For now, the more extreme measures have been rejected by the government
or have gained little traction in the wake of a deadly accumulation of
terrorist attacks this summer.
But that they have been floated at
all is a measure of France’s struggle to find solutions to a security
problem that is now drawing comparisons to the one in Israel, or to the
Islamist insurgency in France’s former colony of Algeria in the 1990s.
With
a presidential race primed to heat up in the fall, the debate over how
France should respond seems likely to intensify, forcing the country to
confront whether it can maintain its aversion to sweeping changes in its
security and judicial systems and live with the grim knowledge that
there will be further attacks.
The fatalism that has marked the
country’s response so far stems in part from France’s distinctive
position among the targets of Islamic extremists: Its own citizens are
often the ones carrying out the attacks.
France has a Muslim
minority that is the largest in Europe — estimated at 7.5 percent of the
population — and a minuscule part of it is keeping the country on edge.
That
fact has given the government a narrowing set of options for dealing
with the problem, short of turning the country into an Israel-style
security state, which no one here, left or right, seems to want.
Already,
the government has assumed wider powers of surveillance and house
detention under a state of emergency, to limited effect. For now at
least, calls to go still farther up that road are losing out to appeals
to defend civil liberties.
A spectacular large-scale attack could
yet shift perspectives. But following a bloody 2015, the steady
drumbeat of attacks this summer — the largest of which killed 85 people
in Nice — has generated fear, but not panic.
Worries over
terrorism are forcing the cancellation of some big events, like the
Braderie de Lille, perhaps Europe’s largest flea market, normally held
in the northern city of Lille each September.
But in the wake of
the murder of the Rev. Jacques Hamel as he celebrated Mass in
St.-Étienne-du-Rouvray in Normandy on July 26, a flurry of urgent
demands for harsher measures from center-right politicians have quickly
dissipated.
Even criticism of the unidentified judge who released
the young man who went on to commit the Normandy murder — Adel
Kermiche, a failed would-be jihadist — from preventive detention has
not, so far, produced plans to change the ways terrorism cases are
handled.
The judge was sympathetic last March to the young man,
who insisted he was giving up on attempts to reach Syria and merely
wanted to settle down. Three appellate judges confirmed the decision to
let Mr. Kermiche go home, over the protests of prosecutors.
Mr.
Kermiche turns out to have been practicing the art of taqiyya, or
dissimulation, explicitly counseled by the Islamic State to fool the
enemy. Judges have now been advised by the French prime minister, Manuel
Valls, to be on the lookout for it. But he also cautioned against
second-guessing the country’s independent judiciary.
After a long
season of police raids, house arrests, and endless parliamentary debate
over how to confront the threat, there is no sustained pitch, even from
the far-right National Front, for a more intrusive police presence in
French daily life.
At least three different security-state models
for France have been debated in the media over the last three weeks:
Israel, the United States and Algeria, which carried out a bloody
10-year repression of an Islamist insurgency in the 1990s, at a cost of
thousands dead or "disappeared.”
All have so far been rejected.
"What
is at stake is the republic,” Mr. Valls said in an interview in the
French newspaper Le Monde last week, rejecting demands for more
repression. "And our shield is democracy.”
His justice minister,
Jean-Jacques Urvoas, appealed to France’s history, as French politicians
often do, in pushing away the center-right’s plea for mass preventive
detention — "administrative retention for those individuals classified
as the most dangerous,” as the former president Nicolas Sarkozy put it
immediately after Father Hamel was killed.
This could potentially
involve rounding up some 10,000 individuals, French citizens and
others, who are in the government’s loose category of Islamist-inspired
potential security threats — the so-called "S-Files” that are a
principal fixation of the French media.
The Socialist government rejects the idea categorically for now.
This
would "amount to wiping out Article 9 of the Declarations of the Rights
of Man and the Citizen of 1789,” Mr. Urvoas wrote in an op-ed in the
same newspaper. This article guarantees the presumption of innocence.
In
recent days, the focus of public debate has shifted toward greater
government control over the country’s mosques, perhaps an indication of
the government’s desperation in its quest for remedies.
Mr. Valls
has said he wants the foreign financing of these mosques to end, and
the training of imams to take place in France. But the usefulness of
such measures appears doubtful, since many of those who have struck had
only tenuous relations with official religion.
The threat facing
France is all the more redoubtable in that those who "pass into action,”
according to the French formula, fall into unpredictable and widely
varying categories.
Some are firmly on the antiterrorism
authorities’ radar, like Mr. Kermiche. Others are completely unknown,
like the driver in the deadly truck attack in Nice, Mohamed Lahouaiej
Bouhlel. Still others have made it into the "S-Files” but were not
considered overt threats, like many of the participants in the Nov. 13
attacks in Paris.
In all, the government has identified more than
2,000 people as "implicated in the phenomenon of violent religious
radicalization or the jihadist recruiting pipeline,” as an official
declaration put it last month. But as the attacks have shown, that in no
way covers all who are potentially dangerous.
"What are we going
to do, put a cop behind everybody with a beard?” Françoise Cotta, a
veteran defense attorney who is one of the few here who represents those
accused of terrorism, asked in an interview this week. "But what if
they shave the beard? It’s ridiculous.”
She continued, "We are going to put 10 percent of the population under surveillance?”
Ms.
Cotta recently defended Karim Mohamed-Aggad, brother of one of the
gunmen who killed 90 people in November at the Bataclan concert hall in
Paris. Her client received a nine-year sentence last month for having
been part of a cell that traveled to Syria to join the Islamic State.
"There
are no miracle-remedies,” Ms. Cotta said, pointing to the overarching
issue of France’s failure to integrate its Muslim minority.
"You
have to first understand why we are where we are, in order to come up
with appropriate solutions,” she said. "That whole labor of integration —
it’s got to be done.”
In the short term, "there’s no zero risk,” Ms. Cotta said. "There will be other attacks.”
