After the Paris killings
Le Monde Diplomatique
February 2015
1)
The guys from the ghetto
Laurent Bonelli
Once people are over the shock of the killings, once the feelings of indignation and powerlessness have dissipated and the only people still hurting are the victims’ immediate circle, the question remains — how, in a time of peace, can young Frenchmen have carried out such violent acts, choosing targets for their opinions, presumed religion or uniform? From the murders by Mohamed Merah in 2012 and the attack by Mehdi Nemmouche on the Jewish museum in Brussels last May, to the killings this January by Said and Cherif Kouachi, and Amedy Coulibaly, 28 people have been shot dead.
The sketchy information the press has gleaned about the killers gives some idea of lives in which social services and the juvenile justice system intervened early on, when family environments were judged inappropriate or inadequate; most spent time in hostels and foster families. Their education was of a pattern common among the least skilled of the working class: they gravitated towards technical courses (CAP, BEP, vocational baccalaureate) — which they did not always complete — though the general baccalaureate is now recognised as a minimum qualification.
To compensate for this educational relegation, some joined street gangs and got involved in their petty disorder. Stealing cars or scooters, driving without a licence, physical assault, verbal abuse, burglary and robbery with violence drew the attention of the police and courts, and Merah, Coulibaly and Nemmouche all went to prison for the first time when they were 19. Fresh offences after release led to the revocation of suspended sentences and longer prison terms; they spent a good part of their twenties in jail. The Kouachi brothers, who grew up in a village in the department of Corrèze, seem to have come only later to delinquency (receiving stolen goods or selling drugs, combined with precarious or black-market employment), when they moved to the Paris area in the early 2000s. Cherif went to prison in 2005-06 at the age of 23 for his involvement in an organisation sending volunteers to fight in Iraq.
All five espoused a vision of an Islam of heroic warriors (mujahideen), grand exploits and distant theatres of war. Some travelled to Syria, Pakistan, Afghanistan or Yemen. Propaganda, preaching and initiation camps gave them a relatively simple worldview that made a coherent whole of their own experience of subjugation and that of other peoples (in Mali, Chechnya, Palestine), and a civilisational narrative blaming Jews and unbelievers for these ills. This idea of religion was attractive because it both made them aware of their situation and offered liberation from it, giving their lives a “higher” purpose.
Not unusual
The similarity of the killers’ lives has already prompted experts to try to classify their actions as “lumpen-terrorism” and “gangster-terrorism”. But the characteristics of those lives do not seem unusual, corresponding to those of the “suburban ghetto generation” to which the killers belong (they were all born in the 1980s), marked by exclusion, harder access to unskilled jobs, spatial segregation and police checks, social relations limited to their own ethnic group and diminishing interest in the political commitments of their elders.
What surprises is not so much the decision to commit such acts of violence as its rarity. “If radicalisation is a process,” write political sociologist Annie Collovald and political scientist Brigitte Gaïti, “we must trace it before we can explain it. That means moving away from why and asking how” (1). The exhortations of jihadist leaders to strike at France, the West or the Jewish community may have inspired those aspiring to rebellion, but did not trigger their actions. Sociologist Howard S Becker points out that the final decision to act is the last in a long series of decisions, none of which, in isolation, seem strange (2). Like historian Christopher Browning, who shows by what mechanisms (group conformity, depersonalisation of victims) the “ordinary men” of Germany’s 101st reserve police battalion were transformed into cold-blooded killers between July 1942 and November 1943 (3), we need to reconstruct the experiences particular to the lives of those who carried out the attacks and to the world they live in.
The attacks used skills these individuals had already learned: how to steal a car or procure, handle and use firearms is transferable knowledge. The method also reflected habits formed when they were mere delinquents: the reconnoitring was rough, the getaway plans only covered getting home, and when that was not possible, they wandered aimlessly. The only real requirements seemed to be the composure necessary to attack and the ability to drive fast. Even seeking a martyr’s death by firing at police was like the fate of Scarface in the Brian de Palma film, an idol of young ghetto-dwellers; or that of armed robber Jacques Mesrine, whose biography Merah was reading a few weeks before his death. Understanding the familiarity of these modes of action and their legitimacy in the eyes of those who use them is a major step towards understanding how they can be transferred to other targets, though it is not enough. Coulibaly’s desire to “get the police”, while the Kouachi brothers were attacking Charlie Hebdo, relates to his hatred for the organisation that killed his best friend, Ali Rezgui, in front of him in 2000, when the two men were loading a van with stolen motorbikes.
This political violence can be traced back to the Algerian civil war. The conflict triggered in 1991 by the cancellation of a general election in which the Islamic Salvation Front (FIS) had won the first round was extremely violent. By the early 2000s, clashes between the army and the Armed Islamic Group (GIA) had killed tens of thousands and led to mass displacement. The war also affected Algerian families living in France, to which Merah, Nemmouche and the Kouachi brothers belonged. Abdelghani Merah, Mohammed’s elder brother, has written a book in which he describes holidays at Oued Bezzaz where their father’s family, who supported the GIA, showed off firearms and sometimes “a gendarme or a civilian with his head cut off”. He also describes pressure from an uncle in Toulouse for his sisters to “leave school, put on the Islamic veil and stay at home” (4). In France, religious injunctions can be at once a way of bringing children who are too liberated (in where they go, their choice of friends or the way they dress) back into line, and an expression of political support for armed groups, such as that of Djamel Beghal, whom Cherif Kouachi and Coulibaly met at the Fleury-Mérogis remand centre in 2005; he is said to have been their mentor. Born in 1965, Beghal was a member of the GIA’s support network in France, and was arrested for this in 1994. With Coulibaly and Cherif Kouachi, he was one of 14 suspected of having planned the failed prison escape in 2010 of Smain Ait Ali Belkacem, a munitions expert behind the 1995 Paris metro bombing. While in prison, Kouachi also met Farid Melouk, serving a sentence for providing logistical support to that attack.
