“They would have died of laughter”

LAURENT LÉGER, 48, is a senior investigative reporter at the French satirical weekly, Charlie Hebdo. He was present on 7 January when masked gunmen killed ten of his colleagues and two policemen on the paper’s Parisian premises, and has agreed to speak to Open about what he witnessed.

“We were all sitting around a table for our weekly editorial meeting when… all of a sudden, a masked gunman dressed all in black burst into the room and began firing at us. I somehow was able to hide under the table. I heard him shout ‘Allahu Akbar’ twice and then he asked for Charb (Stéphane Charbonnier, Charlie Hebdo’s editor in chief). He did not mention anyone else and just fired indiscriminately with what looked like a very heavy weapon, something you would take to fight in a war. I was absolutely petrified and remained completely still. It felt as though the whole event lasted a really long time, but in reality, it all happened in a matter of seconds… After the gunman left, I heard further shots.”

These were probably the shots that killed the French policeman, Ahmed Merabet, who happened to be Muslim, in what has been qualified as the worse terrorist attack in France since 1961.

Léger speaks with remarkable detachment of the shootings, and when pressed for details, explains that his memory is completely blocked. “I seem to use the same words, the same expressions over and over again when describing the events,” he says, as if this almost rote-like recitation would somehow protect him from the trauma. Of those who were in the editorial office that morning, eight died on the spot, four were wounded and four escaped unharmed. Of the wounded, two are still in hospital but out of danger, one is in a medically-induced coma and one is facing extensive facial reconstruction surgery after losing his tongue in the shooting. This grim description highlights what is often overlooked in the aftermath of a terror attack: the focus is almost exclusively on the dead, some of whom gain posthumous fame and glory. But for the survivors, there is often a lifelong battle with disability that stays hidden in the shadows.

The mobilisation of not just intellectuals, but ordinary citizens worldwide, denouncing the attacks and expressing solidarity with Charlie Hebdo has been colossal, and the slogan ‘I am Charlie’ has, in a few short days, become a universal emblem of the right to freedom of speech. On Sunday, 11 January, more than two million people, including 50 heads of state, marched in Paris as part of the biggest public rally the French capital has seen since the Liberation from Nazi occupation at the end of World War II. The Empire State Building in New York was lit up in red, white and blue, the colours of the French flag, and the tricolour lit up London landmarks to the cheers of thousands.

Léger did not attend the march on Sunday. “First of all, I don’t really like taking part in demonstrations; then there was the presence of all these politicians and especially all those dubious foreign politicians… all of this discouraged me.” Instead, he says, “I went to the office, worked and watched it all on television, but I was very moved to see all these millions of people supporting us… I prefer to analyse the massive turnout not so much as an indication of support for our paper, but as a march against terrorism. We are of course a small symbol of that, but this symbol is much too vast for us, we are just a small magazine. People were also demonstrating in support of freedom of expression, but then again most of the people in the crowd could not have been that familiar with Charlie Hebdo. We don’t have three or four million readers. At most, there are 50,000… the numbers are completely disproportionate.”

Some of these feelings were echoed by Auberi Edler, a French journalist and documentary filmmaker who attended the march on Sunday. She describes the atmosphere as “not being sad or mournful for the dead; it was combative, with a feeling that we were defending our values of freedom of expression and liberty.” She also adds that while many did not actually read Charlie, its emblematic cartoons had been part of “all of our childhoods and our adolescence”. In that sense, “Attacking Charlie was attacking us.” She describes a spirit of ‘no pasarán’, the ‘they shall not pass’ phrase emblematic of the Spanish Civil War in the fight against fascism. The ‘no pasarán’ is as applicable here to terrorists as to the right- wing extremists who could hijack the emotional fallout of the attack.

But why such a mobilisation against terror far beyond France’s borders for cartoonists who engaged in a form of humour that is hard to grasp for anyone who is not French and who worked for a publication that was financially on its knees with a rapidly diminishing readership? This question may seem even more pertinent in the wake of the Peshawar massacre last month, when gunmen of the Tehreek-e-Taliban Pakistan killed over 140 people, mainly children. Apart from the usual condemnations by world leaders, ordinary citizens the world over seem to have remained largely indifferent.

