The Secret Life of France (19 page)

Watching the unfolding chaos, President François Mitterrand decided to take the line of least resistance and do nothing. He neither condemned nor condoned the coup. He was, of course, uncomfortable about the interruption of the democratic process, but the prospect of an
Islamic state just across the Mediterranean was no more appealing, nor was the prospect of a massive influx of Algerian refugees.

Mitterrand's wait-and-see posture with regard to the civil war brewing in Algeria became increasingly untenable as the regime's campaign of repression escalated and the massacres of civilians, perpetrated by both sides, spread across the country. As the violence intensified, the Algerian regime called for more military and financial aid from its largest trading partner. France managed to hold back until early 1993, when she pledged 5 billion francs in aid and subsidies. By this time it had become clear that her vital interests and that of the Algerian regime were intertwined. Islamist guerrillas had begun targeting Algeria's francophone intellectuals and the nation's elite was fleeing for France.

Meanwhile, the French government came under ever-increasing pressure from Paris's intelligentsia to do something. Mitterrand was now in his twelfth year as president and sharing power with a centre-right government whose coercive policies were embodied in its hard-talking interior minister, the Corsican Charles Pasqua. On 4 November 1993, in response to pressure from French public opinion and the Algerian regime, Pasqua's police mounted a massive operation against individuals identified by the RG as Muslim fundamentalists or named by the Algerian secret services as FIS sympathisers. ‘Operation Chrysanthemum' led to the arrest of eighty-eight people, many of whom were released through lack of proof and subsequently
placed under surveillance or summarily deported to Burkina Faso. By the end of 1994, the French police had arrested almost two hundred people suspected of sympathy or involvement with the FIS.

So it was that France was drawn into Algeria's bitter civil war; a war that would last for ten years and leave an estimated two hundred thousand people dead and at least fifteen thousand missing. France's own body count in that war began on 21 September 1993, when the corpses of two French land surveyors were found with their throats cut in the hills close to Oran. In January 1994 a woman employed by the French consulate in Algiers was shot dead on the Place des Martyrs in broad daylight. After this, executions of French nationals escalated apace, culminating in the kidnapping of seven French Trappist monks who were taken from their monastery in the mountains south of Algiers in the early hours of the morning of 27 March 1996. Almost two months later, while France's two intelligence services (DST and DGSE) were busy tripping each other up in their respective negotiations to secure the release of the monks, a communiqué came from ‘Emir' Djamel Zitouni, head of the Islamic Armed Group (GIA): ‘We have cut the throats of the seven monks, as we promised. God be praised, it happened this morning.'

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 this 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.