France grieves
The world grieves for France. Again. The country suffered yet another massacre of its people last week, this time in the seaside resort city of Nice.
Initial reports indicated that 84 people were dead and another 202 injured. As people had gathered to watch fireworks on France’s national holiday, a 31-year-old Tunisian native mowed them down in a rented truck. The assailant, Mohamed Lahouaiej Bouhlel, died after police pursued and shot him. Though he had some incidents of petty crime in his past, there was no immediate suggestion that he had been involved with terrorist groups. Yet he was heavily armed. While there is still much that is not known about this latest atrocity, French President Francois Hollande immediately connected the rampage with a larger campaign of hostility. It has been a dreadful few months around the world. We have witnessed massacres at airports and nightclubs, viciously fatal bombs in the streets and political destabilization. No nation seems completely safe. But France seems to be singled out. This is the third massacre of civilians in 18 months on French soil.
On a smaller, though still profoundly ugly, scale there were seven other attacks in France between Charlie Hebdo and now. Many of them displayed the same kind of primitive weaponry as Bouhlel showed this week: A man beheading his boss and trying to blow up a gas plant in Saint-Quentin-Fallavier; a Moroccan-born man with a meat cleaver attacking a police station in Paris.
It is probably not an accident, either, that the savage attack in Nice happened on Bastille Day, a day that commemorates the French Revolution and the new society it birthed, one that prizes the concept of individual freedom in a world in which all are equal. But Islamic extremists see France’s resolute secularism as godlessness, its defence of free speech as an imposition of blasphemy.
The next test for France will come in the political arena. Critics have called French intelligence fragmented, under-resourced and yet mired in bureaucracy. An investigation by the French parliament into last year’s terrorist attacks on Paris described a “global failure” of the country’s ability to gather information on potential terrorists. The French government will now be under pressure to provide a single U.S-style counterterrorism agency, or risk ceding credibility to its right-wing political critics. Meanwhile, the massacre in Nice sticks one more knife into an already ailing Europe. Free movement of European citizens between states, a key defining feature of the European Union, is both a blessing and a curse. It becomes deeply problematic when a country needs to exercise control of who comes in. There are also other concerns about inadequate security communication between states, as Europe struggles to manage the soaring threat of violence coming from the upheaval in the Middle East. As we in North America already know, an increase in fear of attack leads to more government surveillance of everyone, which in turn strips all citizens of their cherished rights. The individual liberty for which France is so well known is under a much darker shadow today.