Last Friday, two days after the Paris attack, about 2,000 people were alleged to have been killed in Nigeria by the terror group Boko Haram. This news was almost completely drowned out by the media uproar around Charlie Hebdo. Why does undermining freedom of speech attract so much more attention than the loss of human lives?

Léger says that this is a horrible sign of how saturated the media is with horror stories, and that people only react when they feel threatened close to home. Again, this does not explain the international dimension of the ‘I am Charlie’ phenomenon.

An imperfect answer to that question can perhaps be found in the importance that we humans place in symbols. This may be seen in the extreme violence that an attack on a symbol, in the form of Charlie Hebdo’s caricatures of Prophet Muhammad, was able to elicit. It is also visible in the scale of the response to the Paris attack, which was perceived as an assault on a symbol of free speech and democracy. As French philosopher and essayist Baudouin Jurdant explains, “We were struck in a very fundamental space which somehow represents our identity. Perhaps it is not so important to understand the why of the extent of the reaction, but to accept that part [as a] mystery and [as] irrational, which is what makes us human.”

In a recent book on the history of humanity, Israeli historian Yuval Noah Harari writes that one of the defining features of Homo sapiens, modern day humans, as opposed to any other intelligent species, is our ability to conceptualise symbols and rally en masse around them. The belief in something greater that what we see is what makes us human, and when our symbols come under attack, it is our very sense of self that feels assaulted, far more than when hundreds of strangers are killed randomly. Hence the outrage.

Some react to attacks on their symbols with extreme violence, and others react by staging peaceful rallies. In this context, much of the commentary on the 7 January event has focused on figuring out whom or what to blame for the violence: Islamic fundamentalism, the alleged racism of Charlie Hebdo, the excesses of France’s secularist policy, the flaws in France’s policies of integration, failures of its intelligence services, the West’s interventions in the Middle East, to name but some.

Pinning the blame on one or the other factor is not the purpose of this article. But it is interesting to focus on some of the more narrow issues directly related to Charlie Hebdo.

First of all, says Léger, Charlie Hebdo is not a racist publication. “We caricature all power structures, all institutions, all religions as well as the society we live in. We are not anti-religious, we just believe that religion is a private affair and has no place in the public sphere. If someone wants to cover themself in a black sheet, they are free to do so; we are just against the idea of imposing that sort of thing on others. We are also certainly not anti-Muslim; we are against fundamentalists of any sort, be they Muslim, Jewish, Catholic or any other.”

One of the values that Charlie Hebdo defends is secularism—the separation of Church and State—as a cornerstone of French Republicanism and a defining feature of what it means to be French. Originally this policy was devised to ensure that the Catholic Church be forced to relinquish its grip on politics and matters of State, as the Church, with its archaic traditions and hierarchies, was seen as a brake on modernity and a perpetrator of social divisions. Under laws governing secularism, no overt display of religiosity, such as wearing headscarves or turbans, is allowed by government officials, and this ban extends to students in government schools. The current government of François Hollande has tried to reopen the debate, particularly on wearing headscarves in schools (these simply implying the covering up of hair, not full facial cover) in the name of finding a balance between secularism and freedom of expression. But so far resistance from the mainstream right as well as from within the Socialist party, which fears that allowing overt displays of multiculturalism will fan the racist rhetoric of the increasingly popular far right National Front, has prevented any real progress on softening the strict application of secularist principles, or on modifying the French model of integrating foreign cultures through assimilation.

But how does it feel to be Muslim in a country that puts such a strong emphasis on secularism that a child wearing a turban or a scarf is banned from attending a state school, but where six of its eleven government holidays are actually Catholic religious holidays? In 2003, a French government commission proposed that Yom Kippur and Eid be declared national holidays for schools in recognition of the fact that France has Europe’s largest Muslim and Jewish populations, but this was rejected. I put this question to Léger, who agrees that this is problematic. But he also explains that the imprint of Catholicism on France is still very strong because of centuries of history, and that it had been very difficult at the beginning of the 20th century to rethink Catholicism outside of the public space. These holidays are, in a sense, a hangover from that history.

