So, Mohamed Merah is not a barbarian monster appearing from nowhere, the sudden incarnation of an Al Qaeda Islamic terrorism that is abstract when not imaginary. The initial details we have on this man, who according to the police openly admitted to the killings in Toulouse and Montauban, tell us something altogether different. They tell us a story of France today. They tell us what can become of our society and where public responsibility might lie.
While the Elysée [the seat of presidential power] and some leader writers (read or listen to for example the chronique politique item on France Inter [public service radio] or this editorial in Libération) want to prevent all debate about what this event says about our society, that is precisely the opposite of what we should be doing. The murder of Jewish children and soldiers, the attack on a school, this is not just a human interest story whose exceptional nature stops us from putting it into context. On the contrary, it resonates dramatically with a country that is in crisis and broken.
Enlargement : Illustration 1
The information we have so far on the killer and his background strongly recall another story of France, that of Khaled Kelkal, one of those responsible for a wave of attacks carried out in France in 1995 (1). He was killed in September of that year by gendarmes in controversial circumstances, a death filmed live by a France2 [public service television station] camera (2). Seventeen years later the parallels with the current case are disturbing (right up to the assault by RAID (3) and the death of Mohamed Merah), as if a France divided in 1995 is echoed by a France in 2012 that is even more damaged.
Mohamed Merah, a young Frenchman aged 24, grew up in a working class housing estate in Toulouse, described today as one of those residential areas in crisis, forgotten by the public authorities. Khaled Kelkal, an Algerian, was also 24 in 1995 and had been brought up on a housing estate in Vaulx-en-Velin, a troubled town at the end of the 1980s. He is considered one of the main organisers of the attacks carried out during the summer of 1995, of which the most spectacular was the explosion set off in a carriage of an RER [Paris regional train network] train at Saint-Michel station in Paris, killing eight people. He was also said to be behind the car bomb that went off in front of a Jewish school in Villeurbanne [near Lyon] on September 7th, 1995. By a miracle no one was killed, as the timing mechanism of the bomb was set to the wrong time
Kelkal had chosen to embrace Islamic terrorism, ending up being recruited by the GIA [Armed Islamic Group] who were trying to export to France the Algerian civil war and its mass murders. According to the [Paris] prosecutor [François Molins] Merah had gone on a journey of “an atypical Salafist self-radicalisation”, ending up, after two visits to Afghanistan, as a lone fanatical killer.
Unlike Mohamed Merah, it seems, Khaled Kelkal had done well in his studies which saw him attend the lycée de la Matinière [secondary school] in Lyon. He was unable to go any further, sinking into ordinary criminality, car theft and robbery, that saw him go to prison for two years from 1990 to 1992. According to the prosecutor Mohamed Merah had piled up convictions before the juvenile courts for theft and assault, before serving 18 months in jail.
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1: The bombings in France in 1995 were carried out by the GIA or Armed Islamic Group, an organisation aiming to overthrow the government in Algeria and establish an Islamic state there. During the Algerian civil war that began in 1991 the GIA broadened its theatre of operations to include France, planting a number of bombs in railway and metro stations and other locations in Paris and Lyon. A total of eight people were killed in the attacks. Khaled Kelkal was one of the leaders of the group operating in France and was killed by gendarmes near Lyon on 29th September 1995 while resisting arrest.
2: Kelkal was eventually traced by gendarmes to woods near Lyon. On the TV footage, one of the gendarmes approaching Kelkal is heard shouting "Finis-le, finis-le !" ("Finish him, Finish him !"). Kelkal had been shot in the leg but aimed a pistol at the gendarmes, who opened fire in self-defence.
3: RAID stands for Recherche Assistance Intervention Dissuasion (Research, Assistance, Intervention, Deterrence ) and is the anti-terrorism unit of the national police.
Khaled Kelkal's journey
The monstrous nature of the crimes committed by Mohamed Merah are every bit as bad as those perpetrated by Khaled Kelkal. However in 1995 Kelkal's death went on to provoke a fierce debate on the path taken by this young immigrant, born at Mostaganem in Algeria, who arrived in France in 1973 and who was brought up in one of the many “ghettos”. The debate was fed by an unusual testimony from Khaled Kelkal himself. Several days after his death, Le Monde [newspaper] published a long interview with the young man by a German social science and politics researcher Dietmat Loch. It had taken place on October 3rd, 1992, as part of fieldwork research on the public policies being pursued at Vaulx-en-Velin.
In the interview Khaled Kelkal retraced the course of his life, a path of impossible integration into society for a young man, like his experience in a lycée in Lyon where he “could not find his place”, a phrase that crops up in relation to many other subjects. The “enormous wall” that separates the suburbs (1) and the centre of Lyon, the racial and social discrimination...Khaled Kelkal is telling the ordinary story of a youth from deprived areas. For his part Dietmar Loch thought that “Khaled Kelkal speaks for the youth of Vaulx-en-Velin. Khaled Kelkal was a Franco-Maghrebi [French with North African origins] who searched for recognition and dignity and did not find them.”
