Empires of the Mind

by Robert Gildea

  This regret was mealy-mouthed. It did not prevent France in practice from pursuing its neo-colonial policy in Africa. In January 2013 the Malian president appealed for French military support against a threat from the Salafist jihadist group Ansar Dine. There was little debate about this intervention. It simply repeated the conventional practices of Françafrique, according to which France supported African leaders who defended her interests. Moreover, on this occasion the intervention had the approval of the United Nations. French air and ground forces were duly deployed alongside Malian forces in Operation Servan to drive the jihadists back and on 2 February President Hollande made a lightning visit to Timbuktu, to be greeted by crowds as a liberator. ‘Gunboat diplomacy is not a solution’, argued a coalition of immigrant and anti-colonialist groups, including the Frantz Fanon Foundation and the Parti des Indigènes de la République, called ‘Sortir du colonialisme’, but this criticism was not widely shared.

  Hollande was even more at ease ratcheting up Ferry’s doctrine of laïcité. On 6 September 2013, a circular required a ‘Charter of Laïcité’ to be displayed in every school. Among its fifteen articles were (3) ‘Laïcité guarantees freedom of conscience for all. Each person is free to believe or not to believe’ and (2) ‘The lay Republic organises the separation of religions from the state. The state is neutral in matters of religious or spiritual conviction. There is no state religion.’40 In a formal sense this doctrinal approach dealt even-handedly with all religions, but in reality it imposed a single ideology that was, at least implicitly, anti-Muslim.

  Meanwhile French history was taught as the single story of the French nation from ‘Our ancestors, the Gauls’, to the present. In 2011 President Sarkozy had announced that a Museum of the History of France would be established in the National Archives, which in turn would be moved to the suburb of Saint-Denis.41 He never set foot in the separate National Museum of the History of Immigration, which told immigrants’ stories in a parallel and unofficial way. Hollande’s socialist prime minister and mayor of the former slave port of Nantes, Jean-Marc Ayrault, suggested in November 2013 that the contribution of immigrants to French history should be incorporated into the official syllabus. This was more controversial than was tolerable. Front National leader Marine Le Pen headed a nationalist backlash, denouncing the proposal as ‘a declaration of war against the French Republic, French history and French culture’ and the proposal was withdrawn.42

  The trouble was that the single story of the French nation included the story of the French Empire, above all of French Algeria. An official exhibition on ‘Algeria 1830–1962’ organised at the Invalides in Paris in the summer of 2012, which played down the role of army violence, was visited by 44,000 people.43 Meanwhile French settlers forced to leave Algeria in 1962 and who had settled along the Mediterranean coast felt free to promote their own memories and values. Robert Ménard, whose family had left Algeria when he was nine years old, was elected mayor of Béziers in April 2014. The following July he unveiled a monument in honour of French settlers who had been massacred in Oran on 5 July 1962, as Algerians celebrated their independence. The settlers were cast not as colonial oppressors but as victims of decolonisation. Ménard then decided to remove the name of the Béziers street marking the Evian agreement of 19 March 1962, traditionally favoured by the Left to acclaim the end of the hated Algerian War, and to rename it in honour of Hélie Denoix de Saint-Marc, a former resister and professional soldier who had supported the generals’ putsch of 1961 against an Algerian Algeria. Thus the most unreconstructed defenders of French Algeria were brought into the mainstream national narrative.

  War on the Caliphate and Jihadist Attacks at Home

  The epicentre of trouble at this point for France, Britain and the United States was not Algeria but France’s former mandate of Syria. The trouble was that it was difficult to establish who the real enemy was after the defeat of the democratic opposition to President Assad: was it the Assad regime or the rising threat of ISIS? The long shadow of the disastrous intervention in Iraq also hung over decision-making, for the overthrow of Saddam Hussein had plunged the country into civil war and the allied occupation had provoked multi-headed jihadist resistance.

