Voices of the Voiceless: France Riots Over Police Murder of Nahel
On Tuesday 27th June 2023, French police murdered 17-year old Nahel Merzouk in the Parisian suburb of Nanterre. What appeared to be a routine traffic stop turned into a brutal execution. Nahel was shot by police at point-blank range in broad daylight. In typical twisted fashion, the police then lied by accusing Nahel of attempting to run over an officer.
Of course, the national media published the police fabrications as the truth— that is until cell phone video evidence filmed by an onlooker emerged, showing the devastating reality. The clip, which has since gone viral, showed that no officer was standing in front of the car or physically threatened by Nahel, as falsely claimed by the police. Instead, millions across the globe were shown horrifying images of police aggressively pulling out rifles and menacingly confronting the driver before fatally shooting the teenager in the head.
The viral clip of Nahel’s murder caused a shock to the collective conscience of France and sparked mass protests and riots across the country. As French cities became engulfed in chaos, the flames and burnt wreckages signified the people’s hatred towards systemic discrimination and police brutality. As Dr. Martin Luther King rightly said:
“A riot is the language of the unheard.”
Tens of thousands of riot police were deployed, using tear gas and rubber bullets to push back against protestors. Police vowed to impose ‘public order’ and police unions announced they are engaged in a ‘war against vermin,’ calling protestors ‘savage hordes’.
Instead of dampening the situation, the inflammatory language used by police acted as a deliberate provocation, inciting more riots. Protestors justifiably felt more aggravated and the public backlash was strong.
On the fifth night of riots, 45,000 police were deployed to crush any attempt by people to assemble and protest. According to @redstreamnet, witnesses described a “large-scale racial profiling of Black and Arab youth, mass arrests and police forces beating down young protestors with batons”. Heavily armed police patrolled the streets in unmarked vans and shot protestors, mostly teenagers, with tear gas grenades. 719 people were arrested across the country, including 315 people in Paris.
In response to the chaos, Macron’s latest press conference felt like a sickening joke, as he chose to blame social media and video games for the riots. Macron initially called the killing of Nahel “inexplicable,” however this again is French falsification and a method of consistent denial. Nahel’s death is not an unsolvable mystery — it was the outcome of structural and systemic racism.
Numerous studies have long identified deeply embedded racial bias in French policing. Police have extensively targeted Arab and Black people in particular. Most victims of the 21 fatalities from police traffic-stop shootings since 2020 were of Arab or Black origin. According to French organization Defender of Rights, young men racialized as Arab or Black are 20 times more likely to be profiled, stopped and subjected to police checks.
The fact that Nahel was of Algerian origin definitely factored into his murder at the hands of French police, as well as their attempt to lie about it. It factored into the police’s belief that it would be easy to obstruct the justice Nahel deserved. This was unquestioningly backed by the national media. Given his ancestry, the French media assumed his guilt and attempted to criminalise him by scrutinizing his past, as if it could somehow justify his horrible death.
Many parallels can be drawn with the 2005 French riots when three teenagers between 15 and 17 were chased by police into an electricity substation. Their crime? Walking home from playing football. Two of them, Zyed Benna and Bouna Traoré were killed by electrocution, while the third, Muhittin Altun suffered life-changing injuries. Paris and other cities burned with rioting for weeks as the callous French media attempted to thrust responsibility for the tragedy into the teenager’s own hands.
National riots in response to police brutality have a long history in France. In 1983, 19-year old Toumi Djaïdja, from a Banlieue in Lyon, fell victim to a ruthless police beating which left him in a coma for two weeks. As a direct consequence, the first antiracist demonstration on a national scale was born — The March of Equality and Against Racism in which 100,000 people took part. This movement has consistently called out violence targeting people of Arab and Black origin for 40 years. They reiterate that many of the uprisings in France’s most impoverished neighbourhoods stem from crimes by police. The continuous cycle of brutal killings and subsequent marches keeps repeating itself without concrete progress. This leaves the disillusioned youth with no other option to be heard than to riot.
In 1993, a young Black man named Makome M’Bowole was tragically murdered while in police custody. A wave of protests and riots spread across France like wildfire in response. Mathieu Kassovitz was one of those protestors who took part in demonstrations. M’Bowole’s death was ruled as ‘accidental’ which further fanned the flames. Saddened and enraged, Mathieu Kassovitz wrote the script for La Haine in the aftermath.
Translating simply to Hate, the bluntness of the title adds clarity and depth to the black and white world of the film. In its gritty depiction of police brutality and poverty in the Banlieus, Paris is now considered the city of Hate, compared to the romantic city of Love it usually symbolizes. It places a mirror to the city, reflecting the deeply entrenched problems wrought by institutions onto marginalised communities. Kassovitz uses images of the 1993 riots in the opening montage to the soundtrack of ‘Burnin And Lootin’ by Bob Marley and The Wailers. This strengthens the portrayal of public outrage, pitting the police against the rioters who are cast in a hopeful light.
La Haine’s modern counterpart Athena tells a similar tale of tragedy, where the death of a young immigrant from apparent police brutality is met with a public violent upheaval that had simmered in the background before reaching boiling point — erupting into full-fledged war between the young Banlieue residents and police. Armed with fireworks and barricaded against police in scenes reminiscent of Les Misérables, the sweeping sequences of the film could have been shot as news footage during this week’s riots.
