The Secret Life of France

by Lucy Wadham

  Nine days later the monks’ heads were discovered near Médéa, each one resting on a white satin cloth with a rose beside it. The brutal nature of this crime, with its echo of Catholic martyrdom, caught France’s attention. More than the massacre of entire villages, beheaded with chainsaws, the murder of the seven monks still stands, in France, as an emblem of the conflict.

  By this time France was reeling from a wave of bomb attacks on her soil. The GIA’s campaign had begun the summer before, on 5 July 1995, with an explosion in the Paris underground station of Saint-Michel, which had killed eight people. In the weeks that followed seven home-made bombs using gas canisters filled with nails were placed in stations, litter bins and market squares throughout the country. The Chirac government announced its ‘Vigipirate Plan’ and teams of armed troops began patrolling the streets and railway stations. It was a tense and frightening period. Paris, the city of ease and pleasure, could not get used to the sight of jackboots on the streets again. Military patrols stood guard outside Jack and Ella’s school, and Laurent, who had always used the Metro, began cycling to work. People were all the more traumatised by the attacks when it emerged that the suspects were all Algerian, either born or raised in France.

  At the end of August, a bomb was discovered on the high-speed TGV line between Paris and Lyon. It carried the fingerprints of Khaled Kelkal, a young man known to the police, not for religious extremism but for car theft. Kelkal, who was born in Algeria, grew up in Vaulx-en-Velin. An above-average student, enrolled in the baccalaureate and with a particular gift for physics and chemistry, Kelkal was caught joy-riding and given a four-month prison sentence. When he returned to Vaulx he dropped out of school and took up armed robbery. In 1991 he was arrested and sentenced to four years in prison. Inside he found Islam.

  Kelkal’s profile confirmed France’s worst fears of the terrorist nurtured in the bosom of the nation. And yet, as the manhunt for Kelkal got under way, it became clear that there was something reassuring about the cliché of this suburban youth gone awry and hijacked by religious extremists.

  At the end of September 1995 the whole of France was riveted to the hunt for Khaled Kelkal. After months of fear, it seemed that a happy outcome was imminent. The new interior minister, Jean-Louis Debré, who had announced (rashly as it turned out) that he believed Kelkal to have been behind all the attacks, was having three meetings a day with the heads of all France’s police forces. By the last days of September, the hunt for Kelkal had mobilised 760 men, including eight mobile units of the Gendarmerie, a platoon of parachutists, a SWAT team, sniffer dogs, as well as backup from the Territorial Army. Kelkal was tracked down to a bus stop called ‘Maison Blanche’, in the wooded hills 25 kilometres outside Lyon. The denouement, shown on France’s main evening news, offered the poignant catharsis the nation so craved. Wounded in the leg, the twenty-four-year-old fugitive brandished his 1939 Mab pistol, which jammed, and under orders from the SWAT team leader, who yelled out for all to hear, ‘Finis-le! Finis-le!’ (Finish him off!), the Gendarmerie opened fire.

  The inevitable mea culpa that ensued was nipped in the bud by Prime Minister Alain Juppé, who firmly announced in the National Assembly the next day that he would not tolerate any suspicion: the Gendarmerie had fired in self-defence.

  One month later a bomb exploded in the Paris Metro station Maison Blanche, in homage to the place where Kelkal had been shot. After Kelkal’s death the bombing campaign continued until the end of the following year, culminating in an attack on Paris’s Port-Royal RER station on 3 December 1996, which killed four people and wounded 170 others.

  By this time the French government was under pressure to end its support for the regime in Algiers. French intellectuals had signed a petition for ‘peace and democracy in Algeria’, demanding that the French government stop ‘all military assistance to the Algerian authorities’. Evidence was beginning to emerge that the Algerian regime had been waging a dirty war of horrendous proportions and that many of the brutal massacres of civilians, blamed on the Islamists, had been carried out by police and army death squads.§ On 8 November 1997, in an interview with the Observer, a former employee of the Algerian secret service living in London revealed that Djamel Zitouni, the GIA’s commander-in-chief who had ordered the assassination of the Monks of Tiberine and masterminded the Paris bombings, had been working for Algerian counter-terrorism.¶ Years later, Ali Touchent, whom French counter-terrorist police had identified as the man who had recruited Khaled Kelkal, was identified as an Algerian agent. Despite the extensive round-ups by French police and the subsequent dismantling of all Touchent’s networks, both in France and Belgium, he miraculously eluded capture and returned to Algiers unmolested, where he settled under a police protection programme.

  By this time, though, it was too late to change strategy. France had embarked on a policy of zero tolerance towards all forms of Islamic militancy, and the French public approved. By the end of the decade, as other Western nations got to know Islamic terrorism, France had become the envy of anti-terrorist forces the world over, boasting twelve years with no attacks on her soil. People in the field claim that France’s success in combating terrorism is due to the close ties between the police and judiciary, specialised anti-terrorist courts and an impressive arsenal of detention and expulsion procedures. Success may also be due to a certain lack of vigilance when it comes to civil and human rights abuses and a loose consensus in the media that coercion in this domain is acceptable.

