The Consequences of Counterterrorism

7. French Responses to Terrorism from the Algerian War to the Present

255 255 CHAPTER 7 FRENCH RESPONSES TO TERRORISM FROM THE ALGERIAN WAR TO THE PRESENT JEREMY SHAPIRO France has long been on the “bleeding edge” of terrorism, confronting terrorism in all its guises from bomb-throwing anarchists to transnational networks. This chapter briefly surveys the French experience with counterterrorism over the last fifty years, chronicling the actions that the French government has taken to improve its capacity to fight terrorism and describing the institutional system that has evolved in France to prevent and respond to terrorist attacks. After a long and often painful evolution, that system has become quite adept at preventing terrorist attacks in France while respecting French democratic traditions. But the system is not without its flaws, both in terms of its capacity to deal with terrorism and its effects on civil liberties in general and on the Muslim community in France in particular. The chapter concludes with an assessment and lessons that the French experience holds for other democracies. The most salient fact about the postwar French experience is the broad range of terrorist threats that France has faced. In the 1950s and 1960s, the French government faced anticolonial terrorism emanating from the war in Algeria as well as right-wing terrorism aimed at preventing France from giving up its Algerian colony. In the 1970s and 1980s, France was 256 Consequences of Counterterrorism often attacked by groups that espoused a radical leftist, anticapitalist philosophy , similar to the Red Brigades (Brigate Rosse) in Italy or the Red Army Faction (Rote Armee Fraktion) in West Germany. As in other European countries, these groups were homegrown and ideologically committed to the overthrow of the capitalist system and to the downfall of American-led imperialism. In the 1970s and 1980s, France confronted foreign terrorists, both spillovers from conflicts elsewhere in Palestine, Lebanon, and Armenia and state-sponsored terrorism aimed at changing French policy toward Iran, Syria, and Libya. In the 1990s, France struggled with the overflow of the Algerian Civil War into France. In the last decade, France has been a target of transnational Islamist networks emanating from various internationalized wars in the Islamic world, including Afghanistan, Bosnia, Chechnya, and most recently Iraq. Throughout these periods, the most persistent—although probably the least violent—terrorist groups in France have been the regional separatist groups that advocate independence for the Basque Country, Brittany, and especially Corsica. After fifty years of confronting this terrorism “à tous azimuts,” France views the struggle against terrorism as a permanent feature of modern life. Accordingly, French counterterrorism strategy has evolved along with the threats, passing through five basic periods, labeled here as emergency, sanctuary , accommodation, repression, and prevention. Such a periodization is rough and necessarily does some violence to the facts. In each of the periods , most of these strategies were employed to some degree, but the labels are intended to convey the dominant strategy in each period (see table 7.1). EMERGENCY In November 1954, the Algerian War of Independence began with attacks against French army positions in various parts of Algeria. The attacks were quickly labeled terrorism, and French prime minister Pierre Mendès-France TABLE 7.1 Dominant French Counterterrorism Strategies Period Strategy 1950s to 1960s Emergency 1970s to early 1980s Sanctuary Late 1980s Accommodation Early 1990s Suppression Late 1990s to present Prevention Source: Authors’ compilation. vowed that “the criminal designs of a few men will be broken by a repression without weakness,” declaring that France would never leave Algeria (Bocca 1968, xiii). In the course of the war from 1954 to 1962, approximately 250,000 people were killed in a struggle that involved terrorism in Algeria and metropolitan (European) France, as well as guerrilla attacks throughout Algeria and even conventional military encounters (for casualty figures, see Rich 1999, 97). Although the Algerian War was fought on many fronts, using many techniques, terrorism was from almost the beginning an integral part of the struggle. The main Algerian resistance group, the Front de Libération Nationale (FLN), adhered to a Maoist insurgency strategy that foresaw moving in slow phases up the ladder of conflict from the creation of a movement to hit-and-run guerrilla attacks, to an eventual conventional military victory. Throughout the conflict, however, the FLN was never able to achieve Mao’s third phase of overwhelming the military forces. Even at the moment of their withdrawal from Algeria in 1962, the French maintained complete conventional military superiority and indeed were even...