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Critics decry 'hypocrisy' of world leaders' photo op in Paris

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Many of those who marched for free speech are leaders of oppressive governments, say journalists

Many of the world leaders who attended Sunday's march for free press have poor records on the issue in their own countries, critics say. (Photo: EPA)

Many of the world leaders who attended Sunday’s march for free press have poor records on the issue in their own countries, critics say. (Photo: EPA)

by Nadia Prupis, Common Dreams

On Sunday, an estimated 3.7 million people marched throughout France in the wake of last Wednesday’s shooting at the offices of satirical French newspaper Charlie Hebdo. The march, which called for unity and free speech, drew a crowd of one million in Paris—the largest in that city’s history.

However, as investigative journalist and The Intercept co-founder Jeremy Scahill said in an interview Monday with Democracy Now!, the event lost some of its power given the presence of several world leaders who run oppressive governments in their own countries. “[T]his is sort of a circus of hypocrisy when it comes to all of those world leaders who were marching at the front of it,” Scahill said. “[E]very single one of those heads of state or representatives of governments there have waged their own wars against journalists.”

Among them, Scahill noted, was UK Prime Minister David Cameron, who ordered The Guardian to destroy the hard drives that held the files leaked in 2013 by NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden. And Cameron was joined by Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netenyahu, whose regime has “kidnapped, abducted, jailed journalists” reporting on Palestine, Scahill said.

“[T]hen you have… General [Abdel Fattal al] Sisi, the dictator of Egypt, who apparently is showing his solidarity for press freedom by continuing to preside over the imprisonment of multiple Al Jazeera journalists whose only crime was doing actual journalism and scores of other Egyptian journalists that never get mentioned in the news media,” Scahill continued.

Scahill’s criticisms followed similar remarks made Sunday by Daniel Wickham, a British journalist and activist. In a series of messages posted to Twitter on Sunday, Wickham laid out those leaders’ own poor records against journalists in their home countries, even as other news sources praised them as “staunch defenders” of free press.

The Independent also noted that the image of those 40-odd heads of state linking arms and marching through the streets of Paris in what the New York Times called a show of “unity in outrage” was actually a coordinated photo op, taken on an empty street away from the million-strong crowd.

“[T]he front line of leaders was followed by just over a dozen rows other dignitaries and officials – after which there was a large security presence maintaining a significant gap with the throngs of other marchers,” theIndependent reported. “The measure was presumably taken for security reasons – but political commentators have suggested that it raises doubts as to whether the leaders were really part of the march at all.”

Reporters Without Borders also condemned the presence of those leaders at the march.

“On what grounds are representatives of regimes that are predators of press freedom coming to Paris to pay tribute to Charlie Hebdo, a publication that has always defended the most radical concept of freedom of expression?” the organization said in a statement on Sunday.

RWB added, “Reporters Without Borders is appalled by the presence of leaders from countries where journalists and bloggers are systematically persecuted such as Egypt (which is ranked 159th out of 180 countries in RWB’s press freedom index), Russia (148th), Turkey (154th) and United Arab Emirates (118th).”

Charlie Hebdo founder says slain editor 'dragged' team to their deaths

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A founding member of Charlie Hebdo says slain editor Stéphane Charbonnier “dragged” team to their deaths by “overdoing” provocative cartoons

charlie-hebdo

by Henry Samuel, The Telegraph

One of the founding members of Charlie Hebdo has accused its slain editor, Stéphane Charbonnier, or Charb, of “dragging the team” to their deaths by releasing increasingly provocative cartoons, as five million copies of the “survivors’ edition” went on sale.

Henri Roussel, 80, who contributed to the first issue of the satirical weekly in 1970, wrote to the murdered editor, saying: “I really hold it against you.”

In this week’s Left-leaning magazine Nouvel Obs, Mr Roussel, who publishes under the pen name Delfeil de Ton, wrote: “I know it’s not done”, but proceeds to criticise the former “boss” of the magazine.

Calling Charb an “amazing lad”, he said he was also a stubborn “block head”.

“What made him feel the need to drag the team into overdoing it,” he said, referring to Charb’s decision to post a Prophet Mohammed character on the magazine’s front page in 2011. Soon afterwards, the magazine’s offices were burned down by unknown arsonists.

Delfeil adds: “He shouldn’t have done it, but Charb did it again a year later, in September 2012.”

The accusation sparked a furious reaction from Richard Malka, Charlie Hebdo’s lawyer for the past 22 years, who sent an angry message to Mathieu Pigasse, one of the owners of Nouvel Obs and Le Monde.

“Charb has not yet even been buried and Obs finds nothing better to do that to publish a polemical and venomous piece on him.

“The other day, the editor of Nouvel Obs, Matthieu Croissandeau, couldn’t shed enough tears to say he would continue the fight. I didn’t know he meant it this way. I refuse to allow myself to be invaded by bad thoughts, but my disappointment is immense.”

Matthieu Croissandeau, Nouvel Obs’ editor, said: “We received this text and after a debate I decided to publish it in an edition on freedom of expression, it would have seemed to me worrisome to have censored his voice, even if it is discordant. Particularly as this is the voice of one of the pioneers of the gang.”

