The 9/11 Wars (40 page)

One reason for the violence of the reaction to the
émeutes
overseas was the very real and important question they posed. If the French riots of November 2005 had indeed been motivated by radical Islamic ideologies, organized by extremists or justified by an appeal to a global Islamic identity, they would have indicated not just that al-Qaeda had succeeded in mobilizing and radicalizing an entirely new population in the heart of Europe far beyond its usual constituency but equally that the ideas and the violence that the group had set out to popularize more than fifteen years previously were no longer restricted to an extremist fringe prepared to use terrorist violence but had for the first time sparked a genuine popular mass uprising. This would have taken the 9/11 Wars into entirely new territory and marked a critical turning for the worst. Previously the conflict had not seen the emergence of a single genuinely popular Islamist movement or at least not one that involved more than a fraction of a nation’s population. Even the Sunni militancy in Iraq had comprised a minority of a minority. The followers of Muqtada al-Sadr were a few hundred thousand strong at best. Jemaa Islamiyya in Indonesia was minuscule compared to the major local Islamist parties. Even Pakistani extremists, despite their visibility, were still small in number, though their social roots ran deep. The same went for Morocco and Turkey, where those who had been responsible for bomb attacks, even if they had benefited from the tacit support of many, were still shunned even by mainstream Islamist parties. The Madrid bombings had been perpetrated by a dozen or so individuals linked to networks which, at an absolute maximum, had a membership in the low hundreds. In none of these societies, nor in any other, had the increased political consciousness, popular anger, ambient anti-Americanism, radicalism and mobilization of the late 1990s and the years since 2001 yet been translated into a mass popular movement. Only in the specific circumstances of the Lebanon and the Gaza Strip did groups such as Hezbollah and Hamas – both bitter enemies of al-Qaeda – have a mass following. But if tens if not hundreds of thousands of young Frenchmen – and most of the rioters were indeed born in France – were now taking to the streets, then that signalled an intensification and aggravation of violence which went well beyond anything seen before. This would mean that mobilizing European Muslim populations had been relatively easy for al-Qaeda and that, instead of offering resistance to its expansion to the Atlantic or beyond, Europe’s 20 million Muslims would have acted to accelerate the process of the broadening and deepening the conflict. And if it happened in France, it could happen in Germany, the UK, Holland and eventually, despite the differences in background and socio-economic achievement of American Muslims, even in the USA. If this was indeed occurring, as al-Suri, the al-Qaeda senior leadership and the right-wing commentators apparently all believed, then the Madrid attacks, 7/7, even 9/11 would be rapidly forgotten in a civil war of appalling violence which would tear apart half the planet. Pinpointing the exact reasons for the rioting in France in November 2005 and the real motivations of those involved, obscured beneath the layers of heated rhetoric at the time, was thus critical.

The first clues as to how the immediate and most worrying reading of the
émeutes
might not have been entirely justified were clear, as is so often the case, to anyone who witnessed them at first hand. Firstly, there was little in the ‘uprising of Europe’s Muslims’ which actually indicated that the disturbances were in any way more ‘religious’ than any other that Europe had seen over previous decades. In three weeks of reporting the rioting, the author heard no slogans, saw no grafitti and read no demands that were in any way related to faith. The firing of a tear-gas canister into a mosque in Clichy-sous-Bois may – though this is disputed – have led to shouts of ‘Allahu akbar’ (God is great), but otherwise there was nothing. In all the ground reporting of the riots, by foreign or French journalists, religious imagery, vocabulary or ideas had a negligible presence. References to Iraq or Palestine or any expression indicating that the rioters were acting or saw themselves as acting out of some kind of solidarity with Muslims elsewhere in the world were extremely rare – though one
émeutier
did confess to wanting to create ‘a bit of Baghdad’.
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Rioters mentioned a range of grievances when interviewed, but these were almost all restricted to immediate issues touching their daily lives, particularly alleged racial discrimination. All displayed a profound animosity towards the French state and its various manifestations. The most dominant theme was that hardy perennial of urban violence: Fuck the police,
nique la police
.
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A large proportion were still in school, which may in part explain why the primary targets of arson and vandalism were educational establishments which were, with the police, the strongest state presence in their lives. ‘Me, what I wanted to do during the rioting was burn the high school, because they are the ones that fucked my future,’ said one nineteen-year-old small-time cannabis dealer.