  A crisis point came in August 2013, when the Assad regime used chemical weapons on Ghouta, a suburb of Damascus held by the opposition, killing an estimated 1,400 people, including many children. The House of Commons voted narrowly by 285–272 against intervention on 29 August 2013. US National Security Adviser Zbigniew Brzezinski nevertheless remarked that the vote might have gone the other way because of the old colonial reflex. ‘I am struck by how eager Great Britain and France appear to be in favour of military action’, he said. ‘And I am also mindful that both of these powers are former imperialist, colonialist powers in the region.’44

  The opportunity for them to flex those imperialist, colonialist muscles was not far away. The situation changed dramatically in June 2014 when ISIS took Mosul and Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi duly proclaimed the Caliphate of Iraq and the Levant. The last US troops had left Iraq as recently as December 2011, and now it seemed that their work would have to start all over again. The United States launched air strikes against ISIS in Iraq on 8 August 2014, provoking an immediate retaliation by ISIS forces against the American hostages they held. On 19 August they published a gruesome video of the beheading of journalist James Foley and on 2 September one of the beheading of journalist Steven Sotoff. Both hostages appealed to the Americans to stop the bombing before they were executed by English-speaking Mohammed Enwazi, aka Jihadi John. The execution of British humanitarian David Haines followed on 13 September and of Alan Henning on 3 October 2014.

  The American response was to step up retaliation. On 10 September 2014, President Obama announced that he would ‘degrade and ultimately destroy’ ISIS. ‘I have made it clear that we will hunt down terrorists who threaten our country, wherever they are’, he warned. Air strikes on 22 September were aimed at ISIS bases at Raqqa in Syria, even though there had been no invitation from the Syrian government. France had not joined in with other allies in the 2003 Iraq War but she now reverted to her former colonial pretensions. President Hollande was received by the Iraqi president in Baghdad on 12 September 2014, responding to a request for support against the jihadists, and French Rafale aircraft began attacking ISIS targets on 19 September.

  At this point the danger of military intervention became clear. The French attacks provoked a jihadist response in metropolitan France and reopened divisions in French society along the lines of the ‘colonial fracture’.

  On 7 January 2015 two Islamist militants entered the offices of the Charlie Hebdo magazine in Paris and shot dead twelve cartoonists and journalists at their weekly meeting. Charlie Hebdo was part of the avant-garde of French political satire and had been pouring scorn for some years on the Prophet Mohammed. While for the magazine this was acting out the Enlightenment, which defined French intellectual life, for the Salafists it was simply blasphemy.

  The leader of the attacks was Amédy Coulibaly, aged 32, the only male in a broken Malian family of ten children, whose hatred of the French state dated to the shooting in 2002 of his friend and accomplice in petty crime. Doing time in the prison of Fleury Mérogis, a notorious jihad academy, he fell under the influence of Algerian-born Djamel Beghal, who had been sentenced to ten years in prison in 2005 for planning an attack on the US embassy in Paris in 2001.45 At Fleury Coulibaly met Chérif Kouachi, also of Algerian origin, brought up with his brother Saïd in the Paris suburbs and a member of the Buttes-Chaumont gang. The Kouachi brothers went to Yemen in 2011 to train with AQPA (al-Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula). Meanwhile, out of prison, Coulibaly married Hayat Boumeddiene, an Algerian by background who had lost her job in a French supermarket for refusing not to wear the veil. The Kouachi brothers were responsible for the Charlie Hebdo killings, under instruction from Coulibaly. In a video he recorded probably on 8 January, Coulibaly described himself as a ‘soldier of the caliphate�
�� and explained, ‘You attack the Islamic State, we will attack you. You are bombing regularly over there.’ Then, addressing his Muslim brothers, he asked, ‘What do you do when they directly violate the law of Allah? What do you do when they assault our sisters?’46 On 9 January he took staff and customers hostage at a kosher supermarket in Vincennes and killed four of them before dying in the police assault. The Kouachi brothers were killed by police the same day.

  The response of the French public to the Charlie Hebo massacres was immediate and dramatic. An estimated four million people demonstrated on Sunday 11 January, wearing badges with the words ‘Je suis Charlie’ (Figure 9.1). The fundamental values of freedom of thought and speech, laïcité and the Republic were declared. The Front National was not invited, lest anti-Muslim, xenophobic sentiments displace those of the Enlightenment. Intellectuals mobilised as during the Dreyfus Affair. Writer and cineast Gérard Mordillat argued that the cartoonists had committed no blasphemy: ‘In the Republic it is perfectly possible to write, shout, proclaim that you couldn’t care about God, Jehovah, Allah, Nanabozo the Giant Rabbit, Buddha, Father Christmas, Mickey Mouse, Harry Potter and all the other gods invented by man to cope with his fear of death.’47

  Figure 9.1 The colonial fracture: ‘Nous sommes Charlie’ demonstration in Paris, 11 January 2015.