This is not the first time Delfeil has disagreed with the modern Charlie, accusing Charb’s predecessor of turning it into a Zionist and Islamophobic organ.

That was after Philippe Val, the previous editor, fired one of its historic figures, Maurice Sine, for publishing a cartoon on the marriage of Nicolas Sarkozy’s son, Jean, to a Jewish retailing heiress, which he considered anti-Semitic.

Delfeil said he would not say anymore on recent events. “I have refused to speak to the TV and radio, to everyone. I kept my message for Obs, and I am not prepared to open this subject again,” he said.

Islamophobia rears its ugly head following Paris shootings

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A Police officer stands guard outside a Mosque and Islamic centre as people arrive for Friday prayers in Marseille on January 9, 2015, in the wake of the attack on French satirical newspaper Charlie Hebdo which left 12 dead and the the shooting of a police officer in a separate incident. AFP/Boris Horvat.

A Police officer stands guard outside a Mosque and Islamic centre as people arrive for Friday prayers in Marseille on January 9, 2015, in the wake of the attack on French satirical newspaper Charlie Hebdo which left 12 dead and the the shooting of a police officer in a separate incident. AFP/Boris Horvat.

by Rana Harbi, Al-Akhbar

The attacks in France by Said and Chérif Kouachi, French brothers of Algerian descent, and Amedy Coulibaly, a French citizen with Malian roots, in the past week have further increased anti-Muslim and anti-immigrant sentiments in a country already rife with both. From grenade attacks on mosques and proposed mosque sites, to gunfire aimed at a Muslim family in a car and an explosion in a kebab shop next to a mosque, Islamophobia in France has now reached new heights.

On January 7, the Kouachi brothers targeted the Paris offices of Charlie Hebdo, a French satirical magazine known for its controversial depictions of the Prophet Mohammad. They killed 12, including a police officer.

Two days later, Coulibaly, who is believed to have also killed a police officer, held people hostage in a kosher supermarket, where he killed four people before being killed himself by security forces.

A total of 20 people, including the three gunmen, were killed over three days from Wednesday to Friday.

Despite condemnation by Muslims in France and across the world, the Central Council of Muslims in France said there have been more than 50 anti-Muslim attacks since the attack on Charlie Hebdo on Wednesday.

The incidents included 21 reports of shooting at sites frequented by Muslims and the throwing of some form of grenades, and 33 threats.

A series of attacks

On January 7, shots were fired at a Muslim prayer room in Port-La-Nouvelle about an hour after prayers; a mosque in Poitiers was daubed with racist graffiti reading, “Morts aux Arabes” (“Death to Arabs) and a Muslim family came briefly under fire in their car in Vaucluse.

On January 8, three grenades were thrown at a mosque in Sablons; and in Villefranche-sur-Saône, an explosion blew out the windows of a kebab shop next door to the town mosque. In the town of Saint-Juéry, four gunshots were fired at the entrance of a mosque, and an arson attack was reported on a mosque in Aix-les-Bains.

On January 9, graffiti was found outside a mosque in Bayonne reading, “Charlie freedom,” “Assassins,” and “Dirty Arabs. In Rennes, a private Islamic center was vandalized with the slogan “Get out” written in both French and the regional dialect, Breton.

On the same day, a 17-year-old of North African descent was assaulted by a gang after suffering “racist abuse.” In Macon, unidentified individuals sprayed “Islam will f*ck you” on street walls.

On January 10, a pig’s head and entrails were placed outside a prayer room in Corte, on the island of Corsica, with a note threatening “next time it will be one of your heads.” And in northern France, two mosque construction sites in Liévin and Béthune, were vandalized with anti-Muslim graffiti.

Over the weekend, five additional acts of anti-Muslim vandalism were reported.

The Committee against Islamophobia in France (CCIF) said that anti-Muslim attacks and insults have risen steadily in France in recent years “as some politicians and media increasingly present Islam as a problem for French society.”

Extremists and Islamophobes

With extremists trying to exacerbate existing tensions, ostensibly tolerant France braces itself for a rising tide of xenophobia and Islamophobia.

Many voices have urged media outlets to choose the terms they use with care, and politicians to be more prudent, cautioning them against further stigmatizing the Muslim community.

“I believe that the attacks today will only increase the racism against Muslims,” Abdallah Zekri, president of the National Observatory Against Islamophobia in Paris, told the Washington Post. “I hear many politicians saying that this is an Islamist terrorist attack and not just a terrorist attack.”

Growing anti-Muslim sentiment has reinforced fears that France, home to an estimated six million Muslims, and other EU countries, will witness an increase in the popularity of the already prominent far right and its Islamophobia.

Commenting on the Paris shootings, Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR) spokesman Ibrahim Hooper told US news channel MSNBC that “Muslims need to marginalize the extremists on their side and also people of other faiths need to marginalize the growing Islamophobic movement in the West.”

