‘ As France reels from the devastating terrorist attack in Nice that claimed 84 lives, questions arise over the efficacy of the state of emergency and the deep roots of Islamist radicalisation.
O n the night of July 14, Mohammed Lahouaiej Bouhlel drove a lorry into a densely packed Promenade des Anglais in Nice, mowing down all those in his path. Holidaymakers and residents, who had congregated on the iconic esplanade to enjoy the festivities of Bastille Day, threw themselves onto the beach, some literally hurling their children onto the sand, but many were unable to escape the assault. Eighty-four people lost their lives before Mr. Bouhlel was shot dead by police, among them children. Hundreds have been maimed, while 102 people remain in hospital, many in a critical condition.
The Bastille Day massacre is the third major terrorist attack on French soil since the Charlie Hebdo killings in January 2015, once again prompting an international outpouring of solidarity and sympathy, and that question again: why France? Since the Paris attacks in November 2015, in which Islamic State terrorists murdered 130 people, France s state of emergency has seen thousands of raids on houses, businesses and mosques and countless policemen and soldiers patrol the streets. By April, 3,400 houses had been searched, and 743 arms, including 75 war arms, confiscated. But the state of emergency has also drawn criticism for human rights violations, with organisations such as Human Rights Watch accusing French authorities of discriminating against the Muslim population. The government says that the emergency measures have prevented a large number of attacks. However, it could not stop the atrocity that visited Nice last week. Tunisian-born lorry driver Mohammed Lahouaiej Bouhlel, according to authorities, represents a new security challenge for never having been filed by the police before, save for petty crime.
Nearly a week after, the attack in Nice raises several questions. How useful is the state of emergency against such unpredictable attacks? And, more deeply, can France s Republican values of libert , galit , and fraternit coexist with its increasingly fractured society? Writing for the Guardian, French political scientist Philippe Marliere notes: There is no liberty when people fear for their lives whenever they go about their daily business; there is no equality when the young have no faith in the future; and there is no fraternity when the Muslim population, an important and large component, is discriminated against and regarded as the enemy within . In this analyses curated by The World Weekly, The New York Times exposes how the attack took place in a city where the social fabric is fraying, while at the FT, counter-terrorist expert and renowned critic of the French government Fran ois Heisbourg takes on the challenges of an increasingly diffuse global terrorism. The massacre in Nice on July 14 could have happened just about anywhere. The modus operandi and the choice of target could be readily transposed to any number of locations: an individual with murderous intent drives a truck into a crowd celebrating a national holiday in a large city that is also a magnet for tourism.
The attack serves as a reminder that terrorists tend to march to their own drum: they do not strike simply because we in the west believe that an event this summer sEuro 2016 football championship in France, for example is important. Their concern is to maximise the chances of their operation being successful according to their own criteria hence the choice of venues that are not under heavy protection. Some of the lessons of the Nice attack are of general application, therefore. First, as was the case in the recent terror operations in Paris, Brussels and Istanbul, this was a low-cost operation from the perpetrator s standpoint. The occupation of Mosul or Raqqa by Isis has little effect on a terrorist s ability to carry out such massacres. Liberating these cities will be important for the fate of the enslaved local populations and will limit the training opportunities for foreign terrorist fighters , but how much training does it take to drive a truck?
Forensic police investigate the truck on the Promenade des Anglais on July 15. Patrick Aventurier/Getty Images
Isis may also be weakened as a result of having embraced what now appears to be a losing strategy of territorial conquest. But this will work to the advantage of other, no less dreadful, competitors in the marketplace of jihadi terrorism. Western and Russian military intervention in the Middle East may not have triggered the latest spate of jihadi terrorism after all, France was declared an enemy by al-Qaeda in the previous decade, notwithstanding Paris s refusal to participate in the invasion of Iraq. Western military operations in the region are of limited relevance to the attempt to prevent homegrown terrorism carried out on a shoestring by radicals, whether of an Islamist persuasion or coming from the extreme-right (as in Norway in 2011, when Anders Behring Breivik killed 77 people in Oslo and on the island of Utoya).
Second, as the examples of Nice and Norway demonstrate, the ability of an individual to kill large numbers is now a feature of the terrorist threat. There are also limits to what protective measures can be adopted in order to stop such outrages. Backpacks can be banned and handbags searched in closed areas such as airports or shopping malls. But what about busy city streets or public parades?