What was also notable by its absence from the
émeutes
was anti-Semitic violence.
⁴⁷
Anti-Semitism in immigrant communities in France was undoubtedly a serious and growing problem. Until 2004 the spikes in anti-Semitic violence had largely come at times of increased tension in Israel-Palestine and the Middle East more broadly, such as during the Second Intifada of October 2000, the ‘battle of Jenin’ in the West Bank in April 2002 and during the 2003 invasion of Iraq. However, from 2004 the correlation had broken down as what appeared to be a structurally greater level of anti-Semitic violence became the norm.
⁴⁸
In 2004, nearly 1,000 attacks on French Jews took place, with, as previously mentioned, the proportion of the perpetrators from ‘Muslim’ immigrant communities much larger than previously seen. The total number of attacks dropped significantly the following year but remained high.
⁴⁹
The abduction, torture and murder of a young Jewish salesman, targeted by a gang of young immigrants of mixed backgrounds led by a self-confessed ‘Salafist’, in January 2006, was thus part of a broad trend.
⁵⁰
However, alarming though these tendencies undoubtedly were, there was no suggestion that Jewish or Israeli targets were targeted in France during the
émeutes
. Indeed, all religious sites were largely ignored. The targets of the rioters, like their language, were non-sectarian.

A second element of importance was the identity, in both senses of the word, of the rioters. Not all the rioters were ‘Muslims’, however defined.
⁵¹
A number were of non-immigrant background or, as their Spanish, Italian or Portuguese names indicated, from earlier waves of immigration. A larger number were relatively recent arrivals from sub-Saharan African countries, especially the Democratic Republic of the Congo, Cameroon, Equatorial Guinea and Cape Verde. These largely non-Muslim populations were among the most active in the riots according to later studies.
⁵²
One acquaintance of the author was typical: a twenty-seven-year-old aspirant rapper from the twentieth arrondissement of Paris whose Congolese parents worked double shifts as cleaners to support four children and went to church every Sunday.Certainly French authorities did not frame the troubles in a religious narrative. According to a leaked confidential report by the Direction Centrale of the Renseignements Généraux, the intelligence service of the French police, the
émeutes
were ‘a form of unorganized urban insurrection’, a ‘popular revolt of the
cités
, without leaders or demands’ led by youths ‘full of a sense of identity based not only on their ethnic or geographic origin but on the condition of social exclusion from French society’.
⁵³

That identity was in fact the opposite of the globalized Islamic one, being extremely local. French expert Olivier Roy later referred to it as ‘le nationalisme du quartier’ (neighbourhood nationalism). Others spoke of the ambivalent relationship of pride and resentment rioters displayed for where they lived.
⁵⁴
Rioters talked of their ‘shitty neighbourhoods’ all the while boasting how they had vied with other nearby housing projects for the highest number of cars burned – even though the cars belonged to their neighbours. ‘I just wanted to get on the evening news like them in Montfermeil,’ said Rabat Sifaoui, fifteen, mentioning a well-known
cité
7 miles away from his home on the fifth floor of a rundown block in Bobigny. One rioter from the rough northern part of the town of Aulnay-sous-Bois spoke of how seeing the slightly less rough eastern part on TV had motivated him and his friends to go out on the streets to defend their own neighbourhood’s long-established reputation for confronting the forces of order.
⁵⁵
As ever, even this local identity had multiple layers. At the most specific or particular it was based on individual housing estates. When asked where they ‘came from’, most rioters named the projects – ‘Cité des 4000’ at La Courneuve; ‘La Madeleine’ at Evreux; ‘Val Fourré’ at Mantes-la-Jolie; ‘Les Minguettes’ at Vénissieux, near Lyon – where they lived. At its most general level the young rioters’ identity was merely that of coming from a département. The most infamous of these was Seine et Saint-Denis, which was known colloquially by its number, ninety-three, though given as ‘Neuf Trois’, not
quatre-vingt-treize
, as it should be in correct French. ‘Neuf Trois’ was known throughout France for being the toughest of all departments and thus had a name to live up to. ‘When I say us, I mean the kids from round here, from Aulnay, from Neuf Trois,’ twenty-two-year-old Mehdi in Aulnay-sous-Bois told one interviewer.
⁵⁶
There was no evidence of any broader national, international, ethnic or religious identities. There was no tension between the global and the local as so often seen elsewhere in the 9/11 Wars for the simple reason that the global was not present.

