Society and space

People want us to demonstrate. Very well, but tomorrow what do we do? They point their finger at us with a nasty look on their face? I don’t want to be part of this France for a single afternoon, but every single day. —Youssouf from the Bondy banlieue

In the immediate aftermath of the horrors of 7 January, emotions run high, oscillating between a feeling of urgency to do something, and a feeling of resignation whereby everything seems futile. For what can anyone do against such reckless hate? On this day – almost a month after the release of the US Senate’s report on the gruesome CIA torture programme, and three weeks after the deadliest terrorist attack in Pakistan, the Peshawar school massacre where 145 people, 132 of them schoolchildren, were killed – a minibus full of explosives went off in Sana’a, killing at least 37 people and wounding 66. This was added as yet another news item on the long list of terrorist killings, without anyone organising rallies or identifying themselves with the tortured or murdered victims of such terror. No one even wiggled a pen in the air.

But the horrors of 7 January were not limited to Yemen’s capital city. For three days, the French capital was caught up in murderous events, and Parisians had a taste of what it might be like to live with terror, experienced on a daily basis in several other parts of the world. Unlike those parts of the world, however, Parisians do not live under the constant threat of established armies, private mercenaries, or drones operated from the Nevada desert. They might also take some relief that the perpetrators of the crimes of 7 January were identified and hunted down by legitimate authorities, which is rarely the case in regions destabilised by constant terror, induced by military interventions and other forms of violent attacks.

In a sign of solidarity, millions of French citizens stood up against terror, to show the world that they were ‘a united people’. The gatherings were massive, emotional and, in a way, encouraging – encouraging in that despite everything that has happened, the citizens of this country publicly manifest their solidarity and unity. But the murderers of 7 January were French citizens, too, born and raised in this country. The details of their lives that have started to emerge suggest that they all went through a radicalisation. They were not born with an inclination or bred from childhood to plan and kill journalists, police, or Jews in their own country of birth and residence. This suggests the possibility that their indoctrination and radicalisation into murderers could not have happened in the absence of long-standing and deeply entrenched grievances. It is the hate stemming from such grievances that the ideologues of terrorism mobilise, which is why the deprived and disenfranchised neighbourhoods in the peripheral areas of cities – banlieues, slums – where unemployment hits as many as half the youth population are targeted as potential recruiting grounds. But what could cause grief to a French citizen, in this cradle of human rights, united under the ‘one and indivisible Republic’?

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