By Patrice De Beer
The morning after was horrible, like a moral, emotional hangover. Even for a former war correspondent who has covered too many wars and massacres, but who has, for the first time, witnessed shooting at a stone’s throw from his family members.
Ten months after last January’s attacks against the satirical magazine Charlie Hebdoand a kosher shop in Paris, people thought, hoped, things would never be the same after a spectacular solidarity march. And now, it has started again, in a more massive, brutal way, and it looks like it could repeat itself again. After what had been, for ISIS, an attack against the “enemies” of Islam – or rather their senseless version of it – France is facing for the first time senseless random killings. A first here, even if the London attacks in 2005 and those in Madrid in 2004 had already targeted ordinary people only united by the fact that they were using public transport at the wrong time.
So now, as politicians and media say, it is “war”, not the war of words we too often indulge in, but the real thing. Not in Beirut or in Syria, Iraq or Turkey, but here, in Europe, at our doorsteps. A war situation with new border controls and, for the first time in decades, a state of emergency.
But while this war is not, or not yet, an all-out war like WW I or II, the sense of national unity we shared after Charlie has already started to crack, only hours after the blood of 219 persons was shed on the streets of Paris, thanks to politicians mainly concerned with next month’s regional elections, personal or ideological hatreds and their political ambitions. Sad.
A brand new situation?
This all-out, indiscriminate attack, hitting Parisian bourgeois alongside youngsters from the ‘banlieues’, Muslims, Christians, Jews and non-believers alike, rich and poor just because they are French – i.e., for IS, evil “Crusaders” – this has created a brand new situation.