Films, music and the arts have a knack of capturing a Zeitgeist that is not easily observed through the news and can have a long legacy of influence and inspiration. The song ‘Voices of the Voiceless’ (2011) by Lowkey and Immortal Technique is another great example of this. Their lyrics capture the essence of resistance against an unequal system — A system that is fundamentally rigged against the marginalised, unheard, and forgotten groups of society:
Reality savage, my words are like a riot in Paris
The voice of the voiceless, that voice is social imbalance
Nahel’s death is another tragic event in the long tale of decades-long accumulated injustice suffered by French descendants of postcolonial immigration.
The Algerian War for Independence (1954–1962) was an especially brutal guerilla war against French colonization. Over 1.5 million Algerian people are estimated to have been slaughtered and systematically tortured by the French regime as it desperately tried to cling to its falling empire. At the height of the war in 1961, French police killed more than 300 French Arabs who were peacefully marching in support of Algerian independence in Paris. Among them was 15 year old Fatima Beda, who was drowned with other protestors in the river Seine.
It was against the backdrop of Algerian struggle for liberation that Frantz Fanon, a prominent psychiatrist and political activist from Martinique wrote The Wretched of the Earth, one of the most influential anti-colonial texts ever written. In it, Fanon describes the unifying force for global decolonization as an inevitably violent and just struggle. This was amidst a context of continuous denial from many notable liberal writers and intellectuals among the Left in France who refused to even acknowledge the existence of racism. Instead they pointed to the reputation of the USA as an especially racist society to minimize France’s own racial discrimination. This helped fuel the myth of French colourblindness. An exception was James Baldwin who described his experience with timeless clarity:
“I lived mainly among les misérables — and, in Paris, les misérables were Algerian”.
Today, as was the case then, those targeted by racism, Islamophobia and police brutality are still Algerian.
The French media response to the current riots wishes to view the death of Nahel as a singular event in a vacuum, as if the devastating tragedies which occurred to Toumi Djaïdja, Fatima Beda, Makome M’Bowole, Zyed Benna, Bouna Traoré and Muhittin Altun never happened. This is echoed on the internet with large numbers of users on Twitter and other platforms showing an unsurprising, but disturbing lack of nuance when discussing the riots. Most importantly, there is no acknowledgment of France’s wretched history of colonial racism and violence. This missing historical context is what underpins the structural racism found in France’s institutions including the police. In fact, it is hard to spot a French state institution that isn’t rooted in systemic racial discrimination.
Take the current situation at the highest level of French football where league champions, Paris Saint-Germain are mired in scandal. The current PSG coach Christophe Galtier is awaiting trial on charges of discrimination and harassment after emails were leaked during his time at OGC Nice in 2021.
Galtier should be in prison over these disgusting remarks, but unfortunately even this evidence may not be enough to put him away. Those in charge of prosecuting him at the top of the French judicial hierarchy are the same bâtards who allow police to walk free after committing racist crimes time after time.
Whether in politics or sports, the structural racism and brutal violence towards people of colour in France comes from the very top — in education, in corporations, in French domestic politics (the rise of the far-right Le Pens), in French foreign policy in Francophone Africa (Françafrique) and in French High Finance with the control of the CFA Franc. It is the last point which I discussed at length in my undergraduate Thesis. In it, I described how France continues to use the CFA franc currency mechanism as a neo-colonial tool of monetary subordination in West and Central Africa.
France uses its hard economic and military power to bind 14 former colonies to France long after they formally gained their independence. To achieve this end, France has not hesitated to intervene by carrying out state sanctioned assassinations such as that of Togolese president Sylvanus Olympio in 1963, numerous French-backed coup d’états in Mali (1968), Niger (1996), Côte d’Ivoire (2011), Burkina Faso (1987) and others, as well as a 1960 French secret service mission to flood the Guinean central bank with counterfeit currency to topple a newly independent and autonomous economy.
This begs the question: How can we expect to stop French police brutality towards people of colour, when it is just a single facet of the structurally racist French state apparatus, stemming from the very top?
Viewing Nahel’s murder in isolation ignores the historical colonial legacies and current neocolonial mechanisms that form the bedrock for the current oppressive French state. As French buildings burn and property is destroyed, it is urgent to remember the words of Che Guevara:
“We understood perfectly that the life of a single human being is worth millions of times more than all the property of the richest man on earth…”
The irony is not lost on the Western liberal media response as they supported the French protests against pension reforms earlier this year. Twitter users cheered on protestors breaking into the headquarters of Blackrock citing the passionate ‘Vive la Révolution’ spirit of France. However, as soon as police brutality takes away a young immigrant’s life, and non-white French people take to the streets in anger at the injustice, those same liberals denounce the needless and unecessary ‘riots’ in a cold and callous manner. The hypocrisy and double standards are breathtaking. But what should we expect from a liberal media whose guiding principle is to be unprincipled…
As summed up eloquently by Dr. Crystal Fleming, “The real violence at stake is not merely the burning of buildings and destruction of property — it’s the very real human cost of victims like Nahel adding to the body count produced by centuries of French oppression.”
The cost of property being destroyed now could never even come close to the immeasurable cost attributed to the stolen lives, land and resources looted by France during the colonial era — and which continue to be siphoned off through neocolonial mechanisms like the CFA Franc system.
To conclude, I will leave you with Lowkey’s powerful hook from ‘Voices of the Voiceless’:
You can try to avoid us but it’s pointless
You can never avoid the voices of the voiceless
This serves as a powerful reminder that We, the many, control the means to shape an equitable and just future through collective action and protest. And we must never stop using our voices to fight for our future.
Justice Pour Nahel