NOTE
Asked how to make public spaces less vulnerable to terrorist attacks, many national experts have advised the installation of bollards, as well as other large immovable devices at the entrances to malls, government buildings and even adjacent al-fresco dining places , according to Mark Briskey, senior lecturer in National Security at University College London. Another lecturer in security at UCL, Herv Borrion, however points out in an article for The Conversation that the cost of doing this on a large scale would be a problem in the age of anytime, anywhere terrorism . Security policy will have to emphasise intelligence and surveillance to an even greater degree than before. And this will involve extra spending and human resources. Civil liberties may also suffer as a consequence. The ability of an individual to kill large numbers is a feature of the terrorist threat. There are limits to what protective measures can be adopted to stop such outrages
The Bastille Day attack will have significant implications specific to France, not least because the country is clearly a priority target for the jihadis. The initial response of the French authorities appeared to be influenced by the line in the film Casablanca about rounding up the usual suspects .
Emergency legislation introduced after the Paris attacks in November last year was still in force when the atrocity in Nice occurred. Fran ois Hollande, the French president, announced that the state of emergency would be extended, despite the fact that it failed to prevent this massacre. Although the deployment after the Charlie Hebdo attack in January 2015 of some 10,000 soldiers serving as police auxiliaries has created more problems than it has solved, Mr Hollande announced that part of France s operational military reserve would be mobilised in the wake of this latest attack. Such knee-jerk responses are unlikely to reassure the public; nor are they are they likely to be particularly effective. A week before the terrible events in Nice, Bernard Cazeneuve, minister of the interior, had dismissed the bipartisan report issued by a parliamentary commission set up after the November attacks. Mr Cazeneuve refused to discuss alleged failures by the security services . It did not help that the commission was organised against the wishes of the government, which has also consistently opposed the launching of a national inquiry.
Mohamed Lahouaiej Bouhlel’s Nice apartment, seen through the keyhole. David Ramos/Getty Images
The report, written by S bastien Pietrasanta, a Socialist MP, criticised the state of emergency, proposed the establishment of a national counter-terrorism centre such as those that exist in the US or the UK and called for the comprehensive reorganisation of intelligence-gathering at the community level. This is an area in which great damage was done during the presidency of Nicolas Sarkozy and which the current administration has not done enough to repair. It does not follow from this that the leader of the far-right National Front, Marine Le Pen, will be the principal political beneficiary of Mr Hollande s flat-footed response to the terrorist threat. The National Front did less well than it or others expected after the events of last November. But we do at least know who the losers in electoral terms will be: Mr Hollande and Manuel Valls, his prime minister. But the real losers are the people who were killed or maimed in Nice, their families and with them all those who share the universal values for which France stands.
Francois Heisbourg
There is the Nice of popular imagination, the old-world resort dotted with palm trees and cafes that look out on the Mediterranean Sea, suffused with an incandescent light prized for centuries by artists. Then there is the other Nice, one that begins to show its face a few blocks inland from the seaside Promenade des Anglais, the majestic arc of a boulevard where 84 people were killed by a 31-year-old Tunisian immigrant at the wheel of a 19-ton truck. This Nice is home to many Muslim immigrants from North Africa, including a secular middle-class that has lived alongside non-Muslim French, and is also a place that local officials estimate has sent as many as 100 young people to fight in Syria with extremists.
It is rare that these two worlds mix with each other except at the moment of festivities or of agreement, like the gatherings on Saturday, said Feiza Ben Mohamed of the Muslims of the South, an organization that fights radicalization, referring to the public mourning for those killed in the truck attack.
Yet the first victim was Muslim, and a good number of the victims were Muslims, Ms. Mohamed added. Just yesterday I was on the promenade reflecting on what had happened, and a journalist asked me if I was there to apologize in the name of Muslims. I said to him, No, I came to weep for the dead like everyone else. Nice presents a many-layered reality. It is at once one of France s most popular tourist destinations, a stone s throw from the glamorous watering holes of the rich and famous at Cap Ferrat and Monaco, and it has one of France s largest populations of Tunisian origin. The fact that the driver of the truck that plowed through crowds celebrating Bastille Day was a Tunisian living in Nice has turned a spotlight on the contrasts.
The Muslim community itself is layered. There is a substantial sector of well-educated and integrated North Africans, but also a population that lives in bleak housing blocks in the city s outlying districts, where in 2013 close to 40 percent of young people were unemployed, according to the French statistics office Insee.
