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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.

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.”

T

he news of Nahel Merzouk’s murder by the police took me back to my primary school days in France. In the early 1990s, as a pupil in a public school in Forbach, Metz, I saw what it meant to be excluded and isolated.

That is why, for me, Nahel’s death was not the first death of a migrant in France, nor would it be the last. In 2005, for example, two young men met a fate similar to Nahel’s. Zyed Benna and Bouna Traoré were running from the police after a football match when they hit an electricity transformer in Paris and were electrocuted. There were riots afterwards. It happened again: Nahel Merzouk was killed by the police and riots followed immediately afterwards.

So, what is the basic problem? What is the root cause of the killing of people like Nahel and the events that follow?

The recruitment of labor from the colonial territories: Opening the door to migrants

In order to answer this question properly, it is necessary to look at the process of colonialism or more precisely to review the history of colonialism briefly. In this sense, colonialism,  which started in the 15th century, is the work of Western countries. The slave trade from Africa and the concept of the “attack on Africa” emerged in this context. Today, colonialism has changed its form.

Although it started a little later than Portuguese-Spanish and British colonialism, French colonialism was exceptionally  brutal. After the British Empire, the French colonial empire was the second largest in the world, reaching its peak and expansion between 1919 and 1939. The French colonial territory, including Algeria, amounted to between 8% and 10% of the world’s territory, and continued to exist until the 1960s.

The French treated the peoples of their colonies much more cruelly than other colonizers; those who were not killed, were treated as an underclass. As a result, the French colonies became very poor.  For example, the British colonies of New Zealand and Australia are now very wealthy states, while Algeria, which was subjected to French exploitation, is a poor and troubled country.

The history of French colonialism in Africa is a human tragedy. Starting with the colonization of Algeria in 1830, France began to establish a new colonialism in Africa. The aim was ruthless: to “civilize” African peoples through language and religion. For the French, as for all colonialists, this civilizing goal was, as Jules Ferry, the leading advocate of colonialism, openly declared, “The rights of the superior races over the inferior races.” By the beginning of the 20th century, French colonization gradually extended to most of North, West, and Central Africa, including Mauritania, Senegal, Guinea, Mali, Côte d’Ivoire, Benin, Niger, Chad, and the Central African Republic.

Colonialism, especially French colonialism, gave way to “labor migrations” after World War II. From then onwards, it was a question of providing labor from the colonial territories struggling for independence for the reconstruction of Europe and France, in particular. It should be recalled that, although France withdrew from the countries it had colonized, it imposed two conditions on its withdrawal: first, French should be the official language of the country and the language of education, and second, public education should be compulsory.

By creating the “Community of French-Speaking Countries,” France prevented its former colonies from severing their ties with France. For example, French is the official language of 27 of the 54 countries in Africa. As a result, France had the power to easily carry out many “labor migrations” from its former colonies. Instead of the slaves of the past, especially in Algeria, now, there were the modern-day “workers.”

Slavery underwent a transformation process and took the form of a labor force, but both share a common goal: to exploit the world, and Africa in particular, for the welfare of the West or France in particular. For the continuity of the state’s welfare, migrant labor was brought into the system by extending colonial logic to this new era.

Positioning migrants: Assimilation, integration or segregation?

Despite the importance of migrants as a labor force in the eyes of France and Western countries, the positioning of migrants is somewhat complex. The complexity concerns whether to assimilate, integrate, or segregate migrants.

Assimilation was to be easy in so far as people of migrant origin had to abandon their own culture and become “civilized.” This was already a central step in the colonial experience. If integration were to take place, the situation would be a little more difficult as people with a migrant background would have to be integrated into the existing culture while preserving their own culture.

This means accepting to be on the same level as people with a migrant background—in other words, a step against the colonial logic or the “superior race” mentality. There was also the possibility of segregating those with a migrant background, i.e., making them live in places that were separate and disconnected from society. After all, it was not appropriate for people of migrant origin to breathe the same air as people of the “superior race” and, therefore, migrants belonged in ghettos.

The ghettos, known as “suburbs,” became the address of migrants in France. What was the aim? To assimilate under the guise of integration; if that was not possible, then to exclude migrants, or to ghettoize by segregation.

The suburbs in France have many problems. Their main problem, however, is social isolation or social exclusion. Social exclusion is when a person or group, for one reason or another, is deprived of something; people of migrant origins living in the suburbs in France are deprived of many human rights simply because of their background. For example, the suburbs are areas where even ambulances refuse to go in case of emergency.

Those who live in the suburbs are known to develop their own methods to survive, which they retain even if they later move out of the suburbs. When they face injustice by the police and others, Paris is set on fire.

Being a victim of segregation or a reflection of the colonial spirit: The murder of Nahel Merzouk

The root cause of setting the city ablaze lies in the fact that people of migrant origin, who are not welcome to integrate and cannot assimilate as an extension of the colonial spirit, are segregated from society and subjected to social exclusion.

Τhe political, economic, and social rights that are automatically acquired through citizenship do not apply in practice to people with a migrant background, who are considered “incomplete (second-class) citizens.” Worse still, instead of having rights, having a migrant background is automatically tantamount to being a criminal, making people with a migrant background the usual suspects: in the case of theft, traffic offences, drug dealing, manslaughter, or similar crimes, having a migrant background is tantamount to being guilty without the need for any evidence.

It is precisely because of this humiliating and exclusionary treatment as “incomplete citizens” that in another French city, a young person demanding justice for Nahel stated, “Police violence happens every day, especially if you are Arab or Black.” It is partly because of this “incomplete citizen” status that people of migrant origin, and especially young people, distrust the police and have no faith in justice or law enforcement. As a result, the “resistance” or “escape” of young people, who are in a state of constant stress and, in the long run, resentment, often ends in death.

Nahel’s death is neither the first nor will it be the last. In the West, and especially in France, human rights do not apply to people of migrant origins who have gone from being slaves to migrant laborers.