Hooper also said that recent anti-Islam marches in Europe send “a very negative message” and “create a sense of alienation.”

Due to a spike in immigration and a moribund economy, far-right parties have been gaining ground in European countries as anti-immigrant policies seem to become progressively accepted in mainstream discourse.

These parties include the United Kingdom’s National Front and Independence Party; the Sweden Democrats party, which received 15 percent support in recent opinion polls; Germany’s so-called Patriotic Europeans Against the Islamisation of the Occident (PEGIDA), which assembled a record 25,000 anti-Islam marchers in Dresden on Monday in its 12th rally since October; and France’s National Front (FN), which has become one of the most prominent political players in the country since its then-leader Jean-Marie Le Pen reached the second round of presidential elections in 2002.

In reference to simmering anti-Muslim sentiment, Dalil Boubakeur, president of the French Council of the Muslim Faith (CFCM), warned in a statement against “inflaming the situation.”

Similarly, Camille Grand, director of the French Foundation for Strategic Research, described the shootings as “double honey for the National Front.”

“[Current FN leader Marine] Le Pen says everywhere that Islam is a massive threat, and that France should not support attacks in Iraq and instead defend the homeland and not create threats by going abroad, so they can naturally take advantage of it,” Grand stated.

Peter Neumann, director of the International Center for the Study of Radicalization at King’s College London told The New York Times, “this is a dangerous moment for European societies.”

“Large parts of the European public are latently anti-Muslim, and increasing mobilization of these forces is now reaching into the center of society,” Neumann said. “If we see more of these incidents, and I think we will, we will see a further polarization of these European societies in the years to come.”

Those who will suffer the most from such a backlash, he said, are the Muslim populations of Europe, “the ordinary normal Muslims who are trying to live their lives in Europe.”

During the hostage crisis at the Paris supermarket on Friday, Lassana Bathily, a Muslim assistant at the shop attacked by Coulibaly, saved a group of shoppers, including a baby, by hiding them in a basement storage room of the store.

Bathily, who managed to escape through the goods lift, told French TV that police kept him in handcuffs for an hour and a half thinking he was a conspirator despite denying any involvement in the attack.

While some say radical Islamists are the fruit of France’s foreign policies, many argue that extremism has fed upon the French government’s inability to enact structural, social and economic reforms that ensure the participation of citizens from different ethnic and religious backgrounds in society.

Kery James, a politically active French rapper, reacted to the Charlie Hebdo attacks by calling for long-term efforts to counter France’s Islamophobia.

“I feel compelled to remind that coexistence is built on the long term and not only in short-lived bouts under the influence of emotion. Coexistence cannot just be a symbol that is done and undone to the rhythm of news stories, no matter how abject they may be. It is not even enough to want to live together to succeed in doing so, one must be determined to succeed in it,” he wrote in an open letter on his Facebook page. “The vast majority of Muslims to which I belong is also a victim and hostage of extremists from all sides. And it is them who are constantly asked to give proofs of citizenship and patriotism that never seem sufficient. It is of them that is required, with an almost menacing tone, that they take to the streets to prove their attachment to France. It is as if it were them who had financed and armed the terrorists. The times ahead will be difficult for us and our patience will be put to the test.”

This sentiment is echoed by many of France’s Muslim population who continue to fear radicalism regardless of its source.

Rana Harbi is a staff writer for Al-Akhbar English. Follow her on Twitter: @ranaharbi

Yemen’s Al-Qaeda claims responsibility for Paris attacks

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This still image grab taken off a propaganda video posted online on January 14, 2015, by al-Malahem Media, the media arm of al-Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula (AQAP), purportedly shows one of the group's leaders, Nasser bin Ali al-Ansi delivering a video message from an undisclosed location and claiming responsibility for the attack on the French satirical magazine Charlie Hebdo's offices in Paris. AFP/HO/al-Malahem Media

This still image grab taken off a propaganda video posted online on January 14, 2015, by al-Malahem Media, the media arm of al-Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula (AQAP), purportedly shows one of the group’s leaders, Nasser bin Ali al-Ansi delivering a video message from an undisclosed location and claiming responsibility for the attack on the French satirical magazine Charlie Hebdo’s offices in Paris. AFP/HO/al-Malahem Media

by Al-Akhbar

Al-Qaeda in Yemen claimed responsibility for the attack on French magazine Charlie Hebdo, saying it was retribution for insulting the Prophet Mohammad, according to a video posted on YouTube.

“As for the blessed battle of Paris, we, the organization of al-Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula (AQAP), claim responsibility for this operation as vengeance for the Messenger of God,” one of the group’s leaders, Nasser al-Ansi, said in the video titled “A message regarding the blessed battle of Paris.”

Ansi said the attack was ordered by Ayman Zawahiri, the network’s global commander.

“The leadership was the party that chose the target and plotted and financed the plan… It was following orders by our general chief Ayman al-Zawahiri,” he said.

“The heroes were chosen and they answered the call,” Ansi added.

Speaking over footage of the attack that killed 12 people, Ansi said: “Today, the mujahideen avenge their revered prophet, and send the clearest message to everyone who would dare to attack Islamic sanctities.”

