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I'm a political cartoonist.
What am I doing here?
(Laughter)
I want to tell you the story of humanity.
It's a long story,
I have a picture from that time.
Look, it's a cartoonist!
(Laughter)
It's my ancestor!
It's a political cartoonist of the old ages.
Life was tough back then.
They had no paper. They had no newspaper.
They had no iPads.
How could they live without an iPad?
(Laughter)
Well, the life of the artist is always a struggle.
[I'm tired of wasting my life with a dreamer!]
(Laughter)
Okay, to make this history of the human race really short,
let's jump to what happened a few weeks ago.
A baby was born.
This is not a personal announcement. I am not the father.
[Is it the first?]
But you recognize the parents of a newborn from their refreshed, happy faces, right?
(Laughter)
You know what baby I'm talking about.
That's Junior number 7 billion.
[...No, the 7 billionth]
The seven billionth human on Earth!
Wow. That's a lot of people to take care of.
It's getting really crowded up here...
Wait, there is something wrong with that slide.
I think it's upside down. Here you go.
So it's getting really crowded down there,
and we need to make space for everybody.
[Move over a bit]
(Laughter)
It's a small planet, and a fragile one.
Hey, look at that dark cloud looming!
Where does it come from?
Yeah, climate change is here,
and it's causing more and more humanitarian crises.
And this small planet is plagued by wars and conflicts,
and very often civilians are trapped in the middle.
What can they do?
We know that in modern wars, most victims are civilians.
[They are retaliating with a humanitarian crisis!]
And then another causality of today's wars is humanitarian law.
[They are not animals!!]
I admire this little delegate here,
fighting for his rights, fighting to keep them relevant,
because his job is not an easy one.
"Here goes the legal quibbling."
(Laughter)
So with crises multiplying all over the world,
it's a race to find the money and get the help where it's needed.
It's a very competitive race.
[Aid]
Okay, I removed the logos of the NGOs, (Laughter)
(Laughter)
to make no one jealous.
(Laughter)
So how do we keep people interested
in what's going on on the other side of the planet?
I think that's a challenge
for both the humanitarian actors and people from the media,
people like me.
So this goes back to my first question:
what am I doing here?
Well, in parallel to my work as editorial cartoonist
for International Herald Tribune, Le Temps,
and Neue Zürcher Zeitung,
I became a cartoon reporter.
This means going to places and reporting
using the techniques of graphic novels.
So in the last 15 years, I covered some 20 stories,
from the war in Gaza in 2009 to the slums of Nairobi.
I went to Ground Zero after 9/11.
That story was published in Le Temps.
Here you see the first page.
They usually give me three full pages for my report in Le Temps.
In the hospital closest to Ground Zero, I met chief medic Dr Logan.
He saw the towers falling right outside his window,
and he told me this: "A catastrophe of such a magnitude,
even if you see it with your own eyes,
it's hard to grasp."
But if you take one person like this patient
he had been following for ten years...
He knew his parents. He knew his wife.
He knew his kids.
And he said, "Then only do you realize."
So what he's telling us
is disasters are not only facts, figures, statistics.
They are always a human story.
A personal story.
In 2009, I went to South Ossetia.
I know what you're thinking:
"South Ossetia? Where is that?"
You might not pay attention to an article about South Ossetia,
but an illustrated story, maybe.
It can take you to places where you wouldn't go by yourself.
South Ossetia, by the way, is a breakaway province of Georgia.
A war happened there in 2008.
Nobody even knows the name of the capital.
Can you pronounce the name of the capital?
Does anybody want to try? It's up there.
Audience: Tskhinvali.
Patrick Chappatte: The answer is very political,
because the Ossetians say Tskhinval,
while the Georgians pronounce it Tskhinvali.
So, a war happened there in 2008,
and as I got there one year after,
I was struck by the level of destruction.
See the parliament, that big building?
Or left, the university?
Just ruins.
Half of the buildings of that little town were damaged.
So that war separated people who used to live side by side.
A few old Georgians were left behind in half-destroyed villages.
They were visited by aid workers, like Natasha and Volodya.
They were old and feeling lonely.
They were thinking of selling the house that they built with their own hands
and moving to Georgia.
The first floor of their house was closed off.
It had been closed off since the day their son took his life there.
He took his life,
because he didn't want to fight his neighbors.
See? We're being overwhelmed by photos and videos of suffering,
and I believe that we sometimes have a hard time
making sense of all these images.
And I think that cartoons, illustrations,
the simple drawing, can help us connect.
It can help us tell these personal, human stories
that are behind the news stories.
By the way, you've all heard about the legendary Caucasian hospitality.
Well, it's not a myth,
because I went to the villages and I experienced it firsthand.
It's serious.
***...
(Laughter)
is something really serious.
So, I went through all the required toasts.
I counted 13 of them,
and it was only mid-afternoon.
And here you see me after toast number 13.
[OK. Time to go back to work.] (Laughter)
The locals told me that 42 toasts are usual.
(Laughter)
I'm ready to take risks in my reporting and to go all the way,
but I don't want to verify this information. I'm sorry.
(Laughter)
This year, with the help
of the International Committee of the Red Cross,
we took one of those illustrated stories
and we turned it into a film.
Let's call it a short animated documentary.
It's 12 minutes long.
It was aired on Swiss TV in a news program in prime time.
It will soon be on Canal+,
and we hope that other networks will follow.
Illustrations can be touching.
I wanted them to be moving.
The story takes place in Southern Lebanon in 2009.
I went there two and a half years after the war
between Israel and the Hezbollah.
In the last days of that war,
cluster munitions were dropped,
a million cluster munitions over that region.
A lot of them did not explode,
and they turned the region into a giant minefield.
So years after,
people are still dealing with this threat.
Like Rasha. Listen to her story.
(Music)
In a small village in this region,
I visit Rasha Zayoun, a young woman of 19.
In Rasha's case,
it was the bomb that came to her,
right into the house.
Her father had come home with a sac of thyme leaves,
which he'd spent the day gathering.
The family makes bunches of them to sell.
Everyone was gathered around the sack.
When Rasha plunged her hand inside, she felt something cold.
(Music)
The whole family might have been killed,
but the teenager was the only one hit.
The bomb took her left leg.
When I go to bed, my leg hurts... the missing one.
I feel it... as it was still there.
I can't go out with the other village girls any more.
I wish...
I wish I was like everyone else.
It's not over in Southern Lebanon.
It's not over in Laos and in other countries.
Little objects not bigger than this are still hiding.
They are hiding in gardens, in fields, in backyards,
and they are waiting for someone to walk by.
So people are being wounded still today,
fields remain to be decontaminated,
and dozens are waiting for an operation.
You can relax, this is just a tomato.
(Laughter)
Remember what that doctor said in New York.
Disasters are always a personal story, a human story.
So I hope that this film can help.
I hope that cartoons, illustrations,
in their simplicity, can help us tell these stories.
Because it's a world that is not paid attention.
And we need to be able to touch people.
And we need to keep these issues in the center of the spotlight.
Thank you very much.
(Applause)