Nadine Osman

“How can France tackle racial profiling without first addressing race?” inquired France24 in its headline following several days of mass rioting across the country in response to the police killing of an unarmed 17-year-old French Arab boy on June 27. Nahel’s death in the Parisian suburb of Nanterre was the third fatal shooting by police during traffic stops in France this year alone.

There were 13 such shootings last year, three in 2021, and two in 2020. Most of the victims since 2017 have been of black or Arab origin, reinforcing claims by rights groups of systemic racism within French law enforcement agencies. France is home to one of Western Europe’s largest Muslim populations, estimated at 5.7 million.

Embarrassingly for President Emmanuel Macron’s centrist straddling government, the UN rights agency (OHCHR) called on France to face its legacy of racism in policing after the third night of demonstrations.

“This is a moment for the country to seriously address the deep issues of racism and discrimination in law enforcement”, said OHCHR Spokeswoman Ravina Shamdasani. Paris was also called out for religious intolerance, attacks against migrants, and racial profiling by several countries at the UN Council as members carried out France’s Universal Periodic Review (UPR), a mandatory process all countries must undergo every four years.

Nahel’s death has triggered violent unrest across the country, including the torching of 5,000 vehicles, 10,000 dustbins, and nearly 1,000 buildings, including 250 police stations, evoking the state of emergency riots that shook French neighbourhoods in 2005.In October 2005, three teens were heading home when they were suddenly pursued by police.

Although, as subsequently confirmed via an inquiry, they had done nothing wrong, the terrified youngsters hid from the police in an electricity substation. Two of them, Zyed Benna, 17, and Bouna Traoré, 15, were electrocuted. Muhittin Altun, the third victim, sustained horrific life-altering burns.

Initial reporting on the latest incident by police sources was debunked by a video posted online, which led to the widespread protests. According to the police, an officer fired his weapon as Nahel was about to run him over. This version, stating self-defence, was called into question once a video was released revealing that the car was not positioned to harm the police officers and was not driving towards them. “The 50-second sequence, which has gone viral on social media, has literally swept away the language elements initially disseminated by police sources and repeated by some media,” reported Le Monde.

The video shows that the two police officers were on the Mercedes driver’s side. The car was moving off when the police officer fired at close range.

A third passenger aboard the Mercedes testified that Nahel was struck several times with buttstroke rifles, with the third strike forcing the teenager to release the brake pedal, causing the car to move forward, given that the gearbox was automatic. According to BFM TV, this version differs from that presented by the police.

According to Paris police chief Laurent Nuñez, “The driver had first turned off the engine, restarted the vehicle, then left. It was in this context that the police officer used his firearm.”

President Macron called the killing of Nahel, which has been dubbed “France’s George Floyd moment,” “inexcusable” and “inexplicable.” A description Crystal Fleming, a professor of sociology at Stony Brook University in New York, disagrees with: “It is not inexplicable,” she told DW.“It is not a mystery. It is racism.”

Fleming added that the protests and riots following the deadly shots fired by police were “a reaction to French racism, which is linked to colonialism.” Both, she says, are typically denied and erased [from collective memory] by French authorities and politicians, “despite centuries of racial oppression of its minorities and colonised populations.”

Young Black or Arab men are 20 times more likely to be stopped and searched than the general population, according to a 2020 report by France’s own human rights ombudsperson, Défenseur des droits.

However, unlike in the UK and many of its Western counterparts, French authorities are prohibited from collecting official data on race or religion, part of the country’s profound dedication to laïcité (secularism), which holds that all nationals are equally French and discourages adherence to any subgroups whose cultural identities might eclipse one’s “Frenchness”.

The Washington Post’s Rokhaya Diallo described institutional racist violence as “a hallmark of French life since the colonial era.”

“In October 1961, for instance, several hundred Algerians who were protesting curfew measures were massacred by Paris police, their bodies left to drown in the Seine River. This has been a perpetual problem ever since.”

Romaissaa Benzizoune, a New York Times columnist, said days after Nahel’s fatal shooting “Many of the articles focused on the policing angle—Why do the people we hire to keep us safe frequently murder us? —but they miss the race angle entirely. Nahel’s death was not an isolated tragedy in an otherwise peaceful and colourblind society.

Nahel was visibly North African—his parents are from Morocco and Algeria—born in France, a country with an incredibly brutal colonial history in North Africa. In the words of Mounia, Nahel’s mother, the policeman “saw an Arab face, a little kid, and wanted to take his life.”

Anecdotal evidence of police harassment has flooded the internet since Naheel’s shooting. “I have been stopped nearly four times in so-called “random” traffic stops in the last 18 months, and my roommate five times this year alone,” said Mourad M, a 22-year-old student at Paris’ prestigious Sorbonne University.

“There is no record of me being Algerian or Ousmane being Malian, even though our skin colour and appearance are central to why we are repeatedly flagged,” he told The Muslim News.

African Stream, a pan-African digital media organisation, tweeted, ‘France has a problem with race: it refuses to recognise its existence! While a policy of colour blindness—treating everybody equally, regardless of skin colour—sounds great in theory, the way France has been doing it has proved a disaster in practice.’

In an interview with The Muslim News Nabila Ramdani, a French journalist of Algerian descent who specialises in Islamic affairs and the Arab world, branded Macron’s government response to Nahel’s killing “reckless and insensitive.”

“There were muddled statements about a clearly unlawful killing that, as usual, failed to even acknowledge that Nahel, the deceased teenager, came from an ethnic and religious minority background. This was in line with the way the French Republic refuses to acknowledge such differences within a population that is meant to be made up of French citizens who are all the same before the law.”

She added, “Hours before Nahel’s killing, the Interior Minister, Gérald Darmanin, had been speaking against young Muslim women wearing headscarves when they play football. When the news broke that Nahel had been shot dead by one of his policemen, Darmanin did not even acknowledge that Nahel was an Arab Muslim!”

“I know about it from a personal point of view, as an Arab Muslim who has lived in France for many years. People who simply “look like” dark-skinned Muslims are really subjected to aggressive police checks. Nahel’s death appeared to be an extreme example of this,” she said.

“If you can’t even acknowledge a problem, then how do you fix it? France needs to compile statistics about discrimination and related problems to improve a deteriorating situation. There are too many French citizens who suffer discrimination in every walk of life, not least of all in the way they are policed, because of what they look like,” concluded Ramdani.

Photo: Paris, France, June 29: A March in memory of Nahel, 17, who was shot in the chest by police on June 27 in Nanterre, a Paris suburb, during a roadside check.
(Credit: Silanoc/WikiCommons)