Power v. Disorder
How a string of ‘isolated’
attacks put France on high alert
©
Georges Gobet, AFP | Police officers patrol the Christmas market in Nantes on
December 23, 2014
Latest
update : 2014-12-23
A spate of
spectacular but seemingly unrelated attacks on police and civilians in France
has jarred nerves in a country that has been singled out by extremists calling
for "lone wolf" action.
Following the
successive attacks in Joué-les-Tours, Dijon and Nantes, the French government announced on Tuesday it
would deploy up to 300
extra troops to patrol public areas over the Christmas period.
The spate of attacks began on Saturday when a
man was shot dead after walking into a police station in the central town of
Joué-les-Tours and stabbing three officers with a knife, leaving two of them
seriously injured.
The man, a Burundian national who had converted
to Islam, allegedly shouted “Allahu Akbar” (God is greatest) during the attack
and had posted a flag of the Islamic State (IS) group on Facebook prior to the
assault, prompting concerns that the attack may have been motivated by Islamic
extremism.
The next day, a
driver with a history of mental illness deliberately ran down pedestrians in
several different locations in the eastern city of Dijon, also crying out
“Allahu Akbar”, and injuring 10 people in the rampage.
And on Monday, a man ploughed his van through a
crowded Christmas market in the western city of Nantes, killing one person and
injuring nine, before repeatedly stabbing himself with a knife.
Prosecutors swiftly described the last two
incidents as “isolated”, ruling out a terrorist link. Still, the government
called an emergency cabinet meeting for Tuesday morning, while urging the
public not to panic.
“We have to protect and reassure the French
people,” Prime Minister Manuel Valls said after the meeting, announcing the
deployment of extra troops.
“We also have to protect public officials (who
are) designated targets for some terrorist movements,” he said.
The radical Islamic State group that controls
swathes of Iraq and Syria has repeatedly urged Muslims around the world to kill
"in any manner" those from countries involved in a coalition fighting
its jihadists, singling out the French.
Among instructions detailing how to kill
civilians or military personnel was to "run them over with your car."
‘A temptation to
categorise’
While at least two of the three recent attacks
in France followed a similar modus operandi, experts have warned against
lumping them together.
“We reason by making categorisations and we try
to make sense out of events by categorising them,” said Gérald Bronner, a
sociologist at the Université Paris Diderot and author of “The Democracy of the
Gullible”.
“The recent attacks in Dijon and Nantes - with a
car ploughing into crowds - make people think of similar attacks in Israel and
we have a tendency to want to interpret incidents that resemble each other.
It’s a mechanism that is far from stupid, but that can refer to totally
different facts,” Bronner told FRANCE 24.
Roland Coutanceau, a criminal psychologist, said
there were significant differences between the three assailants responsible for
the attacks.
“Yes, the first (attacker) can be qualified as a
terrorist because you can decode some kind of diehard conviction in his life,”
he said. But, Coutanceau added, the second attacker was merely a mentally
unstable man suffering from psychosis.
“The third remains a bit of a question mark. We
see the same criminal mechanism that we find with so-called mass murderers,” he
said, referring to the perpetrator’s self-inflicted stab wounds after he ran
down Christmas shoppers. “But that doesn’t necessarily follow a terrorist
logic.”
Copycats
So why did some politicians and media outlets
rush to speak of terrorist attacks even as prosecutors and experts cautioned
against such a line of inquiry in at least two of the three incidents?
According to Bronner, we are naturally
influenced by events that occur near each other in time, “prompting us to seek
one explanation that can be applied to all.”
“And considering the competition that exists
between different media today, there is a temptation to deliver the most
spectacular news. It was almost as though some commentators were disappointed
when terrorism was ruled out in the Dijon case,” he said.
Coutanceau said the fact that there were as many
as three attacks did suggest there may have been a copycat element to them.
“Media coverage of the Dijon incident – in which
pedestrians were run down by a car – might have inspired the attacker in
Nantes, without the (two) acts bearing the same criminal dynamics,” he said.
“The acts are of very different nature, so one
shouldn’t see them as part of an epidemic or a contagious trend.”
But despite the calls to distinguish between the
three attacks, some politicians may believe they have more to gain by ignoring
that advice.
On Tuesday, Florian
Philippot, the vice-president of France’s far-right National Front party, didn’t hesitate to say the attacks
in both Joué-les-Tours and Dijon were “obviously terrorism”, saying the
prosecutor in Nantes had spent “an hour on the investigation” and accusing the
government of “escapism”.
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