On January 7, Cherif and Said Kouachi targeted the Paris office of Charlie Hebdo, a French satirical magazine known for its controversial depictions of the Prophet Mohammad. They killed 12, including a police officer. The two French brothers were killed two days later by French security forces after an extended manhunt.

On January 9, Amedy Coulibaly, a French citizen linked to the Kouachi brothers who is believed to have also killed a police officer on January 7, held people hostage in a kosher supermarket, where he killed four people before being killed himself by security forces.

Despite condemnation of the attacks by Muslims in France and across the world, the Central Council of Muslims in France said there have been more than 50 anti-Muslim assaults since the attack on Charlie Hebdo.

The incidents included 21 reports of shooting at sites frequented by Muslims and the throwing of some form of grenades, and 33 threats.

AQAP in Yemen

AQAP, which is reported to have trained at least one of the two brothers, is seen by Washington as the al-Qaeda network’s most dangerous branch.

The first known attack of al-Qaeda in Yemen dates back to 1992, when bombers hit a hotel that formerly housed US Marines in the southern city of Aden, in which two non-American citizens were killed.

AQAP was formed in January 2009 as a merger of the Yemeni and Saudi branches of al-Qaeda and is led by Nasser al-Wuhayshi.

Since then, AQAP has regularly carried out deadly attacks against Yemeni security forces and, more recently, has claimed a series of bombings against Houthi militants and civilians in the capital Sanaa and central provinces.

The group recently called for its supporters to carry out attacks in France, which is part of a US-led coalition conducting airstrikes against the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria (ISIS) Islamist group.

In December, AQAP’s English-language propaganda magazine “Inspire” urged jihadists to carry out “lone wolf” attacks abroad. In 2013, it named Charlie Hebdo cartoonist and editor-in-chief Stephane Charbonnier among its list of targets.

Charbonnier, better known as Charb, was one of 12 people killed in Paris on Wednesday when the two gunmen stormed the magazine’s offices.

Drone strikes

AQAP took advantage of the weakness of Yemen’s central government during an uprising in 2011 against now-ousted president Ali Abdullah Saleh to seize large swathes of territory across the south.

But after a month-long offensive launched in May 2012 by Yemeni troops, most militants fled to the more lawless desert regions of the east towards the Hadramawt province.

Yemen is a key US ally in the fight against al-Qaeda, allowing Washington to conduct a longstanding drone war against the group on its territory. However, US drone attacks in the impoverished Gulf country have also killed many civilians unaffiliated with al-Qaeda.

(AFP, Reuters, Al-Akhbar)

Bad Muslim: A Poem

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Do not project your fear

onto my body

 

I will not hold your hand

and reassure you

I have no intention of killing you

I will not coddle your

fear or accept guilt

by association

I have no interest in

reassuring you

not all of us are like that

 

I will not apologize

for your parochialism

your provincialism

or your ignorance

for your inability to

perceive

violence unless

a tv box or a hashtag

numbs your mind with it
I will not mourn with you

because you don’t even

know

how to acknowledge

my many deaths

I will not affirm

that your grief

and your loss

is more painful

or more significant

or more terrifying

than the grievances you

have never even heard of

than the grievances you refuse

to recognize as grievances

 

I will tell you instead

what it feels like

to watch your

Pundits and your Experts

extoll the virtues of

Killing All Muslims

of deporting everyone on

security lists with names

like mine

I will tell you

how much terror

your vaunted fear

births

how it pierces my skin

coils around my cranium

burrows under my parietal

bones makes it difficult

to breathe

to think

to wake up

in the morning

how it grows inside me

this infinite terror

because you think

your fear is

so special

so singular

so unique

it justifies the

rivers of blood

in places

you still don’t know

how to find on a map

 

I will not apologize

until every single european

apologizes for the massacres

holocausts genocides famines

committed in your names

until you personally apologize

for palestine kashmir algeria the

congo

for drawing lines

in the sand

that still fester

like bloody wounds

will refuse to apologize

until every single american

personally apologizes for discovering

this continent

by washing it in the

blood

of it’s original inhabitants

for slavery the kkk

plantations japanese internment

camps the trail of tears

for the burnings

hangings lynchings

of Black bodies

for policemen

who still don’t know

innocence and Blackness

can exist

in the same body

for rectal feedings and

unaccountable disappearances

abu ghraib and fallujah

for torture that still doesn’t

count

as torture for terror that rises and

rises and rises

infinitely
I will not apologize

because nothing I can say

will ever suffice for you

because you have already

proven your inability

to hear my many

apologies

because even

my 1,600,000,000 deaths

won’t quench your fear

 

I’m a bad Muslim

and I will never again

apologize

for the bitter taste of

your fear in my mouth

Asam Ahmad is a writer who still has a hard time trusting words. He coordinates the It Gets Fatter project and lives in Toronto. He is a contributor to Killing Trayvons: an Anthology of American Violence.

