French Guiana: “500 euros, the price of my life!”

Moïse Manoël-Florisse, is an African-Caribbean online journalist keeping an eye…

The 76crimes editorial staff is looking back at a homophobic attack suffered almost a year ago by our colleague, Moïse Manoël-Florisse, in Saint-Laurent du Maroni, French Guiana, on the evening of 6 April 2021. A young delinquent who had been harassing Moïse for several weeks chased him in the middle of the street, with a knife in his hand, with the intention of “planting” him, to use the words of the assailant.

Moïse Manoël-Florisse lives in Saint-Laurent-du-Maroni in French Guiana and in Paris, France. He reports on human rights abuses in French-speaking areas for Erasing 76 Cimes. Last year, he was the victim of a violent homophobic attack.

Interview with Moïse Manoël-Florisse, conducted by activist/ journalist / professor Bruno Agar.

Agar: What happened after the attack?

Manoël-Florisse: Following my attack and due to the very difficult living conditions, I decided to return to France. The neighborhood where I lived lacked many essential public services: no public lighting and no garbage collection, among others. This is unfortunately very common in French Guiana.

In the course of July 2021, several months after my attack, the gendarmerie contacted me, even though I was already established in the Val de Marne, to inform me of the arrest and the placement in custody of the young thug who attacked me. I didn’t even expect it anymore, to tell the truth. I thought that this case would not have had any favorable follow-up and that it would have been lost in the limbo of the administrative meanderings of the understaffed local gendarmerie. I experienced this phone call as a first shock, while I was still under the trauma of the last months.

Finally the hearing of my aggressor was held on September 8, at the branch of the Court for Children of Cayenne, in Saint-Laurent du Maroni, and it was again a divine surprise, because I did not expect to be able to benefit from legal support for my case in such a short time. But, in fact, [the LGBTQ rights associations] ADHEOS, MOUSSE and STOP HOMOPHOBIE all joined me as civil parties in this case.

**French Guiana is an overseas department/region of French, fully incorporated into the French Republic. Nestled between Brazil and Suriname, it is home to nearly 300,000 people.**

Agar: What decision was made by the court?

Manoël-Florisse: The 15-and-a-half-year-old thug was sentenced to a socio-judicial follow-up until his majority and his legal guardian was condemned to pay me 500 euros [approximately 525 USD] in damages.

500 euros is the price of a life that could have been broken. Such is the price of a life that could have passed away, stopped or even faded away, in a banal tragedy under the heat of the tropics. Thus, I could have ended up with a severed carotid artery, but I could also have been mutilated, left with a glass eye, like an LGBTI rights activist who had his eye savagely plucked out a few months earlier, in another overseas territory. [Editor’s note: Moïse is referring to an incident in the French West Indies that he knows about, although it has not been widely reported.]

Obviously, these ignominious attacks targeting human rights defenders and more particularly LGBTI rights defenders in the Antilles-Guiana owe nothing to chance. However, despite the obvious and repeated homophobic insults that have sometimes accompanied and embellished the multiple attacks of which I have been the object, the justice system has remained silent on this issue and the aggravating circumstance of homophobia was not retained at the time of the request for re-characterization of the facts.

Consequently, my assailant was judged and sentenced as if it was an assault without motive. The conviction was decided on the basis of criminal facts without taking into account the motives of the attack on me. I consider this purely and simply scandalous. For me, it is a failure in the search for the truth.

Agar: How do you feel about the case?

Manoël-Florisse: It leaves me with a very bitter taste and filled with anger, too. Maybe if I had died, all this would have been considered differently. Maybe if I were rich and the son of a prominent person, the judgment would have been more severe. I don’t know, but I have doubts and I need to be able to get them out. I think that if the incident had occurred in Paris, for example, the judgment would probably have been different. Sometimes, one has the impression that there is a justice for France and another for the Overseas Territories.

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Also, I have to struggle to live with the psychological and mental after-effects related to the attack itself, the attacks that preceded it, as well as the social context.

Manoël-Florisse bursts into tears at this point in the interview.

When you are a non-white LGBTI person in a rural area, in a poor overseas department with very few public services, you are very vulnerable, because you are very isolated and made very invisible, due to the remoteness, lack of transportation and resignation to a form of political relegation that takes the place of social order. Yet our lives count for no less than those of others.

Indeed, what I find most revolting is the indifference that my attack provoked in a city that is admittedly plagued by insecurity. Among the LGBTI people living in the area, the attack I experienced was even met with sarcasm. When I needed to express my discomfort, I was referred to a pornographic group on WhatsApp. My relatives in Cayenne even blamed my Facebook postings for my attacker’s actions. I was left speechless.

With the exception of Gay Attitude Guyane, which sent me a message of support, I hold the LGBTI community of the city where I lived partly responsible — though not guilty — for the attack I had to face. A simple and responsible attitude would have consisted in being more vigilant towards each other, in order to be able to report to the authorities the “slight or intermediate” examples of ordinary homophobia: insults, bottle throwing, rock throwing, pushing, threats, being followed in the street by a cyclist, having to change roads to avoid trouble, etc… You know, Saint-Laurent du Maroni is a big village. However, I did not benefit from this basic work of prevention of homophobia. And one day, we will have to wonder about the gap between the missions of the DILCRAH [a French government agency, the Interministerial Delegation to Combat Racism, Antisemitism and Anti-LGBT Hate] in Guiana and the situation of abandonment in which the victims of LGBTphobia find themselves on the spot.

Also, we do not have the right to refuse to come to the aid of a person in mortal danger, because he denounces the ethnocentrism of the white LGBTI community of Guiana. It is unspeakable.

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