Stricken yet defiant, Paris confronts terror’s shadow
PARIS— Darkness falling on the City of Light.
The Eiffel Tower, usually luminously ablaze, blinkered its 20,000 bulbs and blinked briefly to black Thursday night. Like a flame, extinguished. Black, for mourning, as the shadow of terrorism lies menacingly across this bewildered city and this stricken nation.
But then suddenly flashing back to sparkly radiance. As Paris, defiant, has so vigorously repelled the objectives of fear and coercion and homicidal religious righteousness unleashed in the massacre at a satirical weekly magazine.
Who are they, these audacious gunmen? That’s now well enough known, as the suspects have been identified. Where are they? In the wind. On the run. Eluding, as of early Friday morning, a massive police dragnet concentrated around a rural village 80 kilometres northeast of here.
Their hijacked car abandoned, the pair of brothers fled on foot into a densely wooded area, according to the latest reports. Thousands of hectares of forest criss-crossed by footpaths, studded with hiding places.
But if they’re breathing, if their bodies were emitting heat in the cold night, they might show up on thermal imaging sensors brought to the dramatic manhunt by France’s military, as helicopters buzzed overhead.
This city, however, has barely had a chance to exhale amidst the mounting melodrama. Too many questions, worries, hang pendulously.
Paris is on edge. But it doesn’t want to be. It’s as if resilience, courage in the face of trauma, is all that citizens can control while unprecedented events swirl around them.
A couple of miles from the Eiffel Tower, pinpricks of light, hundreds and hundreds, flickered in the cool and damp evening air. Tiny votive candles lit in requiem for the dozen journalists and cartoonists and police officers slain in Wednesday morning’s stunning assault on the Charlie Hebdo offices.
For the second night in a row, a massive crowd gathered spontaneously in the Place de la République — citadel of the French Republic’s democratic values — standing shoulder to shoulder at the feet of Marianne, the personification of France, black arm band fastened to the statue’s arm, as younger demonstrators clambered over the monument, leading the assembled in full-throated cheers: WE ARE NOT AFRAID! CHARLIE ISN’T DEAD! I AM CHARLIE! Counter-chants of bravado against the declaration made by one of the assailants, as he fled the scene of carnage: “We have killed Charlie Hebdo!”
No, they haven’t. The magazine will publish next Wednesday, as their murdered editor, Stéphane Charbonnier, and his staff would have wanted — a million issues set to roll out, more than ever before. Their lampooning voice, in words and drawings, will not be silenced. Radical Islam is not off-limits. It has, rather, been exposed yet again for the villainy at its merciless heart.
Around the République monument — liberté, égalité, fraternité, France’s national motto, inscribed on its plinth — poignant memorials have sprung up, piles of crayons and markers and pens and paintbrushes, the tools of the cartoonist’s trade, as understood by the public.
Revulsion perhaps best expressed in an Australian editorial caricaturist yesterday, of a terrorist standing over a dead cartoonist’s body: “He drew first!”
In the morning, an expression of solidarity at a rally organized nearby by France’s journalism unions, in one of the few countries where trade unions still have political traction. At high noon, on what was declared a national day of mourning, the bells of Notre Dame Cathedral tolling in solemn lamentation, hundreds prayed for the victims, including the eight wounded, four critically. Flags throughout the country flew at half-mast. And a minute of silence — a moment of national unity — was marked throughout the city, where even the Metro subway cars came to a halt in the tunnels and commuters stood to honour the dead. In schools, children hushed themselves, wide-eyed by events they may or may not understand. One Muslim child, captured by a photographer, holding a sign that read: “Not in my name.”
France has not given any indication of cracking open along fault lines of religious divisions. At the Place de la République, there were women wearing hijabs, warmly greeted. Although just-below-the-surface ruptures may shortly be bored open by the country’s far right politicians. “Our culture was attacked,” National Front leader Marine Le Pen, stated yesterday. “War has been declared on our way of life.”
Then she called for a referendum on the death penalty, which was abolished in France in 1981.
This is no war. This was a skirmish — with obviously widely radiating repercussions — as Islamic militants shift their operational tactics from the spectacular of 9/11 to smaller targeted missions that can engender just as much dread: the armed and fanatic lone wolf, or known wolf, as one of the brother suspects was convicted for aiding and abetting others to join jihadist movements, sentenced to 18 months in 2008.
This is, however — and despite the firm pronouncements of defiance — a city of leeriness and confusion and anxiety.
Police sirens wail and it might be nothing or it could be something. Police vans burned rubber on the streets as rain fell all day in Paris. Hundreds of extra police and army troops have been added to the security ranks, yet another metropolis marked by the presence of the military in its midst — 200 soldiers from parachute regiments across the country brought to the capital.
Security officials fear copycat attacks or a secondary ambush. Could it really be possible that the perpetrators of the Charlie Hebdo operation — and it looks very much like an operation, carefully orchestrated, with a getaway plan attached — would so carelessly leave a personal ID card in the vehicle they abandoned afterward, leading immediately and directly to the French-born brothers, and police releasing photos of the suspects: Cherif and Said Kouachi, 32 and 34? The brothers were born in eastern Paris to Algerian parents who died when the boys were still children. They grew up in an orphanage in the western city of Rennes.
Are they amateurs or trained jihadists?
While the enhanced security presence is necessary to protect Muslim places of worship as required — at least two mosques attacked in France over the past 48 hours, as well as a kebab shop, though no injuries were reported — the core fear is that this event was not plotted as a oneoff. Or, even more chaotically and impossible to avert, that other likeminded malcontents will be inspired to launch their own assaults.
A fever pitch was hit Thursday morning when two police officers were gunned down in the southern Montrouge district of Paris by a man wearing a bulletproof vest, who fled. The female officer was killed. Last night, police were maintaining they did not believe the two events were linked, but a second terrorism investigation was opened.
Nine people had been detained by late Thursday, though it’s unclear what their connection might be to either attack.
Police convoys carrying heavily armoured and masked anti-terrorism units raced to the scene around the villages of Corcy and Longpoint, holding reporters back four kilometres from the district of their sweep. The fugitives had struck a service station nearby earlier in the day, robbing the operator of food and fuel, which further suggests they may not have been adequately prepared for an effective getaway. Some reports cast the men as operates of Al Qaeda in Yemen, others to the Islamic State. Both were definitely known to police and each had been on no-fly lists.
The helter-skelter nature of their escape is in marked contrast to the methodical orderliness of their butchery at Charlie Hebdo, where they attacked in the middle of the newspaper’s weekly editorial meeting, apparently knowing in advance who would be in attendance and proceeding as if operating from a manifest list: calling out the names of those they intended to kill, shooting them in bursts, yet separating out some of the women, as one of the survivors told French magazine L’Humanité afterward. Freelance reporter Sigolene Vinson, who’d gone in Wednesday to attend the editorial meeting around the old U-shaped wooden desk, said the men had spared her, one of them stating: “I’m not killing you because you are a woman and we don’t kill women, but you have to convert to Islam.”
All for cartoons, for parody of the prophet Muhammad that, as in Denmark before, aggrieved the righteously radical, Charlie Hebdo a thorn in the side of pious Muslims as it was to Christian evangelicals and right-wing French politicians and any other target that seized its gleeful imagination.
“The lions of Islam have taken revenge on the heretics in the name of our Prophet,” IS said approvingly in a released statement.
Nearly three centuries ago, French writer and philosopher Voltaire encapsulated the freedom of expression that such jihadists cannot abide: “I do not agree with what you have to say, but I’ll defend to the death your right to say it.” Rosie DiManno usually appears Monday, Wednesday, Friday and Saturday.