Where terror doesn’t pay
Why Marseille seems to have avoided the radicalization that plagues other French cities
MARSEILLE, FRANCE— Only two and a half hours from the site of the Bastille Day bloodshed in Nice, Marseille has all the characteristics of a city prone to radicalization and terrorist attack.
The gritty Phoenician metropolis has France’s poorest neighbourhood and its highest urban murder rate. It’s got a large immigrant population and is a hotbed for smuggling.
Since the beginning of the year, terrorist threats have targeted Marseille’s touristy waterfront, its container port and its soccer matches. But in the end, it was Nice where Mohamed Lahouaiej Bouhlel drove a truck through a throng of families celebrating Bastille Day, killing 84 and injuring more than 200.
This is not because Marseille has better security; Nice has more than twice as many police officers per inhabitant. Nor is it due to Marseille’s distinction as France’s most functional multicultural city. That image was shattered when the overtly racist National Front party took control of the city’s two poorest areas in the last municipal elections.
Instead, Marseille seems to have avoided the radicalization of disaffected youth that has so plagued many of France’s other cities for a cynical reason: there’s no money in terrorism.
“People identify with Marseille because they were welcomed here when nowhere else would take them.” LÉO PURGUETTE POLITICAL COLUMNIST
Highly developed organized crime rings have operated in the city for over a century. Using the port of Marseille, they manage a massive flow of drugs, weapons and counterfeit goods into France and the rest of Europe. Experts ranging from local politicians to community social workers say these criminal networks recruit the same impoverished, immigrant youth that might otherwise be tempted by propaganda from Daesh, also known as ISIS and ISIL. “Demographically speaking, Marseille should be a rich recruiting ground for Islamic radicalization,” said Olivier Roy, a professor at the European University Institute in Florence who studies Western jihadism. “But the delinquency protects them from terrorism. Marseille is unique in that sense.”
“While it’s true that Salafism (a particularly extreme interpretation of Islam) is on the rise, the jihadists don’t come from these mosques. The proof is the biographies of the terrorists who’ve struck France in the last 18 months: They drink, they’re violent, they don’t pray . . . They’re petty criminals who all of a sudden adopt the ideology of Daesh.”
In Marseille, the ruthlessly run criminal networks maintain discipline among the youth, said Badra Latreche, a community social worker who runs youth programs in some of the city’s poorest areas. In 2005, when hundreds of thousands of cars were burned during a month of rioting across the country, Marseille was the only city that stayed quiet. “It’s not good for business,” she said. Hiding from the blazing sun in the shadows of the towers of Cité Consolat, a large public housing project, Latreche and a handful of young activity leaders lead games for local children. There’s soccer, badminton and a giant game of connect four, standing a metre-and-a-half tall.
“The charbonniers (drug dealers) get them young. At 14 or 15, they’re already selling hashish. We have to start younger to get them away from that, so they don’t end up shot dead at 20,” says Latreche, handing out juice boxes and cookies.
One of the program staff, Said Youssouf, grew up in the projects and found himself in jail before he had finished high school.
“When I was little, this didn’t exist,” he said while DJing hip-hop over the loudspeakers.
As part of his probation, Youssouf began volunteering with community programs and was soon hired for a paid position. He was surprised by questions about Islamic radicalization, almost as if the idea had never crossed his mind.
“The kids from Marseille, they see things differently than youth else- where. They’re focused on business. They’re not interested in religion,” he said. “The economic crisis that is spreading across France, it’s been here a long time. People are used to the poverty.”
After a little more reflection, he added: “You know, even us — tough kids from the cité — we’re afraid of Daesh. We’re their enemy too, because we’re not good Muslims.”
Unlike other cities in France, where the housing projects are located in the suburbs — or banlieues — in Marseille, they’re inside city limits. They still suffer from the high crime and poverty rates as cités elsewhere, but they benefit from the psychological effect of feeling included, said Léo Purguette, a political columnist at the local left-leaning daily, La Marseillaise.