People gather and lay tributes on the Promenade des Anglais on July 16. Carl Court/Getty Images
It is in those neighborhoods, where resentment of the affluent waterfront world runs high, that recruiters for the extremist Muslims fighting in Syria operate. One of them, Omar Diaby, a resident of Senegalese origin now believed to be living in Syria, has been linked through an associate or associates to Mohamed Lahouaiej Bouhlel, the man who carried out the Bastille Day massacre, according to French news reports. Mr. Diaby, several Muslims with knowledge of radical circles said, targeted 13- to 15-year-olds as recruits to join the fight in Syria and was notorious for using violent radicalization videos that made killing seem like a game. The French newspaper Le Monde and other French news outlets said the authorities had found cellphone records indicating that Mr. Diaby and Mr. Lahouaiej Bouhlel knew, or at least called, some of the same people. These different groups, Muslim and non-Muslim, lived alongside each other in relative peace for generations, but that has begun to change along with the rise of France s far-right National Front party, led by Marine Le Pen. Nice is governed by the center-right, which includes the Republicans, but some say its leaders increasingly play the politics of division.
There is a widening gap between the communities, said Samih Abid, a lawyer and longtime Nice resident.
When people first meet him, Mr. Abid said, they often do not realize he is Muslim: He wears Western clothes and works primarily on business law. But when they hear his name and realize he is of Arab origin, I can see their look change, he said. My problem is that there is this soft discrimination here, and I worry that it will harden now. After Thursday s rampage, Mr. Abid said, he overheard people on the street disparaging Muslims who were praying before the makeshift shrines on the Promenade des Anglais. They were saying, Oh, look, they are praying here. Shame on them, he recalled.
Otmane Aissaoui, (front), imam at the Muslim Union of the Alpes-Maritimes prays near the coffins of three victims of the attack. CATHERINE MARCIANO/AFP/Getty Images
As for soft discrimination, Mr. Abid said there were no mosques in Nice itself because the mayor s office is against them. (There are a few small ones in the city s outlying districts.) He acknowledged that many Muslims did not vote because they had not become citizens or because they were not well organized politically, making it easier for the government to ignore their concerns. In the 2014 regional elections, the right-leaning parties won about the same number of votes as the National Front in the first round of voting, but took control of Nice after earning more ballots in the second round.
The city s mayor, Philippe Pradal, has tried to quell worries on all sides. He said in an interview that Muslims needed to try harder to demonstrate their willingness to be part of Nice s broader community, but also that the community needed to see that Islam and the values of the French republic could complement each other.
It is possible to encounter reactions of mistrust or rejection when you face people who ostentatiously wear religious signs linked to Islam, Mr. Pradal said, referring to women who are fully veiled and men who wear a long Islamic tunic.
We must find the path that permits us to reconcile respect for religious values and republican values, he said. We can see from what happened on July 14 that the truck did not detect who was Muslim and who was not. There were victims of many nationalities and all religions.
A man srapy paints a message on the Promenade des Anglais on July 16, 2016 in Nice, France. Patrick Aventurier/Getty Images
Boubakeur Bekri, an imam who has spoken out against radicalization, agreed that Muslim residents could do more to deter discrimination, but also said there had been a retreat into identity politics in which Muslims were often the objects of black looks.
We must show that we form a bloc and that we are here to defend our country, said Mr. Bekri, whose mosque, Al Fourkane, is in L Ariane, a neighborhood northeast of Nice. And we must prevent those people who plot things from a million kilometers away from programming it and launching the torpedo.
We must do this now, he added. Even if in the past the Muslim community withdrew and was silent, now it must speak. Other Muslim residents said the most worrisome trend was how immigrants were being pushed to the city s outskirts by gentrification. Behind the cathedral in old Nice, there is a working-class neighborhood where the local government has been buying up buildings. Several residents said the city either kept the buildings empty or turned them into cybercafes or day care centers, rather that rent them out to Muslim shopkeepers. The city has said it wants to renew the area and increase the number of pedestrian streets.
However, on Rue Italie, the once-fierce competition among numerous halal butchers has dwindled to two. Lotfi Brick, a halal butcher from Tunisia, said the city government was trying to clear the Muslims from the neighborhood. Mr. Brick is proud that his clientele has remained diverse and loyal over the years, but he worries that could change because of gentrification and politics.
I have Charolais beef, the best meat in France, and reasonable prices, he said, referring to one of France s most celebrated breeds of cattle.
That s why everyone shops here: Christians, Jews, Muslims, he said.
For at least a little longer, he said, he wants his street to remain a place where the two Nices meet.
Alissa J. Rubin
Natalie Sauer
ANALYSES
21 July 2016 – last edited today
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