Noam Chomsky on Charlie Hebdo: We Are All – Fill in the Blank

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Terrorism is not terrorism when a much more severe terrorist attack is carried out by those who are Righteous by virtue of their power

On April 23, 1999, NATO air strikes blasted Serbian state television off the air, just hours after Belgrade offered a peace proposal to allow an "international presence" in war-torn Kosovo under U.N. auspices.

On April 23, 1999, NATO air strikes blasted Serbian state television off the air, just hours after Belgrade offered a peace proposal to allow an “international presence” in war-torn Kosovo under U.N. auspices.

by Noam Chomsky

The world reacted with horror to the murderous attack on the French satirical journal Charlie Hebdo. In the New York Times, veteran Europe correspondent Steven Erlanger graphically described the immediate aftermath, what many call France’s 9/11, as “a day of sirens, helicopters in the air, frantic news bulletins; of police cordons and anxious crowds; of young children led away from schools to safety. It was a day, like the previous two, of blood and horror in and around Paris.” The enormous outcry worldwide was accompanied by reflection about the deeper roots of the atrocity. “Many Perceive a Clash of Civilizations,” a New York Times headline read.

The reaction of horror and revulsion about the crime is justified, as is the search for deeper roots, as long as we keep some principles firmly in mind. The reaction should be completely independent of what thinks about this journal and what it produces. The passionate and ubiquitous chants “I am Charlie,” and the like, should not be meant to indicate, even hint at, any association with the journal, at least in the context of defense of freedom of speech. Rather, they should express defense of the right of free expression whatever one thinks of the contents, even if they are regarded as hateful and depraved.

And the chants should also express condemnation for violence and terror. The head of Israel’s Labor Party and the main challenger for the upcoming elections in Israel, Isaac Herzog, is quite right when he says that “Terrorism is terrorism. There’s no two ways about it.” He is also right to say that “All the nations that seek peace and freedom [face] an enormous challenge” from murderous terrorism – putting aside his predictably selective interpretation of the challenge.

Erlanger vividly describes the scene of horror. He quotes one surviving journalist as saying that “Everything crashed. There was no way out. There was smoke everywhere. It was terrible. People were screaming. It was like a nightmare.” Another surviving journalist reported a “huge detonation, and everything went completely dark.” The scene, Erlanger reported, “was an increasingly familiar one of smashed glass, broken walls, twisted timbers, scorched paint and emotional devastation.” At least 10 people were reported at once to have died in the explosion, with 20 missing, “presumably buried in the rubble.”

These quotes, as the indefatigable David Peterson reminds us, are not, however, from January 2015. Rather, they are from a story of Erlanger’s on April 24 1999, which made it only to page 6 of the New York Times, not reaching the significance of the Charlie Hebdo attack. Erlanger was reporting on the NATO (meaning US) “missile attack on Serbian state television headquarters” that “knocked Radio Television Serbia off the air.”

There was an official justification. “NATO and American officials defended the attack,” Erlanger reports, “as an effort to undermine the regime of President Slobodan Milosevic of Yugoslavia.” Pentagon spokesman Kenneth Bacon told a briefing in Washington that “Serb TV is as much a part of Milosevic’s murder machine as his military is,” hence a legitimate target of attack.

The Yugoslavian government said that “The entire nation is with our President, Slobodan Milosevic,” Erlanger reports, adding that “How the Government knows that with such precision was not clear.”

No such sardonic comments are in order when we read that France mourns the dead and the world is outraged by the atrocity. There need also be no inquiry into the deeper roots, no profound questions about who stands for civilization, and who for barbarism.

Isaac Herzog, then, is mistaken when he says that “Terrorism is terrorism. There’s no two ways about it.” There are quite definitely two ways about it: terrorism is not terrorism when a much more severe terrorist attack is carried out by those who are Righteous by virtue of their power. Similarly, there is no assault against freedom of speech when the Righteous destroy a TV channel supportive of a government that they are attacking.

By the same token, we can readily comprehend the comment in the New York Times of civil rights lawyer Floyd Abrams, noted for his forceful defense of freedom of expression, that the Charlie Hebdo attack is “the most threatening assault on journalism in living memory.” He is quite correct about “living memory,” which carefully assigns assaults on journalism and acts of terror to their proper categories: Theirs, which are horrendous; and Ours, which are virtuous and easily dismissed from living memory.

We might recall as well that this is only one of many assaults by the Righteous on free expression. To mention only one example that is easily erased from “living memory,” the assault on Fallujah by US forces in November 2004, one of the worst crimes of the invasion of Iraq, opened with occupation of Fallujah General Hospital. Military occupation of a hospital is, of course, a serious war crime in itself, even apart from the manner in which it was carried out, blandly reported in a front-page story in the New York Times, accompanied with a photograph depicting the crime. The story reported that “Patients and hospital employees were rushed out of rooms by armed soldiers and ordered to sit or lie on the floor while troops tied their hands behind their backs.” The crimes were reported as highly meritorious, and justified: “The offensive also shut down what officers said was a propaganda weapon for the militants: Fallujah General Hospital, with its stream of reports of civilian casualties.”