There is a growing sense of schizophrenia in France, where in the name of integration and secularism, minorities and particularly Muslims feel that the most hypocritical double standards apply. Farah Mendjour, a French 24- year-old Oxford graduate of Algerian origin who has lived most of her life in the notorious 94th department, which witnessed violent anti-government riots in 2005, says that even before the killings the atmosphere in her neighbourhood was unbearably tense. “Now they want people who are visibly Muslim to join the march on Sunday. What does that mean—headscarves and beards to show how multicultural France is? How does that sit with the principle of secularism and integration?” She describes a sense of marginalisation that has permeated her community most of her life, a sense of discrimination that has grown in recent years. “As this feeling has grown,” she says, “the number of conversions to Islam has skyrocketed.” Nevertheless, there is a very big gap between converting to Islam and taking up arms in its name.

The UK has a very different approach to integrating its immigrants, and large suburbs of British cities have been so transformed by their local communities that one could be forgiven for thinking that one had stepped into a suburb of Karachi. In a rather visible symbol that recognises the multicultural face of today’s Britain, uniforms of state officials (police, customs services, army) exist to accommodate the vestimentary requirements of different faiths. But does any of this make any difference? Although fewer young men in absolute numbers from Britain than France have left to fight with extremist groups in the Middle East, the figures in proportion to their populations are similar. According to a former member of the British intelligence services interviewed for this article, the threat level from home-grown terrorists is pretty similar in France and the UK. “The problem has nothing to do with models of integration or any other lofty politico-philosophical ideas. The problem is that we have hordes of bored, unemployed and poorly educated young men (those who choose the path to violence are overwhelmingly men), who have fallen into petty crime, drug abuse, and feel totally alienated from a society that praises individualism above all, and whose overwhelmingly materialistic values are out of their reach. Then one day someone comes along offering them camaraderie, adventure, a cause to believe in that is far greater than themselves, and a way out of the lonely rut they are stuck in. So yes, they are prepared to take up arms, become heroes and even die for the chance of a few moments of glory.” It is worth mentioning here that a non-negligible number of European jihadists were not born in Muslim house-holds. And yes, they are finding solace and identity in symbols.

Jean-Pierre Krief, a French filmmaker of Jewish North African descent, blames an obsession with political correctness taken to extremes for the dire security situation in France today. He explains that out of fear of feeding the National Front, main- stream politicians on the left are afraid of publicly addressing the fact that there is a serious threat to France’s security emanating from the predominantly Muslim ghettoised suburbs of France’s large cities. Krief decries the fact that “our politicians mask reality in the name of national unity” and blames what he calls France’s silence and inaction for the violence that is now emerging.

Refusing to label and classify people along religious or ethnic lines in the name of a strict adherence to the principles of equality is indeed part of the problem, according to many commentators. Official census statistics on the number of Muslims in France do not even exist, as asking people what their religion is could be perceived as discriminatory. How can one even begin to tackle a problem if one cannot even begin to decrypt its components?

In this context, where so much is left unsaid in the name of political correctness, Charlie Hebdo plays a vital role in France’s collective sub-conscious, because through its cartoons and acerbic satire it addresses some of the country’s festering and hidden sores, those that a political class that is perceived as sclerotic and incapable of giving a clear direction to the country is unable or unwilling to confront head on.

At the end of our discusion, I ask Léger what his dead colleagues, who in a way died defending their values, wouldhave thought of the chiming of the bells of Notre Dame Cathedral, one of the most cherished emblems of French Catholicism, in their honour during a nationwide minute of silence the day after the killings. “That’s when I was really sad that they are no longer here because they would have made so much fun of the situation. They would have died of laughter.” And here, in the words of this journalist who has not stopped working since the day of the attack, I find the same cutting humour that proves Charlie is not dead.

In spite of all the flaws exposed by the 7 January event, something great has been revealed as well. One of its sacrosanct symbols was attacked, and a nation’s citizens came out onto the streets on a cold January day not to call for revenge, but for Freedom, Equality and Brotherhood. These values may be imperfectly reflected in today’s France but they still matter. Much work needs to be done to ensure that these values remain at the forefront of French politics and policies once emotions have died down. If the spirit of Sunday can carry on, perhaps it will give French politicians the courage to address some of the difficult questions they are afraid to ask; perhaps the images of Sunday’s march will reassure them that in a crisis the French people are able to rally against extremism in any form. No pasarán? A utopian dream perhaps, but as a European of Anglo-French heritage, it is one that I will cling to.

(Samantha de Bendern is a journalist who specialises in international relations. She has worked for the European Commission and NATO)

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