Can a Person Die During a Traffic Identity Check? Death and Protests in France
Two centuries later, the French Revolution's slogan "Liberté, Egalité, Fraternité" does not apply to all French people.
Police intervene with tear gas shells to disperse the protesters as people gather to protest the death of 17-year-old Nahel, who was shot in the chest by police in Nanterre on June 27, in Paris, France on June 29, 2023. Photo by Anadolu Images.
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n June 27, 17-year-old Nahel M of Algerian descent was killed in France for fleeing such a routine procedure. According to the testimony of the two motorcycle police officers who carried out the identity check, Nahel was shot in the heart in self-defense. In the video footage, described by the interior minister as “shocking” and confirmed by the French news agency AFP, one of the police officers can be seen pointing a gun at Nahel M while the other can be heard saying “You will be shot in the head.”
Nahel did not have a driver’s license and had been out with a friend in a borrowed car. Two weeks earlier, Alhoussein Camara, a 19-year-old French teenager of Guinean origin, was killed by police during an identity check on his way to work in the southwestern town of Angoulême. According to French media reports, he “had a regular job, a driver’s license, and his car was insured.” Since 2022, 13 people have been killed by police during routine identity checks in France.
After Nahel M’s death, a silent protest, attended by his mother, turned into a violent demonstration in a few hours and gripped the whole country. France witnessed a riot of this magnitude for the first time in 18 years. In 2005, in the Paris suburb of Clichy-sous-Bois, 15-year-old Bouna Traore and 17-year-old Zyed Benna were returning from a soccer match when they ran away from a police identity check, drove into a transformer, and burned to death.
In the last 50 years in France, children and teenagers, on foot, ridding a scooter or in a car, have tried to evade police checks and died: Youssef Khaïf (Mantes-la-Jolie, 1991), Malik Oussekine (Paris, 1986), Lahouari Ben Mohamed (Marseille, 1980), Mohamed Diab (Versailles, 1972). Following the killing of these young men, who were all of Arab or African origin, there were protests and outbreaks of violence.
Since the riots in the suburbs of Lyon in the 1980s, in the last 40 years, there have been no more than ten suburban riots in France; some local, some in big cities, and the largest in 2005. Both in the past and now, people in the suburbs have not been able to organize themselves like other social protest movements in the country, nor have they been able to turn their reactions into permanent political pressure.
Romain Gavras’s movie Athena, which was broadcast on Netflix last year, ended with the message that those who burn and destroy end up burning and destroying themselves and their relatives. Similarly, quoted on a front-page interview in the newspaper Liberation, a father who participated in the weeks-long events of 2005, said to his son, now involved in Nahel’s protests and violence: “I swear to you, this is not helping anything.”
Of course, it is not acceptable or excusable to disrupt public order, no matter how justified the cause. Yet, this is not a method of protest and rioting specific to the suburbs or to young people of Muslim origin or Black youth. This time, suburban youth have led a popular uprising; such uprisings have taken place in the streets since the French Revolution in 1789, which laid the foundations of the Republic.
Suburban youth were not present in the spiral of violence of burning, destroying, and looting that accompanied the protests that began in November 2018, which lasted for months in response to the rise in energy prices. However, the current suburban youth uprising has been joined by the yellow vests, extreme leftists, and those angry with government policies. According to official data, more than 6,000 vehicles and 12,400 garbage bins were set on fire, 147 attacks on municipal buildings and libraries were recorded, and 3,700 people were detained, a third of them children.
Video: ATHENA directed by Romain Gavras | Official Trailer | Netflix
Silent Muslim Minority
Despite the presence of urban ghettos; intolerance, discrimination, and racism towards Muslims; colonization; and all forms of historical and current injustices, French Muslims comprise a silent population of 7-8 million. Nahel, who was killed on June 27 for evading a French police identity search, is one of them. He is the child of a family which emigrated from Algeria, colonized by the French 41 years after the French Revolution and ruled until 1962. He was from the Algeria of Frantz Fanon, a Christian from Martinique, one of France’s overseas frontiers, who wrote about the psychopathology of colonialism in more than ten works such as The Wretched of the Earth.
Two centuries later, the Revolution’s slogan “Liberty, Equality, Fraternity” engraved on the top of public buildings does not apply to all French people. French Muslims are French, but just as in Algeria where they lived publicly as half-citizens on their own soil, in practice they are not fully French today. They have always been seen as second- or third-class citizens in the land where they migrated in order to survive, and have been subjected to almost every kind of discrimination.