Evidently such a propaganda agency cannot be permitted to spew forth its vulgar obscenities.

Charlie Hebdo: Paris attack brothers' campaign of terror can be traced back to Algeria in 1954

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Algeria is the post-colonial wound that still bleeds in France

Cherif Said Kouachi

by Robert Fisk, The Independent

Algeria. Long before the identity of the murder suspects was revealed by the French police – even before I heard the names of Cherif and Said Kouachi – I muttered the word “Algeria” to myself. As soon as I heard the names and saw the faces, I said the word “Algeria” again. And then the French police said the two men were of “Algerian origin”.

For Algeria remains the most painful wound within the body politic of the Republic – save, perhaps, for its continuing self-examination of Nazi occupation – and provides a fearful context for every act of Arab violence against France. The six-year Algerian war for independence, in which perhaps a million and a half Arab Muslims and many thousands of French men and women died, remains an unending and unresolved agony for both peoples. Just over half a century ago, it almost started a French civil war.

Maybe all newspaper and television reports should carry a “history corner”, a little reminder that nothing – absolutely zilch – happens without a past. Massacres, bloodletting, fury, sorrow, police hunts (“widening” or “narrowing” as sub-editors wish) take the headlines. Always it’s the “who” and the “how” – but rarely the “why”. Take the crime against humanity in Paris this week – the words “atrocity” and “barbarity” somehow diminish the savagery of this act – and its immediate aftermath.

We know the victims: journalists, cartoonists, cops. And how they were killed. Masked gunmen, Kalashnikov automatic rifles, ruthless, almost professional nonchalance. And the answer to “why” was helpfully supplied by the murderers. They wanted to avenge “the Prophet” for Charlie Hebdo’s irreverent and (for Muslims) highly offensive cartoons. And of course, we must all repeat the rubric: nothing – nothing ever – could justify these cruel acts of mass murder. And no, the killers cannot call on history to justify their crimes.

But there’s an important context that somehow got left out of the story this week, the “history corner” that many Frenchmen as well as Algerians prefer to ignore: the bloody 1954-62 struggle of an entire people for freedom against a brutal imperial regime, a prolonged war which remains the foundational quarrel of Arabs and French to this day.

The desperate and permanent crisis in Algerian-French relations, like the refusal of a divorced couple to accept an agreed narrative of their sorrow, poisons the cohabitation of these two peoples in France. However Cherif and Said Kouachi excused their actions, they were born at a time when Algeria had been invisibly mutilated by 132 years of occupation. Perhaps five million of France’s six and a half million Muslims are Algerian. Most are poor, many regard themselves as second-class citizens in the land of equality.

Like all tragedies, Algeria’s eludes the one-paragraph explanation of news agency dispatches, even the shorter histories written by both sides after the French abandoned Algeria in 1962.

For unlike other important French dependencies or colonies, Algeria was regarded as an integral part of metropolitan France, sending representatives to the French parliament in Paris, even providing Charles de Gaulle and the Allies with a French “capital” from which to invade Nazi-occupied north Africa and Sicily.

More than 100 years earlier, France had invaded Algeria itself, subjugating its native Muslim population, building small French towns and chateaux across the countryside, even – in an early 19th-century Catholic renaissance which was supposed to “re-Christianise” northern Africa – converting mosques into churches.

The Algerian response to what today appears to be a monstrous historical anachronism varied over the decades between lassitude, collaboration and insurrection. A demonstration for independence in the Muslim-majority and nationalist town of Sétif on VE Day – when the Allies had liberated the captive countries of Europe – resulted in the killing of 103 European civilians. French government revenge was ruthless; up to 700 Muslim civilians – perhaps far more – were killed by infuriated French “colons” and in bombardment of surrounding villages by French aircraft and a naval cruiser. The world paid little attention.

But when a full-scale insurrection broke out in 1954 – at first, of course, ambushes with few French lives lost and then attacks on the French army – the sombre war of Algerian liberation was almost preordained. Beaten in that classic post-war anti-colonial battle at Dien Bien Phu, the French army, after its debacle in 1940, seemed vulnerable to the more romantic Algerian nationalists who noted France’s further humiliation at Suez in 1956.

French military police drive through Algiers during the insurrection (Keystone/Getty Images)

What the historian Alistair Horne rightly described in his magnificent history of the Algerian struggle as “a savage war of peace” took the lives of hundreds of thousands. Bombs, booby traps, massacres by government forces and National Liberation Front guerrillas in the “bled” – the countryside south of the Mediterranean – led to the brutal suppression of Muslim sectors of Algiers, the assassination, torture and execution of guerrilla leaders by French paratroopers, soldiers, Foreign Legion operatives – including German ex-Nazis – and paramilitary police. Even white French sympathisers of the Algerians were “disappeared”. Albert Camus spoke out against torture and French civil servants were sickened by the brutality employed to keep Algeria French.