Inclusion, he said, has long been Marseille’s most attractive feature as it accepted wave after wave of immigration.
“People identify with Marseille because they were welcomed here when nowhere else would take them,” Purguette said.
The largest immigrant community is now North African, but there are significant populations of Roma, Armenians, Kurds and people from the Comoro Islands, he said. While they may not intermingle too much, they coexist peacefully, for the most part.
This is facilitated by a strong social safety net, the product of the city’s long communist history that set up public services and programs for the working poor, Purguette said.
It’s also helped by a solidarity between different identities, often called the “Marseille model” or the “mosaic city.” But unlike Canada’s celebration of multiculturalism, Marseille’s unity is built upon adversity.
The southern city has a terrible reputation, and the rest of France generally avoids it, seeing it as too dangerous and dirty. But this suspicion has bred a fierce local pride, and the Marseillais are defiantly defensive of their town.
That attitude was put on display this week, when a Daesh video on social media named Marseille as the target of the next attack. A video response, recorded by a nameless man in the streets of the city, threatened Daesh if it ever came to the city. The response, predictably, went viral.
“That pride brings us together. But this isn’t a vaccination, the extremists are gaining ground,” Purguette said.
The Front National party took over the municipal government in two poor parts of the city, and has implemented a bizarre form of civic punishment that runs contrary to New York’s “broken windows” theory of policing.
In the 1990s, the Big Apple cracked down on the most minor, visible crimes as a way of sending a zero tolerance message. In 2016, Marseille’s city government refuses to repair any vandalized public facilities, under the pretext that criminals shouldn’t benefit from their crimes.
Salafist mosques are gaining in popularity, he said, not the least because people turn to them instead of the local government for services.
“Our equilibrium is very fragile,” Purguette said. “It’s working now, but if there’s a spark . . .”
At opposite ends of the French Riviera, the contrast between Nice and Marseille couldn’t be starker. While expensive perfume wafts through the air in Nice, Marseille smells like fish. In Nice, women sunbathe topless along the busy waterfront promenade, but in Marseille, they’re more likely to wear a niqab as a fashion statement. In Nice, young men accost pedestrians to convince them to dine at a restaurant. In Marseille, the drug dealers wish customers “Bon appétit.”
“For all its problems, Marseille makes out pretty well,” said Nora Mebarek, a representative on the regional council. “The poor aren’t isolated; soccer brings us together.”
But Marseille’s multiculturalism doesn’t jive with an increasingly strong demand for secularism across France, exacerbated by the terrorist attacks of the last 18 months.
“France has a very conformist secular discourse, and Marseille doesn’t fit in,” she said.
The secular ideal of a “republican citizen” may have provided a solid premise for social peace when everyone looked alike and had similar backgrounds, Mebarek said. But as immigration brings in more ethnic diversity, this model of society is breaking down.
“We judge people’s Frenchness on the degree to which they reject their ethnic and religious background. This doesn’t work. It just allows frustrations to accumulate.”
Rather than the rest of France moving toward a more Marseillais model, Mebarek sees the multiculturalism fostered in the city slowly eroding.
“They want us to be more like them? But their model isn’t working. Why would we want to be like that?”
In the days after the Nice attacks, summer festivals across France have been cancelled and 10,000 army reservists have been called up to help with security operations. Everyone is expecting another attack. Could Marseille be next?
On the cobblestoned quais of Marseille’s Old Harbour, Raf Lefada leans against his pushcart selling multicoloured bars of soap to tourists.
He says the threats of terrorist attack aren’t new. He grew up next to a synagogue and remembers being evacuated repeatedly by police when bomb threats were called in. The 1990s saw terrorists from Algeria carry out shootings and bombings, not to mention the Basque and Corsican separatists, who also waged an armed struggle in France.
“The enemy is new but the problem of terrorism has always been there,” Lefada said. “People just have short memories.”