  Getty Images / Dan Kitwood / 461343474

  The Charlie Hebdo and Jewish supermarket massacres, however, divided as much as they united. Immigrant populations in the banlieues did not take part in the marches. In Belleville they challenged demonstrators with shouts of ‘Je ne suis pas Charlie’ and sang Intifada songs.48 The school of the Republic was also divided. Muslim schoolchildren shouted in corridors at school and refused to observe the minute’s silence instituted by the government.49 ‘For many Muslims it was impossible to say “Je suis Charlie”’, writer Karim Miské said later, ‘because Charlie Hebdo attacked their prophet […] To say “Je suis Charlie” would have been to say, “I submit to the white secular order, even though I think it is horrible”’.50

  The Charlie Hebdo affair dramatised how fractured French society was between those who endorsed the values of the Enlightenment and laïcité and those who felt that these values served to marginalise them, discriminate against them, even stigmatise them. It underscored the rift between those who identified with France as a colonial power and had been able to assimilate and those who experienced discrimination and segregation and alienation as former subjects of that power and identified with the push-back by Islamist fighters (Figure 9.2). One reader of Le Monde from Conakry, in the former French colony of Guinea, pointed out that:

  France is a country curiously ill at ease with its cultural diversity. With very few exceptions, it is obvious that those from visible minorities do not get a good deal either in education or on the job market, because of different forms of segregation and a badly adapted policy of integration based on assimilating French people of overseas origin. It is utopian to try to assimilate people who, because of their circumstances, have different cultural and historical references. Because they cannot succeed, these people break with French society and in the end no longer have faith in the institutions of the Republic. Some of them join jihadist organisations where they recover their lost honour and a meaning of life.51

  Figure 9.2 The colonial fracture: Senegalese Muslims declare ‘Je ne suis pas Charlie’, Dakar, 16 January 2015.

  Getty Images / SEYLLOU / Stringer /AFP / 461637124

  This interpretation was reinforced by sociologist Edgar Morin, whose radicalism went back to the Spanish Civil War and opposition to the Algerian War, and Patrick Singaïny, a writer from Réunion who had written a biography of Aimé Césaire. Immigrants of Arab and Muslim origin, they argued, were ghettoised in the banlieues, harassed by the police and became radicalised in prison, where paradoxically they were reborn. ‘They could not become real French people, but they could become real Muslims.’52 The rise of Daesh was a consequence of the destruction of Afghanistan and Iraq by military interventions led by the Americans, they claimed. ‘France was present through its air force, through French Muslims who joined the jihad and came back from the jihad. It is now clear that the Middle East is now present in the heart of France.’53

  This analysis that French Muslims, joined by Belgian Muslims in a similar situation, joined the jihad and returned from the jihad to undertake attacks in France was confirmed in Paris ten months later. Salim Benghalem, a former crane operator of Algerian origin from Cachan, outside Paris, met members of the Buttes-Chaumont group while in Fresnes prison in 2007 and travelled to Syria in 2013. He called on would-be French jihadists to join Daesh and defended the Charlie Hebdo assassins in a video. The French authorities launched a bombing raid on a Daesh training camp in Raqqa on 8 October 2015 in the hope of killing him, but without success. It is possible to trace a connection between this raid and the shootings and the suicide bombings in Paris on 13 November 2015, which killed 130 people. Omar Mostefai, aged 29, from Courcouronnes and Samy Amimour, aged 28, from Drancy, both in the Paris region, attacked the Bataclan concert hall. Three brothers, Brahim, Salah and Mohammed Abdeslam, Belgians of Moroccan origin from Molenbeek, shot at drinkers in the Bastille-Nation quarter of Paris. Meanwhile, Bilal Hadfi and Ahmed al-Mohammed blew themselves up at the Stade de France. The mastermind, to begin with, was thought to be Abdelhamid Abaaoud, a Belgian of Moroccan origin, who had travelled to Syria early in 2013, joined Daesh and returned to the Molenbeek suburb of Brussels in September 2013. Two months later, however, the mastermind was thought to be Salim Benghalem himself.54