De Gaulle appeared to support the white population and said as much in Algiers – “Je vous ai compris,” he told them – and then proceeded to negotiate with FLN representatives in France. Algerians had long provided the majority of France’s Muslim population and in October 1961 up to 30,000 of them staged a banned independence rally in Paris – in fact, scarcely a mile from the scene of last week’s slaughter – which was attacked by French police units who murdered, it is now acknowledged, up to 600 of the protesters.

A crowd of Algerian demonstrators outside Government House, carrying Charles de Gaulle posters during the Algerian war of independence in 1985 (Getty Images)

Algerians were beaten to death in police barracks or thrown into the Seine. The police chief who supervised security operations and who apparently directed the 1961 massacre was none other than Maurice Papon – who was, almost 40 years later, convicted for crimes against humanity under Petain’s Vichy regime during the Nazi occupation.

The Algerian conflict finished in a bloodbath. White “pied noir” French colonists refused to accept France’s withdrawal, supported the secret OAS in attacking Algerian Muslims and encouraged French military units to mutiny. At one point, De Gaulle feared that French paratroopers would try to take over Paris.

When the end came, despite FLN promises to protect French citizens who chose to stay in Algeria, there were mass killings in Oran. Up to a million and a half white French men, women and children – faced with a choice of “the coffin or the suitcase” – left for France, along with thousands of loyal Algerian “harki” fighters who fought with the army but were then largely abandoned to their terrible fate by De Gaulle. Some were forced to swallow their own French military medals and thrown into mass graves.

Algerian rebels training to use weapons in 1958 (Getty Images)

But the former French colonists, who still regarded Algeria as French – along with an exhausted FLN dictatorship which took over the independent country – instituted a cold peace in which Algeria’s residual anger, in France as well as in the homeland, settled into long-standing resentment. In Algeria, the new nationalist elite embarked on a hopeless Soviet-style industrialisation of their country. Former French citizens demanded massive reparations; indeed, for decades, the French kept all the drainage maps of major Algerian cities so that the new owners of Algeria had to dig up square miles of city streets every time a water main burst.

And when the Algerian civil war of the 1980s commenced – after the Algerian army cancelled a second round of elections which Islamists were sure to win – the corrupt FLN “pouvoir” and the Muslim rebels embarked on a conflict every bit as gruesome as the Franco-Algerian war of the 1950s and 1960s. Torture, disappearances, village massacres all resumed. France discreetly supported a dictatorship whose military leaders salted away millions of dollars in Swiss banks.

Algerian Muslims returning from the anti-Soviet war in Afghanistan joined the Islamists in the mountains, killing some of the few remaining French citizens in Algeria. And many subsequently left to fight in the Islamist wars, in Iraq and later Syria.

Enter here the Kouachi brothers, especially Chérif, who was imprisoned for taking Frenchmen to fight against the Americans in Iraq. And the United States, with French support, now backs the FLN regime in its continuing battle against Islamists in Algeria’s deserts and mountain forests, arming a military which tortured and murdered thousands of men in the 1990s.

As an American diplomat said just before the 2003 invasion of Iraq, the United States “has much to learn” from the Algerian authorities. You can see why some Algerians went to fight for the Iraqi resistance. And found a new cause…

Deadly end to sieges in France

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Brothers believed behind attack on satirical magazine killed north of Paris, as four hostages and gunman die in capital.

Hostages after an hold-up in a jewelery in Southern France

by Al Jazeera

Two suspects believed to have been involved in Wednesday’s attack on a satirical magazine’s office have been killed northeast of Paris, while a gunman who took several hostages at a supermarket in the east of the capital is also dead.

At least four hostages held at the kosher grocery store in Porte De Vincennes also died on Friday as police stormed the site. Speaking to reporters on Friday, the French prosecutor, Francois Molins, said it was likely the hostages had been killed before the police assault.

Earlier on Friday, police said that a man named Amedy Coulibaly was the primary suspect in the kosher store siege. His wife Hayat Boumeddiene was also named as a wanted suspect and accomplice, but her whereabouts were unclear.

“[Taking into account] declarations made once again to a TV station by [Amedy] Coulibaly saying – and I quote ‘I have killed four of them’ – and pending the result of the autopsy, we can suppose that none of the hostages were killed during the assault launched by law enforcement officers and that the deaths occurred at the hand of the terrorist when he entered the supermarket,” Molins said.

Seven people, including three police officers, were injured in the supermarket raid.

Police said that the grocery store gunman had threatened to kill the hostages if police launched an assault on two brothers holed up in Dammartin-en-Goele after being on the run for two days following the attack on the Charlie Hebdo office in Paris.

The brothers – identified as 32-year-old Said Kouachi and 34-year-old Cherif Kouachi – died in a simultaneous operation in the French town, where they had been cornered by police inside a printing house after taking a hostage. The hostage was unharmed.

Police say the brothers came out of their hideaway with guns blazing, and were killed in a shoot-out.

“The two brothers did not answer calls of negotiators,” Molins told reporters. “[They] came out with rifle guns and started firing on police
who replied with fire and hit the two brothers, who returned their fire.

“[The police] had to neutralise them.”

Officers earlier reported the brothers as saying they wanted to “die as martyrs”.

