The Enemy Within

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Wednesday, Sep. 19, 2001
French Prime Minister Lionel Jospin has insisted that, "We're combating terrorism, but we're not combating the Islamic world." In Washington yesterday, President Jacques Chirac objected to talk of a 'war' on terrorism and advised President Bush of the danger of lumping the perpetrators of last week's attacks with Muslims as a whole: "It would be falling into the trap laid by the terrorists," said Chirac. France is home to some 5 million Muslims — the largest population in western Europe — and battled throughout the 90's against terrorist campaigns that now look like prototypes for fundamentalist attacks within western democracies.

France's Muslim population is made up of three distinct ethnic groups: north Africans, black Africans and Turks. They arrived in three waves of immigration, the first of which began in the 1950s. North Africans (Algerians, Moroccans and Tunisians) are the biggest group, with Algerians dominant within it. For decades, Islam was invisible here. Its believers occupied the lowest rungs of the economic and social ladder, lived in peripheral housing projects and practised their faith in improvised prayer-halls. They were divided by country of origin and continued the customs of their native villages.

That situation began to change in the late 80's. By then, it had become obvious that the first-generation immigrants and their offspring would never return to their countries of origin — even though they and their families were living in poverty on the margins of French society. Exposed during their schooling to France's republican ideals of "Liberte, Egalite, Fraternite", their children began to feel that they were victims of injustice. The stage was set for the defining phenomenon of the 90's: the "reconversion" of young second- and third-generation immigrants to a more radical Islam than that of their parents as an source of identity in a society from which they felt excluded.

The rise of this new, assertive young Islam in France is a sign of the increasing integration of France's Muslim population. The country is having to invent a way of living with what — for France — is a new religion. Increasingly, the country's mosques are attended by a cross-section of blacks, north Africans and even converted white French. The leading theorist of this new Euro-Islam is Tariq Ramadan. Ramadan proposes abandoning the classical Islamic theological distinction between the land of Islam and the land of unbelievers. In a globalized age, he maintains that Muslims can practise their religion satisfactorily in traditionally non-Muslim places like Europe and so need to develop their own religious authorities, diluting their links to the Middle East.

Over the past decade, the main source of terrorism in France has been Algeria. When Algeria's military canceled the second round of elections in 1991, fearing victory by the fundamentalist FIS, the first to take up arms in response were the legendary "Afghans": veteran moujahadin who had fought the Russians in Afghanistan. Afghanistan-trained fighters took care of the military side, while Saudi-trained clerics dealt with the propaganda.

The first attempt to export terrorism into France took place at Christmas 1994. The chosen vehicle was an airplane. Four moujahadin from the GIA (Armed Islamic Group), armed with dynamite and AK47's, hijacked an Air France plane on the tarmac at the airport in Algiers. Although they began by demanding the release of jailed FIS leaders, the men soon demanded clearance to fly to Paris. At a refuelling stop in Marseille, they demanded three times the amount of fuel required for a flight to Paris. French anti-terrorist police stormed the plane and killed the highjackers during the Marseille stopover. Intelligence sources explained that the highjackers had intended to use the plane as a bomb to attack Paris. The GIA is known to have links with bin Laden's Al Qaeda. During the next wave of terrorism to hit France, in the summer of 1995, the operatives were French. Eight bomb attacks left seven dead and over 130 injured. They were carried out by disaffected north African youths with a history of petty crime.

France quickly recognized the danger of this enemy within. Since the late 90's, the government has gone out of its way to integrate Islam into French life, rather than treating it as a menacing foreign influence. If France's Muslims see no opposition between being French and Muslim, they are less likely to be used by foreign troublemakers.