The three days of terror and chaos in Paris that began with Wednesday’s massacre at the offices of the satirical magazine Charlie Hebdo have left France in a state of shock, grief and bewilderment. The violence raises disturbing questions about how the French intelligence services failed to anticipate the threat represented by known extremists and why it took so long to bring them to justice. The trauma of the attacks will also present French democratic values with a formidable test as siren voices from the far-right seek to exploit the violence to polarise society.
By the end of yesterday’s sieges at a print works near Charles De Gaulles airport and at a kosher supermarket in the east of Paris, the violence had left 21 people dead, including the three suspected terrorists and three police officers. The security operation that killed brothers Chérif and Saïd Kouachi and their apparent accomplice Amedy Coulibaly ended both sieges but at the cost of the lives of four hostages in the supermarket.
The simultaneous operations by police and special forces brought a dramatic and bloody end to a violent and confusing succession of events since the Charlie Hebdo attack. Entire neighbourhoods of Paris were under lockdown yesterday as police sought to capture the Kouachi brothers, who are believed to have carried out Wednesday’s murder of 12 magazine staff and two police officers, and Coulibadi, who is suspected of shooting dead a woman police officer in a separate incident on Thursday.
The three dead suspects were all known to the police as potentially violent extremists with links to jihadi groups in Yemen, Iraq and Syria but they none the less succeeded in putting together a significant arsenal of weaponry and executing elaborate and carefully planned terrorist operations. Intelligence services in France and elsewhere in Europe fear that further cells of violent extremists have the capacity to launch similar operations and the authorities will be under intense pressure to prevent another attack.
This week’s events have demonstrated the need for improvement at the operational level of security but policy makers should resist the temptation to respond to the attacks by expanding state surveillance of citizens and further encroaching on civil liberties. Such steps would not only be unwelcome on civil liberties grounds but would provide the terrorists with a victory by undermining the values of democracy and freedom that came under violent attack this week.
The best response to violent extremism is that adopted by Norway in 2011 after the far-rightist Anders Behring Breivik murdered 77 people, most of them teenagers, in a bomb attack and mass shooting. “Our response is more democracy, more openness, and more humanity,” said prime minister Jens Stoltenberg. France could do no better than follow his lead.