Sources connected to aAl-Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula (AQAP) on Friday claimed responsibility for the attack on Charlie Hebdo in a statement to the Associated Press news agency.

The attack was carried out “as revenge for the honour” of Prophet Muhammad, a member of the group told AP.

An earlier video from AQAP’s leadership had praised the attack, but did not claim responsibility.

Said Kouachi is believed to have travelled to Yemen in 2011 and either received training from or fought alongside the group, according to US and Yemeni officials, AP reported.

If confirmed, the attack would be the first time al-Qaeda’s branch in Yemen has successfully carried out an operation in the West after at least two earlier attempts.

The group also threatened to carry out further attacks, the AFP news agency reported.

“It is better for you to stop your aggression against the Muslims, so perhaps you will live safely. If you refuse but to wage war, then wait for the glad tiding,” AQAP official Harith al-Nadhari was quoted as saying in a video according to monitoring group SITE.

Kosher supermarket suspect

Police said that Coulibaly had links to one of the Kouachi brothers and it was reported that Boumeddiene had called him more than 500 times.

Al Jazeera’s Tim Friend said the calls offered “clear evidence they were coordinating this”.

Coulibaly is also suspected of being the same gunman who killed a policewoman in a shooting in Mountrouge in southern Paris on Thursday.

The dramatic events on Friday followed a nationwide manhunt after 12 people were killed when masked gunmen attacked the office of Charlie Hebdo in Paris on Wednesday.

Events leading to the Dammartin-en-Goele siege

  • After the attack on the Charlie Hebdo office on Wednesday, the two gunmen were at-large for almost 24 hours until they were first spotted outside Paris on Thursday.
  • The owner of a petrol station in Villers-Cotterets called the police, claiming to have been robbed by the two suspects at around 9:30 GMT. The men reportedly stole petrol and food.
  • Almost 24 hours later on Friday, reports came in of a gunfight with police, north of Paris, in Seine-et-Marne, near Dammartin-en-Goele.
  • Police chased the vehicle which they believe the Kouachi brothers hijacked from a woman. The chase ended in the industrial area of Dammartin-en-Goele.
  • A hostage was taken by the gunmen, starting the siege that lasted hours.
  • The suspects were then surrounded, holed up in a print shop. Later on Friday, the gunmen came out of the shop firing at police and were killed in the shoot-out.

The Kouachi brothers – who are they?

Paris terror attack a 'backlash': Mani Shankar Aiyar

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Photo: Pradeep Gaur/Mint

Photo: Pradeep Gaur/Mint

New Delhi: Senior Congress leader Mani Shankar Aiyar described Thursday the terror attack in a satirical magazine office in Paris as a “backlash”, noting that Muslims were killed in Iraq and Afghanistan without any discrimination of being “innocent” or otherwise.

The opposition not only slammed Aiyar for his comments but his own party distanced itself from the controversy.

“If you are more powerful, it does not mean you can do anything and the weak will not respond. So when drone attacks happen and homes are destroyed and children are killed, then it is imminent that there will be a reaction.

“So, I think the way the war on terrorism has been going on, it was known that it will have this kind of reaction. It is happening now and France needs to see how it can be prevented,” Aiyar told reporters in Delhi.

Attacking the United States, the Congress leader said that Muslims were killed in Iraq and Afghanistan and backlash was expected.

“We have to accept that since the time the war on terror began in the aftermath of 9/11, Muslims have been killed without any distinction between the innocent and the guilty. This has been done by America in Iraq and Afghansitan. And now it seems that they will do it in Syria as well. So, a backlash to this is imminent,” Aiyar added.

He said that the West should learn about the “unity of diversity” practised in India as it opposes the ‘hijab’ worn by Muslim girls.

“They say hijab can’t be worn by Muslim girls. So it will have some kind of impact on the Muslims. So, the unity in diversity that has been practised in India is one lesson the West hasn’t learnt.

“Till now, they were saying that they are Christians and it will be a world of Christian. Now since they have to accocmodate others, they have to learn the lesson of unity and diversity,” he said.

Earlier, Congress party has strongly condemned the attack in Paris.

“We are very clear that whatever happened in Paris is terribly unfortunate and condemnable in the strongest possible terms and that’s what the Congress party adhers to. Mr Aiyar’s observation are entirely his own,” Congress spokesperson Sanjay Jha said.

(PTI)

Mosque attacked in wake of Charlie Hebdo shooting

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An explosion has been reported at a restaurant near a mosque in Villefranche-sur-Saone, France.

An explosion has been reported at a restaurant near a mosque in Villefranche-sur-Saone, France.

by World Bulletin

In Villefranche-sur-Saone, northeast France, an explosion has been reported early today in front of a kebab restaurant near a mosque.

French press announced that there is no death or injury at the explosion in Villefranche-sur-Saone, Rhone region. Yet material damage is detected at the reestaurant after the explosion.

French Police has already started an investigation about the incident and is expected to make a public statement about the first impresions.

Whether the explosion is connectod to yesterday attack in Paris which end up with 12 death is still unknown.

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