According to a study published in Zadig magazine, the Republic gives which districts “four times fewer resources than elsewhere in terms of the number of inhabitants.” The whole country knows that when looking for a job, a name like Muhammed, Ali, or Ayşe is an impediment, and that no matter how successful these young people are, they cannot even approach many big companies.
There are millions of silent people like the mother in Gavras’s Athena, whose 13-year-old child is killed just like Nahel and who weeps in silent prayer with her neighbors with an imam at their head. They too are worried about the youth rebellion, no matter what happens. If these people were to suddenly leave the country, France’s hospitals, the post office, the subway, and the train company RATP would collapse and the whole system would be paralyzed.
The movie mentions them for a few minutes, but it does not focus on them. Instead, it focuses on a small minority among these millions of people and their anger: Karim, who attacks the police station with a Molotov cocktail after the news that his brother was killed by the police and starts a rebellion with his friends; his older brother Abdel, who fought for the French army in Mali; and his older brother Moktar, a drug dealer.
Abdel, who initially tried to suppress Karim and the rebels, was accused of being a “harki,” a traitor, by his sister, and he confronted Karim. The only historical reference in the movie appears indirectly in this scene. During the Algerian National Liberation Front’s war against France on the road to independence in Algeria, Muslims who stayed loyal to the French army under the mistaken impression that they were caught between two fires were called “harki.”
As for the brother, Moktar, the drug dealer, it is no secret that in some neighborhoods in the suburbs it is not easy to manage the tensions between crime and law enforcement. In many suburbs there is drug trafficking, petty crime, and gangs. Many of the young people involved in these incidents have no ties to their homeland, do not recognize the authority of their parents, and even threaten to turn to the police if their parents pressure them, reminding them that they are in France.
They are a small minority, often trying to exist in a state of hatred and resentment. But the aggression and impunity of law enforcement in France is no secret. The trial of two police officers charged in the 2005 riots centered on a police radio statement that “if they enter a transformer, there is little chance of getting out alive.” Both were acquitted in 2015.
Moreover, a new law passed in 2017 authorizes the police to use weapons in five controversial circumstances in case of failure to obey a “stop” warning. In addition, young people often evade identity checks because they are bored of being subjected to them and want to outsmart the police fueled by the anger they feel towards them.
What remains after the riots in the suburbs end is the image of the police with shields, batons, and tear gas canisters, on one side, and the youth throwing objects at them, burning cars, fireworks, and mortars. Whether reporting favorably or against the riots, they are always reported with the same headlines, analyzed the same way, and after the events are over, they are not talked about until the next one. Not only according to the far right, but also according to society at large, the suburban youth are the most likely group to be scapegoated for such incidents, and they are sidelined until the next incident.
In today’s world where reality and fiction are blurred, the movie Athena is being revisited on social media and in the French press, with some going as far as to claim that the movie is an inspiration for young people. In addition, the murderer in the movie is not a police officer, as initially believed, but a far-right militant wearing a police uniform.
Karim, who never believed he was a police officer and started the rebellion, eventually loses his life in the film, while the film labels Abdel, who has won the admiration of the French state and integrated into the system, a potential criminal: after Karim’s death, Abdel is driven by this pain to organize the continuation of the rebellion.
Even though President Macron introduced some of the most Islamophobic legislation in Europe during his first term and Muslims have become a minority in France that is routinely targeted and discriminated against, Macron has shown restraint on this occasion. During the 2005 events, Sarkozy, who was minister of the interior at the time, called the protesters a “rabble” and talked about purging them.
On the contrary, in his first statement after Nahel’s murder, Macron strongly condemned the incident, calling it “unforgivable.” As for his electoral rivals, on the far left, Jean-Luc Mélenchon refused to “call for calm”; far-right Eric Zemmour likened the suburban riots to the “prodromes of a civil war”; and, on the right, Les Republicains president Éric Ciotti called the rioters “barbarians.” Far-right theorists such as Renaud Camus have long labeled them “invaders” and their smear propaganda goes as far as arguing that “they will colonize us.”
An article in Le Monde stated, “Although many forget and don’t want to see it, what has led to the violence in recent days is indeed a sense of injustice that makes one weep.” The banner on the Paris ring road outside the Parc des Princes stadium simply reads, “God rest Nahel’s soul.”