  After this second devastating attack on Paris in 2015, François Hollande declared a state of emergency in France and closed the frontiers. This time there were no marches in support of freedom of thought. Hollande, who three years earlier had paid tribute to the Algerians massacred in Paris in October 1961, now sent a small army into the northern Paris banlieue of Saint-Denis, a ghetto of segregation and exclusion, where Abdelhamid Abaaoud and two other terrorists had holed up. Over 1,500 projectiles were spent in the assault that killed the terrorists and made the building they were in uninhabitable. ‘It was quite a trauma for us here, for the population’, said local councillor Madjid Messaoudene. He complained that subsequently the police and army had occupied Saint-Denis, a multicultural melting pot, in which 135 nationalities lived side by side, like a foreign town.55 It was as if the Battle of Algiers, fought to clear the kasbah of FLN terrorists in 1957, was now being fought in the banlieues of Paris.

  As the colonial shutters came down in France a few voices suggested that France should take a hard look at the divisions that lay behind these terrible attacks. Edgar Morin traced France’s ills to her foreign policy in the Middle East and to the effective exclusion of Muslims from French society. Much more thought, he said, had to go into how to integrate them:

  Make peace in the Middle East. Build a general coalition of the least barbaric powers (including Russia, Iran and ourselves) against the most barbaric of all […] The war against Daesh will be won not only through peace in Syria but through peace in the banlieues. Nothing in depth or over time has been done for a real integration of the nation by schools teaching that French history is multicultural and by confronting discrimination in society.56

  Attempts to reach a new accommodation with Muslims, however, were unlikely after the attacks of 13 November 2015, and more or less unthinkable after the attack of 14 July 2016, when Tunisian-born Mohamed Lahouaiej-Bouhlel, aged 31, drove a highjacked truck into crowds celebrating Bastille Day on the Nice sea front, killing 86 people and injuring 458. Prime Minister Manuel Valls, coming to pay his respects the following day, was booed by the crowd for failing to provide adequate security against Islamist terrorism. Local authorities on the Côte d’Azur took their revenge that summer by banning the wearing of the full-body swimming costume, commonly known as the burkini, on their beaches. For republicans this was simply the imposition in public places of a laïcit�
� that forbade the conspicuous display of religious affiliation, whereas for Muslims it was gratuitous discrimination. Given the predominance on the French Mediterranean coast of pieds noirs, who were reminded of their 1962 defeat and exodus by the Arab Muslim presence on French soil, it seemed like the reimposition of a segregation that would have been taken as read fifty years before, in colonial Algeria.

  Initially, Britain was more cautious about military intervention against ISIS in Syria. It voted narrowly against intervention against the Assad regime in August 2013. It did not, like France, follow the lead of the United States in August and September 2014. Memories of the disastrous intervention in Iraq were still too painful. This did not mean, however, that it had worked through the consequences of military intervention in terms of alienating Muslim populations abroad and at home, creating waves of refugees from the war zone and inviting a jihadist response, and was therefore liable to make the same mistake as in Iraq.

  The limits of official thinking were demonstrated when news came through on 15 June 2015 that Talha Asmal, a 17-year-old from Dewsbury in West Yorkshire, had blown himself up as a suicide bomber in Syria. On the BBC, Lord Alex Carlile, the head of Prevent, argued that the answer was better policing: intelligence services should be given greater powers to access communications between terrorists and those they were radicalising. Against him, former MP for Dewsbury Shahid Malik replied that to see radicalisation only through the lens of security and to criticise British Muslims for not doing enough to counter radicalisation was counter-productive. ‘If we undermine the Muslim part of our population’, he said, ‘we are effectively undermining the front line against terrorism in the UK’.57 His view made a good deal of sense, but was not sufficient to counter the official view that the Islamist threat must ultimately be conquered by force.