The publication sparked off violent criticism, so disturbing did it appear: how could you allow a terrorist to have their say, and question society and its politicians about their responsibility for this path of criminality? However, the debate nonetheless developed. [President] Jacques Chirac visited Vaulx-en-Velin. Key figures in urban policy were ordered to respond, and political leaders reacted. Eric Raoult, then minister with responsibility for towns, announced a “national programme for urban integration”, the first step in the Marshall Plan for deprived areas promised by Jacques Chirac in his election campaign but never carried out.
Mayors, relevant associations and local leaders examined the issue and the press carried a major debate on the suburbs, integration and equality of opportunity. The context of 1995 gave rise to such a debate for one simple reason: the future of working-class areas and areas of immigration like ethnic ghettos that had been created were still then a central issue of public debate.
Some years before, in 1991, a councillor of state Jean-Marie Delarue (who is today in charge of inspecting France's prisons) published a study on urban policy and social development that launched a debate. The notion of “ghettoisation” was moving from being a slow-burning crisis to a major issue in society. “The deprived areas are drifting away, silently, in the night,” he wrote. Describing the confusion and incoherence of public actions, he warned about the explosions to come, concluding: “These objectives [Editor's note: those announced in the report] will not be achieved if the political mess is not resolved.”
Another example of the renewed attention and debate on these issues that marked these years came during the election of 1995 (2), a few months before the Kelkal attacks, with the publication of a book by sociologist Adil Jazouli (see photograph right). “Une saison en banlieue” [“A spell in the suburbs”] was the product of a long work of social analysis carried out by the association Banlieuescopies. In his preface writer Tahar ben Jelloun summed up well the issue of the state of these areas and their inhabitants. “It is a tragedy that is starting to bubble up in front of us: it is in the offing and we know that it will produce incomprehension and sorrow, that it will be marked with blood and words and that it will involve an infinite despair ready to do anything.”
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1: The French word banlieue translates as “suburb” but in France these areas are often deprived areas of poverty and high unemployment, and the word does not conjure up the quiet residential areas often associated with it in English.
2: In which Jacques Chirac of the right-wing Rally for the Republic (RPR) party beat Socialist Party candidate Lionel Jospin in the second round of voting on May 7th, 1995.
A wider "malaise"
Today we have arrived at that point. And yet it is forbidden or obscene to question the “political mess”, to use Jean-Marie Delarue's phrase! Seventeen years later, the authorities demand silence, while at the same time improvising a new raft of legal measures described as anti-terrorist even as question marks are growing over a potential fiasco of ten days of police investigation and the assault by RAID.
Enlargement : Illustration 4
"We must pull together and not give way to glib responses or vengeance. Faced with such an event France can only be great through national unity,” said the president and election candidate [Nicolas Sarkozy]. Rather that this national unity driven by circumstances and decreed by an executive power in an election campaign, it is high time that a real national solidarity was put into action. And that a real public debate was put in place of a democracy that seems to have been set aside.
François Bayrou [leader of the centrist Modem party and presidential candidate] was not mistaken when on Monday evening [March 19th the day of the shootings at the Jewish school in Toulouse] he decided to transform his political rally at Grenoble into a “meeting for national reflection”. He told the meeting: “The act of pointing a finger at others because of their origin is to fan the flames of passion, and it is done because in those flames there are votes to win. Subjects are flung into the debate and words are uttered that roll like an avalanche and sometimes fall on the crazy.”
Dismissed as “vile” by [foreign minister] Alain Juppé, François Bayrou's comments, on the contrary, come just at the right time. As do those of Jean-Luc Mélenchon [presidential candidate for the left-wing Front de Gauche or Front of the Left, which is to the left of the Socialist Party] and of Eva Joly [candidate for the environmental alliance Europe Ecologie les Verts]. On Wednesday [March 21st] she noted that “there has clearly been discriminatory and stigmatising speeches on the part of Nicolas Sarkozy and of [interior minister] Claude Guéant. That doesn't help anything. I think that we are coming out of a period of five years when French people have set against each other”.
François Bayrou echoed this on RMC [radio] on Friday [March 23rd] when he spoke of a wider “malaise”. This could be seen, he said, “on the housing estates, in what is happening with employment, and what is happening with schools, the fact that our society is no longer integrating those who were born on its soil and [who are] often born of parents who were themselves born in France”.
It is high time, while Marine Le Pen [presidential candidate for the far-right National Front party] brandishes once again the idea of a referendum on the death penalty (1), that candidates who want to represent a progressive alternative to five years of a Sarkozy presidency grab hold of these questions. In order that the politics of integration are put centre stage once more. To make working-class areas the central issue, when today they are ignored. And to teach this country to live together once more, after five years in which everything has been done to divide it and to organise expulsions.
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1: Capital punishment was formally abolished in France in 1981.
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English version: Michael Streeter