Young people got killed in the name of France’s involvement against ISIS. Young people are also being recruited into jihad by extremists seen to be financed by one of France’s partners.
If there is one thing that terrorists do well, it is symbolism. In 2001, the World Trade Center attacks challenged the American domination. Seven years later, Mumbai was targeted because it stood for a certain inclusive and cosmopolitan vision of India. The Taj was the jewel in this crown. Now, seven years later, Paris was hit for the second time. In January, the editorial team of the satirical newspaper Charlie Hebdo was decimated because it embodied freedom of speech and resistance to all religious extremists and because of France’s anti-ISIS foreign policy in Syria.
But why exactly did a concert hall, a couple of cafés and the Stade de France, a very large multi sport stadium, get attacked ? What do they have in common, besides being in or on the outskirts of the capital of a country that is bombing the Islamic State?
The Parisian way of life
Parisians often deride these parts of their city as Hipsterland. They are right, these areas are a fashionable hangout on a Friday night. These are places of entertainment, places where men and women mix and drink and sing and shout in support of their teams. These are places where women can dress as they wish, where lovers can embrace regardless of their marital status, their age or their gender, where you can have one beer or one glass of wine too many. Where all this is expected. There is a certain liberating feeling associated with both youth and Paris in these areas.
The demographics matter too. Mostly young people crowd the Canal Saint Martin, the Bastille and the nearby pubs, the stadium, rock concert halls, people in the 20 to 40 years age bracket. These areas are grounds for “mixité” a concept very dear to the French. Mixité means the ability to live together regardless of gender, religion, social or economic background. In the areas that came under attack on November 13, young white bourgeois from affluent Catholic families can mingle with coloured middle-class atheists and “banlieusards” from Muslim families coming from poorer suburban neighbourhoods.
The day following the attacks, the pavement in front of the Bataclan concert hall was covered with flowers, candles and messages of support in French, English, Spanish, German and Arabic. And there was a copy of a French edition of A Moveable Feast, in which Hemingway famously recalls his life in the French capital in the 1920s. The French title is Paris est une fête which translates to"Paris is a party". This feast, this festive youthfulness is precisely what ISIS, who claimed responsibility for the attacks, wants to shut down and put an end to.
The mirror image
But let us not romanticise Paris and its youth, however appealing that might be in a time of national mourning. According to the police, most of the seven suicide bombers were less than 30 years old. The suicide bomber who detonated his vest in front of the stadium is rumoured to have been merely 15. The public prosecutor formally identified another bomber. While he did not give his name, he said that the terrorist was French, 29 years old and born in Courcouronnes, just outside Paris.
Courcouronnes is one of the many poor suburban cities in France where riots took place a decade ago. Last week, to mark the 10th anniversary of the riots that pitted disenfranchised youth against the police, many journalists made the 30-minute trip from Paris to “la banlieue”, or the suburbs. “Nothing has changed” was what most interviewees stressed. True enough, youth unemployment is still higher than the national average and the poverty rate is slightly above 20% in Courcouronnes. But something has indeed changed since 2005. And that is news about youth getting recruited for jihad in Syria, regardless of their family background or religion. This phenomenon also exists in the United Kingdom and Germany and perplexes the French, the British and the Germans alike.
Previous generations could tap into a body of political ideologies that have now either lost their currency or their appeal. A fraction of the current generation seems to be turning instead to propagandists operating in local mosques and online, who point them to Syria and Iraq. The French political class will now pledge to drive these recruiters and hate mongers out of the country or, if this proves impossible, into jail. It is unlikely that they will start questioning France’s arms sales and, more generally, its deep commercial and diplomatic ties with Saudia Arabia, a country known to support Salafism.
On the one hand, young people got killed in the name of France’s involvement against ISIS. On the other hand, young people are being recruited into jihad by extremists seen to be financed by one of France’s partners. Of course, the State does not bear the immediate responsibility for the attacks but its duplicity is murderous. And now we must ask ourselves: what does France stand for? What does our country symbolise? We would like to think that Paris is a symbol of the “art de vivre” that was attacked on November 13, of a certain harmless youthfulness. Let us hope our domestic and our foreign policies will be consistent enough to defend it.
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