Nicole Prévost Logan

The Nov. 13 attack was not the end of it.

The Parisians lived through a first somber weekend listening to the non-stop sirens of police cars.  On Nov. 18, RAID (Recherche-Assistance-Intervention-Dissuasion), assisted by hundreds of special police forces launched a massive assault  in St Denis, barely one kilometer from the Stade de France and next to the 12th century basilica of the kings of France.  At four in the morning and for seven hours the tiny street became a war scene of incredible violence.  Explosions shook the shabby buildings so much that walls and floors collapsed.

Two suspects, a woman and a man, unidentified for almost two days, were found in the rubble. Terrorist Salah Abdelslam was still on the run.  Every day the police uncovered new details about the terrorists — in Montreuil and in the 18th arrondissement.  On Nov. 23, a belt with explosives was found on a sidewalk in Montrouge, south of Paris.  The Belgium connection intensified, particularly in Melenbeek, a town with a mostly Moslem population and 85 mosques.  One week after the French attack, a major terrorist threat forced the Belgian capital to shut down for several days.

How are the French coping?  They feel “80 percent anger and 15 percent pain,” commented Thierry Pech, head of the Terra Nova Fondation.  One feels outraged that petty delinquents, often on drugs, would commit such atrocities.  A mood of mourning and solidarity spread throughout France.

We are now in another era, prime minister Manuel Valls declared,  and we will have to learn how to live with terror but must not give in to it.  The French people have heard this sobering message and are behaving with great dignity, albeit with nervousness.  At no point did the citizens feel an infringement on their personal freedom. Public debates , such as the Friday night TV show “Ce soir ou Jamais”, are more heated than ever.

There was a temporary disconnect between the politicians and the general public.  During a stormy session at the Assemblée Nationale,  Les Republicains (LR) (new name of UMP) gave a hard time to the prime minister.  Catcalls and jeers made his speeches barely audible.  The right wing daily Le Figaro explained how Christian Jacob, leader of the LR parliamentary group, instructed his party to calm down.  On the following day, the behavior of the deputés was exemplary as they voted unanimously to prolong the Etat d’urgence (state of emergency) for three months.

To reassure the population, the government took several security measures including the creation of 10,000 posts in the police and border control personnel.  A major change in the Code Pénal was put in place to facilitate searches of private homes and house arrests, as well as preventive arrests without the intervention of a judge.  Close to one thousand searches were carried out last week, which is more than during a full year under normal circumstances.  To enhance the efficiency of the police, the definition of legitimate defence is being altered.

The Patriot Act, signed into law by the US Congress on Oct. 21 2001, developed surveillance on the whole nation and the gathering of “metadata.”  It is very different in France,  since the new administrative and judiciary steps, taken by the Executive, are targeted at a concrete enemy of about 11,000 dangerous individuals, registered on the “S” form, living in the midst of the population, practically next door.   In the US, the task of protecting the country is shared between the Justice Department, the Homeland Security, the FBI and the 50 states.  In France, overall responsibility lies with the Ministre de l’Interieur – at present Bernard Cazeneuve.

When it became known that Abdelhamid Abaaoud, who was finally identified in the St. Denis assault, a co-author of the terrorist attack of Nov. 13,  had been on the loose for several months, it literally infuriated public opinion.  Flaws in the surveillance system became obvious.  That man was well known by the Intelligence officials, had taken part in four out of six recent aborted attacks, and, at one time, was convicted to 20 years in prison.  He made several round trips to Syria and apparently passed easily through porous airports, including Istanbul.

Close to one million migrants have entered Europe since the beginning of the year and there is no end in sight.  Should the Schengen principle of free circulation of people and goods within the European Union (EU) be suspended?  The Paris correspondent of the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung thinks that, to abandon Schengen, would be a very serious threat to the survival of Europe.

But many disagree with that opinion.

The  “Schengen Space” was created in 1985 for six countries and intended to function in peaceful and normal times when the external frontiers were real.  That is not the case any more.  How can Greece, financially broke, stop or at least control 80 percent of the migrants who have landed on their shores?

The European Commission is trying to alleviate the situation somewhat.  One decision is to apply the PNR (passenger name record) even on EU nationals entering the continent.  The other is to intensify the controls of arms and assault weapons’ spare parts coming mainly from the Balkans.  The idea of depriving bi-national  jihadists of one of their nationalities is also being considered.

On the diplomatic and military scenes, the repercussions of Nov. 13 have been huge.  It seems to have caused a major turn- around in the main powers’ policy – a 180 degree shift, one might say.  No one wanted to admit they were making concessions, but they did.  Suddenly Putin recognized that the Russian plane had indeed been blown up over the Sinai desert. He changed course and started limiting his air strikes to Daesch (ISIS) and no longer to Syrian rebels.   In a recent interview in the courtyard of the Elysée Palace, John Kerry did not mention the ousting of Bachar al-Assad as a preliminary condition to negotiations. The French, who had been the most hawkish among the warring countries prior to 2012, skipped Assad’s removal as well.  It is concentrating the action of its Rafales on Rakka, the self-proclaimed capital of Daech. At this point, none of the main powers are willing to put “boots on the ground.”  The only boots one has seen so far are Kurdish boots.

This will be a marathon week for François Hollande: Cameron on Monday,  Obama on Tuesday, Merkel on Wednesday and Putin on Thursday.  His objective is to build up a single coalition against Daech.

Intense soul-searching and analyses by experts are going on to try and understand a conflict to which we have never before been exposed.   Can we win a war against terrorism?  No, said former minister of foreign Affairs Dominique de Villepin.  We cannot defeat this invisible enemy, which we have helped create.

What is Daesch really and what does it want?  To destabilize our society by increasing the divide between Moslems and our secular values, says Gilles Keppel, professor at Sciences Po and a specialist on Islam.  Philosopher Alain Finkelkraut believes that Daesch is not just reacting to the bombings.  He says that by nature it is a conquering culture and today it is on a crusade to destroy the West.

Nicole Prévost Logan

About the author: Nicole Prévost Logan divides her time between Essex and Paris, spending summers in the former and winters in the latter. She writes a regular column for us from her Paris home where her topics will include politics, economy, social unrest — mostly in France — but also in other European countries. She also covers a variety of art exhibits and the performing arts in Europe. Logan is the author of ‘Forever on the Road: A Franco-American Family’s Thirty Years in the Foreign Service,’ an autobiography of her life as the wife of an overseas diplomat, who lived in 10 foreign countries on three continents. Her experiences during her foreign service life included being in Lebanon when civil war erupted, excavating a medieval city in Moscow and spending a week under house arrest in Guinea.