  *

  In keeping with her republican traditions, there is a widespread and accepted intolerance towards religion in France. This intolerance had always struck me as irrational, but after the bombing campaign of the nineties, it seemed to take on a new level of hysteria. In 2004, when Chirac’s government banned the wearing of the hidjab (Islamic headscarf) in State schools, I was stunned by the ubiquitous support for a measure that I believed to be not only intolerant but counter-productive. I argued with all my French friends, and even my own children, who felt that there was no place for this religious symbol in the schools of the Republic. I was shocked by the vehemence with which I was attacked for supporting young girls who chose to wear the hidjab.

  ‘You’re condoning a symbol of male oppression,’ my own daughter protested.

  When I argued that banning this symbol would only radicalise a young woman likely to grow out of her religious fervour if left to her own devices, I was told that as an Anglo-Saxon, I would never understand. France had fought hard to disentangle herself from the stranglehold of religion. The separation of Church and State in 2005 was all too recent and France was as fervently attached to her secular identity (laïcité) as to any religion. Religious symbols were anathema to the Republic.

  It has always been France’s vocation to assimilate, my friends told me. British pragmatism – which accepts the idea of separate communities continuing to observe their own culture and traditions – is offensive to the French. It did not occur to any of them that France’s Muslim communities were separated, not by their traditions, or their language, or their culture, but by economic and social exclusion and by their own alienation and rage.

  Ten years later, in the aftermath of the 2005 July bomb attacks on London, I was shocked again, but this time by British commentators who were arguing that France’s zero tolerance (in every sense of the word) had spared her from the horrors of terrorism. Later that same year, when France was reeling from another wave of suburban rioting in les cités, Britain could then return to her preferred position as back-seat driver and condemn France for the excesses of a zero-tolerance policy towards her immigrant communities.

  *

  Until Britain herself became a target, the approach of British intelligence, much to the irritation of the French, was always to observe Muslim extremism from a distance, intervening only if and when it posed a direct threat to national security. Jean-Louis Bruguière, one of France’s leading anti-terrorist investigative magistrates, has been a fierce critic of thi
s policy ever since he began his investigations into the Paris bombings of the nineties and discovered that the bombers were using London as their base. He became particularly irate when the British authorities refused to extradite Rachid Ramda, also known as Abou Farès, believed by Bruguière to have financed the Paris bombings of 1995.

  ‘It’s all very well, this blind-eye policy,’ he told me at the time. ‘You’ll buy peace for a while. But believe me, your turn will come.’

  When Britain’s turn did come, the policy changed just as Bruguière had predicted. Rachid Ramda’s extradition was finally decided three months after the London bomb attacks. He was extradited in December of that year and on 26 October 2007, sentenced to life imprisonment by a French court.

  Bruguière is the perfect symbol of France’s answer to anti-terrorist policing. With his bodyguards, his blacked-out, armoured Peugeot, his .357 Magnum pistol – always peeking discreetly but clearly from his open jacket during our lunches together – Bruguière always brims with self-belief. This mega-star of the judiciary has dominated investigations into all the major threats to the French State over the past thirty years. From Carlos the Jackal (whom he had kidnapped by the French secret services in Khartoum) to Al Qaeda, this investigating magistrate has managed to place himself at the heart of French foreign policy and became, throughout the nineties, a kind of éminence grise to the Quai d’Orsay (France’s foreign office). In October 1992 – while investigating Muammar Ghadafi’s apparent involvement in the bombing of the UTA airline’s DC-10 in September 1989, in which 170 passengers died on a flight from Brazzaville to Paris – Bruguière sailed to Tripoli on board a French Navy warship that had been lent to him by François Mitterrand. Libya, which was under a US-led blockade at the time, refused to let him in and he was turned back, but only after a magnificent photo opportunity featuring the magistrate standing on the deck of this massive frigate and looking like the scourge of Justice.

  When I met Bruguière, the word on the street was that he would talk to anyone, provided they took him to a very good restaurant – preferably Robuchon’s (named that year the best restaurant in the world by the International Herald Tribune). Although the BBC research budget did not stretch that far, he did accept lunch at Robuchon’s former restaurant, Laurent. Once I had recovered from the excitement of dining with this swashbuckling hero of French counter-terrorism, it became clear that Judge Bruguière – once you looked behind the gun and the bodyguards and the aura of a man used to pacing the corridors of power – was, well, a little unstable. Distracted and excitable like many people of power, Bruguière’s behaviour during our various meetings made me want to delve a little further into his world.

  As in most Latin countries, France’s judiciary follows the inquisitorial system. Heir to the infamous Catholic Inquisition, this system places a magistrate in charge of the police investigation. He or she leads the investigation, accumulating evidence both for the defence and the prosecution, right up until the hearing. When it comes to court, only the evidence presented by the investigating magistrate will be up for discussion. To some, this provides useful supervision to police work and thereby reduces the chances of police brutality during the investigation; to others, it merely slows things down and places too great a burden on a single – potentially corruptible – individual. Indeed, French judicial blunders tend to come not from police malpractice but from the fallibility of the investigating magistrate, who snaps under pressure. Bruguière, who comes from a long line of magistrates, stretching back through eleven generations, is immune to self-doubt. Known to his friends as ‘The Admiral’ since his escapade to Tripoli and as ‘Sheriff’ to his enemies (for his perceived sycophancy towards the FBI), Bruguière is said to love secrecy and conspiracy. He has, for many years, wanted Yves’s former job as head of French counter-terrorism (DST), but has been passed over many times for less flamboyant men.