Another problem for the ‘Intifada’ thesis of either al-Suri or the right-wing commentators was that no Islamists, al-Qaeda-type militants or members of France’s community of rigorous Islamic conservatives from quietist traditions were involved in the violence. This was despite a substantial population of all three. Islamic militant violence in France, with a few specificities of its own such as a tradition of cooperation between armed robbers and Islamic militants and the origins of its Muslim immigrant populations largely in the Maghreb rather than south Asia, had its roots in the same causes and catalysts as did violence in the UK.
⁵⁷
Though French radicals lacked the ease of access to Pakistan and thus to the al-Qaeda senior leadership that their British counterparts enjoyed, patterns of radicalization in France had been broadly the same as across the Channel with, at least in the 2001–5 period, recruits drawn from the same social strata of the marginally better-off, better-educated, relatively well-integrated working classes. There was also the same pattern of family tensions and generational difficulties and recruitment by peers, brothers and friends rather than older clerics. This occurred, as in the UK, around rather than in mosques or in Islamic centres, in homes and in prison, where in some French institutions upwards of 60 per cent of detainees were self-declared Muslims, even if few were particularly observant.
⁵⁸
The same processes of the evolution and radicalization of cells were also evident: the outward-bound trips, the bonding sessions, the same role for images – especially of the abuse in Abu Ghraib – and the internet.
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At least four Frenchmen had died in or around Falluja in 2004, and several dozen others were said to have travelled to Iraq.
⁶⁰
One issue that concerned French security agencies, as it did their British counterparts, was the constant flow of young men to Riyadh, Cairo or radical religious schools in Pakistan for instruction in extremely conservative if pacific broadly ‘Salafi’ strands of Islam. Significant subsidies from the Saudi government facilitated the trips and between 2004 and 2005 around 250 travelled, not enough to be a mass phenomenon, as one French intelligence officer commented, but enough to be worrying.
⁶¹

Salafi movements such as the Jamaat Tabligh, a vast network dedicated to preaching and good works that professes to shun violence, had recruited tens of thousands from all walks of life in France as in the UK. French intelligence services had been watching such groups as well as freelance preachers often sponsored by Gulf-based religious organizations for many years. But, instead of causing trouble themselves during the
émeutes
, senior French Salafis suspected of involvement in militant activities were heard by eavesdropping security operatives complaining that the rioting caused problems for their recruiting by attracting unwelcome police attention. The neighbourhoods where the Salafis (both those suspected of involvement in radicalism and those known to be law-abiding) had the most influence remained quiet.
⁶²
Of the 3,000 rioters arrested in the Paris region, not one was previously known to the French security services. Instead surveillance revealed genuine violent extremists going to ground, suspending efforts to send new volunteers to Iraq or leaving areas for fear of major security operations.
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There was certainly no evidence of any involvement by anyone associated with al-Qaeda in the rioting. Nor was there any surge in recruitment to radical Muslim groups or networks either, security agencies found.
⁶⁴
Instead, the weeks after the
émeutes
, due to a high-profile campaign led by figures respected locally such as the rapper Joey Starr, saw a significant surge in registrations to vote in the forthcoming 2007 presidential elections in the
cités
.
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