21 July 2016
On peut faire plus et on peut faire mieux?
The response to the tragedy in Nice.
by Richard Pooley
“It is hard to fathom what is happening from here.” So wrote Shaw Sheet’s editor last Friday when asking me to give my view on the previous night’s massacre in Nice. Frankly, I am not sure that it is any easier to fathom from a village in south-west France, but I have been struck by three things as I have listened to interviews, read articles and have heard and seen what ordinary French people are saying and writing. First, the response of France’s leading politicians has been utterly inadequate. Secondly, France’s media have failed in what are surely their primary duties: to find out what happened and why. Thirdly, the Front National’s Marine Le Pen is not only certain of being one of the two candidates in the final round of France’s presidential election on May 7 next year; she now has a genuine chance of becoming France’s next president.
In the early hours of July 15, President Hollande announced that the state of emergency, which he had said the day before would end on July 26, would be extended for another three months. His Minister of the Interior, Bernard Cazeneuve, said that 12,000 police reservists would be called up and, at the same time, begged “French patriots” to join up as reservists to protect the country’s borders. Nicholas Sarkozy, hoping to become president once again, demanded that all foreign nationals with jihadist sympathies be expelled from France. Ask yourself this, as I am sure many French people are doing: would having thousands more police and soldiers on France’s streets and along her borders stop similar acts in the future? Mohamed Bouhel was himself a Tunisian but among those who who were arrested as his associates were two French nationals. Sarkozy’s proposal won’t stop people like them from murdering their fellow citizens.
But the politician who has been least impressive is the one who is considered, by the media anyway, to be most likely to become president of France: Alain Juppé, ex-prime minister and the current Republican mayor of Bordeaux. In a TV interview on Tuesday morning he said “One can do more and one can do better.” By “one” he meant the government. And what was this “more” and “better”? More police, tougher penalties for terrorism, more prisons, draconian measures to counter jihadism on the internet and teaching children the Truth when they study History at school. The interviewer, usually good at finding her interviewees’ weak points, was unable to get Juppé to explain what he meant by “draconian”, or what he considered French History’s “Truth” to be (though he did say, perhaps by way of explanation, that people who come to live in France must realise that this is a Christian country).
And this leads me on to my second point: the failure of the media to ask the right questions and search for pragmatic solutions, however unpalatable and unsatisfactory they may be. Instead reporters and commentators have focused on the nation-wide political blame-game. There are many examples of this but one will have to suffice. Christian Estrosi is president of the new Provence-Alpes-Côte d’Azur region. He was, until last month, mayor of Nice for eight years. He is a close ally of Sarkozy and has been arguing for years that the French government needs to combat terrorism more effectively. It was he who ensured that Nice has more CCTV cameras than any other French city, including Paris (reports vary between 1,250 and 1,400). He hired extra security personnel to guard Nice’s fanzone during the European Football Championships, complaining that the Government itself should have provided and paid for them. In 2013 he forbade the building of a Saudi-sponsored mosque in Nice but, in case you are thinking that this right-wing politician is anti-Islam, he also launched programmes to build bridges between the various religious communities in the city and to de-radicalise Nice’s many disaffected young French Muslims. A few hours before the massacre he sent a letter to Hollande demanding that security in Nice be beefed up. Thirty thousand people were watching the fireworks in Nice on Bastille Day. Between forty-five and sixty police were there to protect them (again the media have yet to agree on a single figure). Within hours of the massacre Estrosi was blaming the Government for it and accusing Hollande and co. of being liars. He has not stopped doing so since and the media have been his willing megaphone.
Why is so little attention being paid by French media to the extraordinary and commendable efforts Estrosi made to make Nice a safe city? Why are they not pointing out more forcefully that the solutions so many politicians are now proposing, including by his pal Sarkozy, were tried out by him and have been shown not to work? Would it not be a good idea to find out more about his attempts to de-radicalise would-be jihadists and whether they are or are not part of the long-term solution to France’s home-grown terrorism?
And why do we have to wait almost a week for Le Canard enchaîné, France’s equivalent to Private Eye, to find out that the barrier of police vans on the Promenade des Anglais which was removed too early (why? on whose orders?) would not have stopped Bouhel’s 19-ton lorry even if it had remained in place? Why not? Because it only stretched across the road itself. The pavements were not blocked. They are wide enough for such a lorry to get through with ease.
There has also been a lot of talk in the media about the failures of the French intelligence services and the Police to spot the terrorists living in our midst. A report on the attacks in Paris of last November, written by a Senate committee, was published a fortnight ago (just seven months, Sir John Chilcot!). It is a devastating indictment of these guardians of our safety. The lack of teamwork and joined-up thinking is stunning, even to someone like me who used, long ago, to work inside a British government department. And yet I feel it is a lack of imagination which has so often been the fault. France’s state of emergency was initially extended to cover the Football Euros and the Tour de France. At the time, I found this incomprehensible. How could the cyclists and fans along the 3,519 km route possibly be protected from a terrorist intent on murder? Even so, I was shocked to see what happened as race-leader Christopher Froome was cycling up to the finish line on Mont Ventoux on, yes, July 14. He and two other cyclists crashed into a motorcycle (bearing a TV cameraman) which had been forced to stop by the crowds surging into the road from both sides. There were no barriers even this close to the finish of the Tour’s most famous stage. If you were a terrorist wanting maximum publicity for your cause and/or for yourself, would not that have been the time and place to attack? Did no-one in Intelligence have the wit and imagination to see that? This is not hindsight on my part. I asked exactly that question that afternoon. Oh, and three days later, three days after Nice, a Tour spectator let off a flare. He was not arrested.
My wife and I arrived in Argentat at 11.50 on Monday morning on our way up to the Auvergne for a couple of days in the mountains. The little town sits on the upper Dordogne river at the point in centuries past where the timber cut down in the forests and floated down would be switched to flat-bottomed boats for travel onwards to far-away Bordeaux. The police had blocked (effectively) the entrance to the high street. We parked and joined some forty other people, including the mayor and two policemen, at the end of the street furthest from the river. The national minute’s silence in memory of the 84 killed in Nice was due to start at mid-day. But, this being France, we did not start walking down the street until 12.02. We arrived at the Mairie at 12.05 and listened to two speeches, one given by the mayor and the other by an old man who had been in Nice for a conference (we think) on regional languages. The mayor kept it short and told us the solution lay in education. I could not understand the old man. Not only was his accent too strong for me, he was hardly able to speak through his tears. Both men were applauded. We were silent for a minute. And then, spontaneously, the Marseillaise was sung, softly and vehemently. I started to cry too. But later I reminded myself what the words of the second half of the first verse and first part of the chorus actually are:
Do you hear, in the countryside,
The roar of those ferocious soldiers?
They’re coming right into your arms
To cut the throats of your sons, your women!
To arms, citizens,
Form your battalions,
Let’s march, let’s march!
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