The present problem of radicalisation was indirectly created by the French government as an offshoot of its foreign policy
IS, or more accurately Daesh, is a creation of multiple forces – its seeds were sown by America during its Cold War confrontation against the erstwhile Soviet Union, it has been nurtured well since by the US ally Saudi Arabia’s sponsorship of Sunni extremist ideology in its own war against Shias, especially Iran and its allies, and it began to bear the evil fruit of terrorism and spread its ideology after America’s invasion of Saddam’s Iraq. But France, too, bears responsibility for failing to stop the attacks on Paris – due to Intelligence and societal failures.
With a population of over 66 million, France is one of the most protected countries. Not counting its armed forces, France has 2,72,500 men in its national and allied police forces; 13,000 in CRS, a force akin to our Central Reserve Police; and its one lakh-strong Gendarmerie, i.e military police.
France had experienced terrorism in the 70s from Basque and Corsican separatists. However, the problem became acute in the 80s when France became a magnet for outside contrarian activities dragged onto its soil by settlers from foreign countries. It became a battleground for Israel-Palestine Liberation Organisation wars, intra-PLO clashes, Armenian-Turkish battles, and the mercenary activities of Carlos, the Jackal, and Abu Nidal. To meet these threats, France raised a number of counter-terrorist forces like GIGN in 1973 and RAID in 1985. Another unit named BRI, or ‘anti-gang brigades’ is a specialised unit under the Interior Ministry. It was the BRI commandoes we saw on TV in Paris during the recent attacks.
France also effected a number of counter-terrorist Intelligence upgrades, merging old branches and creating new ones, forming a National Intelligence Council and appointing an Intelligence coordinator reporting directly to the President. Since 1986, all cases of terrorism are being tried centrally in Paris, and not in jurisdictional courts like it’s done in India.
As a result of this elaborate protective shield, France could escape Jihadi terrorism on its soil till March 2012 while other European countries had been subjected to serious attacks.
The lull in France was shattered in March 2012 with three major incidents in Montauban and Toulouse when jihadis killed 3 French paratroopers and 4 Jews. In January 2015, the world was shocked by the Charlie Hebdo attacks. The serial attacks on November 13 is the most serious incident in the history of Europe when a handful of terrorists challenged a government.
A number of reasons could be listed. It is an open secret that racial relations in France have been traditionally poor. Over 70 percent of immigrants from North Africa and Turkey were children of manual workers. Their modest social origins had led to low levels of education and consequent unemployment. The Pasqua immigration laws of 1993 created problems for them. In October 2005, France witnessed unprecedented violence when two French immigrant youths died after being electrocuted when they were running away from police checks. France had to declare emergency.
Riots erupted again in October 2006 in the same suburbs due to police enforcement. Then Interior Minister Nicolas Sarkozy’s deportations from 2005 onwards created further frustration. over 47,700 were deported during 2002-2006. The reason why Police-Muslim clashes occur is because the French police, like in India, is used for checking illegal immigration and enforcing secular laws on Muslim polygamy and separation practices. The police identity check on veiled women in July 2013 to enforce a secular law banning Niqabs led to very serious riots in Trappes, a Paris suburb.
The administration failed to realise that the rioters were second-generation immigrant youth and the issues they faced were complex. Government also ignored that liberty, free expression and a secular fabric of society cannot be achieved through police measures when the underlying reasons are racial discrimination and social and economic exclusion. Blame is again laid on Nicolas Sarkozy, who scrapped a friendlier police system of “police de proximité” (neighborhood policing) in 2002, replacing it with a system emphasising only the “repressive” part of their job — to impose order, investigate a crime and perform an arrest. A fertile ground for resentment was created.
The present problem of radicalisation was indirectly created by the French government as an offshoot of its foreign policy. France was one of the first countries to freely allow, if not encourage, its citizens to join the Syrian Islamic rebel forces for regime change. Nearly 2,000 of the 6,000 EU jihadi volunteers who joined the Syrian wars were from France. It was only in late 2013 that Paris started worrying about the backlash from radicalised jihadists returning from Syria. Europe is geographically close and readily accessible to flows of ISIS terrorists.
There was also gross Intelligence failure. On October 28, exactly 15 days before the Paris attacks, the British MI-5 chief Andrew Parker had issued an unprecedented terror warning from “Islamic State and Al-Qaeda fanatics plotting mass casualties”. How did Paris miss the warning? Why did the government or private security officials fail to take the usual precautions of entry control to the Stade de France and Bataclan theatre? Iraqi sources said on November 14 that they had warned about the imminence of such an attack one day earlier. France 24 TV channel announced on November 18 that Paris Police had received intelligence early in November that six persons living in 18th district “might do something big”.
Another reason for the Intelligence failure is collection of massive electronic data beyond the interpretation capability of analysts. There are crucial lessons for Intelligence agencies and governments to learn from the November 13 Paris attacks.
The writer is a former Special Secretary and member of the 26/11 inquiry panel set up by Maharashtra Government
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