To the lands of jihad
These meetings link the different generations of Islamic political militants, and make their choices part of a longer history of feats of arms, defeats and changes of direction (5). In 1995 the GIA hoped for military and political victory in Algeria. The bombing of public transport in Paris was intended to force the French government to reduce its support for the military regime. A few years later, the situation had changed. The GIA was defeated and the Salafist Group for Preaching and Combat, founded in 1998, was weakening under the onslaught of the Algerian army — a political and territorial decline that explains its decision to merge with Al-Qaida in 2007, under the name Al-Qaida in the Islamic Maghreb, and to change its strategy. It now focuses on operations in the Sahara, and Mali or Niger, such as the abduction of westerners. For militants living in France or other European countries, the cause has survived but takes a different route, with a shift to (or sometimes departure for) the “lands of jihad” or a switch to the “propaganda of the deed”.
The anarchists at the London conference of 1881 took this approach. The principle was simple: insurrectional acts (bombings, assassinations, sabotage, robbery) “are the most effective form of propaganda, and the only one capable of … penetrating the deepest layers of society” (6). It was used in Europe, the US and Russia to target government figures, police, judges, religious, political opponents and anonymous “bourgeois”. It aimed to punish those responsible (for judgments, torture) and to avenge fallen comrades or destroy symbols so as to awaken the masses. Some 130 years before Inspire, the magazine published by Al-Qaida in the Arabian Peninsula, called for the death of Stéphane “Charb” Charbonnier, La Révolution sociale, La Lutte and Le Drapeau Noir published columns dedicated to bomb-making. In 1884 Le Droit Social launched an appeal for funds “for the purchase of a revolver to avenge the death of comrade Louis Chaves”, killed by French gendarmes.
Propaganda of the deed did not rouse the masses. Some acts were perceived favourably but failed to mobilise, and even distanced the working class from anarchist movements at a time when these were mercilessly repressed. The approach was abandoned in the early 20th century in favour of more collective action. It was later used with a similar lack of success by far-left movements (Action Directe in France, Red Army Faction in Germany, Red Brigades in Italy), and by supporters of the far right (Organisation Armée Secrète in France, Timothy McVeigh, the Oklahoma City bomber in the US in 1995, and Anders Behring Breivik, responsible for the Utøya massacre in Norway in 2011).
The attacks in France confirm the pattern. Despite Coulibaly’s exhortations in a posthumous video (“What do you do when they continue to insult the Prophet? What do you do when you see your brothers and your sisters starving?”), his “Muslim brothers” have overwhelmingly rejected his acts; subsequent attacks on mosques and physical assaults have made them collateral victims.
Not a war
Politicians forget the lessons of history when they adopt a warlike stance, as did France’s prime minister Manuel Valls, who told the National Assembly on 13 January: “France is at war with terrorism, jihadism and radical Islam.” Though tragic, the situation is not a war. It remains under the control of the police and judiciary. The perpetrators and accomplices were quickly neutralised or arrested, and it is reasonable to suppose that the same will happen if other acts of terrorism follow. There has never been a time when the risk was zero — even in the harshest police states, such as Pinochet’s Chile or Franco’s Spain.
Warlike talk assumes polarisation, since it rests on popular mobilisation against a common enemy. Though it can resonate when foreign armies attack national borders, it does not do so in times of peace. The difficulty some teachers in France had in making their pupils observe a minute’s silence on 8 January, and the social makeup of the huge demonstrations the following Sunday, show that the population was not unanimous. This is not surprising: the experience of the working class, particularly the young, is far closer to that of the killers than that of the politicians, or of the educated middle class who demonstrate. Discrimination (social, religious, racial or chauvinistic), social and spatial relegation, and police checks make it unlikely that a single movement will unite those who experience them, those who organise them and those who deplore them without worrying about it too much. Disruptive schoolchildren in Germany have claimed to be Nazis to shock their teachers; verbal support for the January attacks has given their French counterparts an excuse to protest against an educational and social order that excludes them.
Polarisation is counterproductive. There are two opposing discourses: that of the authorities (you’re either with us or with the “terrorists”) and that of the perpetrators of political violence (you’re either with us or you’re a bad Muslim/nationalist/revolutionary). But the “terrorist relationship” implies three participants: the clash between the first two takes place in front of the (often indifferent) majority, who become spectators thanks to the media. This distancing prevents the violence from spreading, especially when radical groups do not have a strong social or territorial base. Yet pressure to express unanimous condemnation can, by reaction, encourage a minority of spectators to sympathise with the objectives of the organisations targeted, or even join them. The risk increases if the exhortation is backed by legal or administrative measures to punish those who refuse.
Footnote
(1) Annie Collovald and Brigitte Gaïti (eds), La Démocratie aux extremes: Sur la radicalisation politique, La Dispute, Paris, 2006.
(2) See Howard S Becker, Tricks of the Trade, University of Chicago Press, 1998.
(3) See Christopher Browning, Ordinary Men: Reserve Police Battalion 101 and the Final Solution in Poland, HarperCollins, New York, 1992.
(4) Abdelghani Merah with Mohamed Sifaoui, Mon frère, ce terroriste (My Brother the Terrorist), Calmann-Lévy, Paris, 2012.
(5) Similar mechanisms can be seen at work in other clandestine movements. See Laurent Bonelli, “The secret lives of terrorists”, Le Monde diplomatique, English edition, October 2011.
(6) Letter from Carlo Cafiero to Errico Malatesta, quoted in Bulletin de la Fédération jurassienne, no 49, Sonvillier, Switzerland, 3 December 1876.
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