RFI, he died following a long illness on Wednesday, December 4 at the age of 63.
By our colleagues at the Near East desk,
His mischievous air and his sense of narrative will remain etched in our memories. Toufik Benaichouche was one of the most outstanding personalities of our radio, a Middle East expert and an outstanding storyteller.
Arrived in 1994 at RFI, he covers many conflicts, as a reporter, with a predilection for the Middle East.
In the early 2000s, he was one of the radio's special envoys to the Palestinian Territories and Israel and covered the bloody turmoil of the second intifada. The US invasion of Iraq in 2003 and the years of chaos that followed also lead to this country. In Lebanon, his radio report Une nuit sous les bombes shot in 2006 earned him the 3rd Bayeux prize for war correspondents.
Une nuit sous les bombes, a report by Toufik Benaïchouche 05/12/2019 - by RFI Play
In these areas of conflict, his sense of narrative allows listeners to understand the issues but also to hear the human dimension of events. Toufik Benaichouche tells the men, women, and children affected by the war. He looks at them with a look of great tenderness.
He brings to life the best tradition of radio journalism: the one that draws portraits and describes landscapes with the power of words. A look, a beard, a headdress, a garment ... Toufik's writing engraves images and puts the human being at the center of each story.
Meeting with Massoud and cover of 9/11
Back from reporting, Toufik also likes to tell his colleagues his meetings, like the one, exceptional, with the commander Massoud in Afghanistan, a few months before his death on September 9, 2001. A meeting that deserves, after days of expectations in the mountains, and a memorable discussion by the fireside, to speak poetry, a passion common to both men.
On September 9, 2001, the Lion of Panshir is assassinated and the world is about to know the shock of the attacks of the World Trade Center . Coincidence or "baraka" of the reporter, that day, Toufik is already in New York. He arrives on the scene as the two towers have just collapsed and he covers the event for RFI.
In recent years, Toufik has abandoned the battlefields but continues to probe the human soul through his reports. In 2017, he accompanied for a week a group of visually impaired and hard of hearing in Siberia, for an extraordinary scientific and human adventure. Their crossing of Lake Baikal gives rise to a series of major reports broadcast on RFI. Toufik comes back transformed, admiring the courage of the people he has met.
The crossing of Lake Baikal an unprecedented expedition by the blind, a report by Toufik Benaichouche 05/12/2019 - by RFI Play
A passionate about Algeria
Born in Mulhouse on October 11, 1956, Toufik Benaichouche quickly became passionate about Algeria, his parents' country. He decided to go there in the 1970s by volunteering for Operation Green Dam, planting trees to prevent the advance of the desert. He is not yet of age, but he is lying about his age to be restrained.
Graduated from the School of Journalism in Strasbourg, he began his career as a journalist in 1982, in Alger channel 3, the Algerian public radio. In 1994, threatened like other journalists by Islamists, he was forced to return to France, where he joined RFI.
With his death, our radio loses a great reporter, a scholar and a lover of life. We think very strongly of his wife Juliet and his daughter Iman.