  A firm believer in the policy of ‘kicking the anthill’, Bruguière’s method, when it comes to Islamic terrorism, is to organise massive police operations resulting in large numbers of what he calls ‘preventative arrests’.

  ‘The goal is to keep constant heat on the Islamists,’ he explained to me. ‘By doing this you prevent networks from forming and deal with the problem before it happens.’

  In July 1998 Bruguière mounted a police operation to dismantle suspected GIA sympathisers in France: 138 people were arrested in one day and Bruguière was broadly congratulated in the press for this deadly blow to terrorism. As it turned out, Bruguière’s colleague Gilbert Thiel, who was forced to take over the investigation, dismissed thirty-four of the cases due to lack of evidence and released a further fifty-one people who had been sitting in prison for several months awaiting trial.

  My lunches with Bruguière, though hugely diverting, did not provide me with any details of the cases he was investigating. I had to look elsewhere for those. An arch manipulator like the people in the intelligence world he so admired, Bruguière quite fittingly decided to have a run at political office. In March 2007 he rallied behind Nicolas Sarkozy’s candidacy and ran for MP in the department of Lot-et-Garonne, where he tasted defeat, possibly for the first time in his life.

  * Libération, 8 October 1990.

  † L’Express, 11 October 1990.

  ‡ ‘France: justice fails victims of police brutality’, Amnesty International, 6 April 2005.

  § John Sweeney, ‘Police role in Algerian killings exposed’, Observer, 11 January 1998.

  ¶ Interview with Hocine Ouguenoune, former captain in the DCSA, Direction Centrale de la Sécurité de l’Armée (military intelligence).

  12

  Sarkozy and the End of Ideology

  Sex Dwarves and the Patriarchy

  France’s hapless former prime minister Dominique de Villepin once told an eminent journalist from Le Figaro that what France really needed was to be raped by a strong leader: ‘La France veut qu’on la prenne,’ said the suave diplomat who is compared to Chateaubriand by his friends and the emperor Nero by his enemies: France wants to be taken by force.

  Villepin’s record for taking his nation’s temperature is pretty poor. He was the man responsible for proposing and then withdrawing the labour reforms (CPE) of 2004 after six weeks of student mayhem and political deadlock. It seems, though, that on the matter of France’s deepest desires, he was probably right.

  In some ways, Nicolas Sarkozy’s strategy – or at least posture – was to ‘take France by force’. His presidential campaign was peppered with pugnacious, coercive vocabulary. He claimed to be answering what he called the nation’s long-suppressed ‘need for order, authority and firmness’. Distinguishing himself from the motherly, reassuring messages of his opponent, Ségolène Royal, he invited French citizens to vote for la rupture. When France chose Sarkozy, she made a clear choice in favour of a certain violence to herself. What form that violence would take, no one seemed quite sure at the time.

  For some, Nicolas Sarkozy would herald the breaking of the last levees against globalisation. For others, he would enable France at last to benefit from the buoyancy of the global economy. So far, and unsurprisingly given the economic context, he has done neither. One year on, his ratings were at an all-time low, with 72 per cent of the population dissatisfied with his performance. When asked about the reasons for their disapprobation, the majority of French people cited not his reform record but his style of governance, in particular his médiatisation or celebrity status. The French do not want a rock star as their head of State. It seems that they still prefer a kind of godhead (legacy of the divine right of kings) – aloof, disembodied and unaccountable.

  It is interesting to note that in spite of the general dissatisfaction, France, a nation supposedly immune to change, has swallowed a large quantity of reforms. In his first year in office Sarkozy managed, with no major industrial action, to push through unprecedented legislation on France’s traditionally immutable education system, as well as reforms to the labour code and the
welfare system. But far more fundamental than all this is a deep and subtle mutation taking place in French society, simply by virtue of the fact that, in electing Nicolas Sarkozy, the population capitulated to a force that it had long resisted. More than its individual achievements and reforms, Sarkozy’s presidency will be remembered as the turning point in French history, the moment when ideology began to die.

  Since the 1789 Revolution, the dominant ideology – with the exception of the fascist interlude of Vichy – has been socialist. In French schools, Civic Education – an obligatory subject from the age of thirteen – teaches the values of the Republic and encourages youngsters to engage in political debate. The fact that both the creators of this discipline and its teachers were left-wing never seems to have posed a problem, for there has always been a broad consensus that socialist values and republican values were synonymous. The fact that there was a huge (silent) portion of the country that believed otherwise never appeared to bother the chattering classes, whose values and interests were consistently upheld by the media. This political reality explains why analysts were so stunned by the result of the referendum on the European constitution: no one predicted a ‘No’ vote because the press and television had so clearly supported a ‘Yes’ vote.