Some random thoughts, one week on (during which time I have been reporting, first from France and now from London, on these terrible events. See http://www.thenational.ae/authors/colin-randall)...
One week after bombs and bullets cast their deadly reach over Paris, the city of light and romance is making resolute strides to regain its joie de vivre.
From the grandeur of an Eiffel Tower bathed in the red, white and blue of the tricolour to small gestures of defiance from ordinary Parisians, spirits are higher than many might have imagined possible after such misery was inflicted in one evening of carnage.
Grief and anger are as raw as in the immediate aftermath of the slaughter claimed by ISIL that struck the heart of one of the world’s most beautiful cities.
That beauty has looked a little flawed since Friday November 13, but it was not destroyed; booksellers report extraordinary interest in Ernest Hemingway’s memoir depicting his Paris of the 1920s, Paris est une fête (A Moveable Feast in the English version).
“If you are lucky enough to have lived in Paris as a young man, then wherever you go for the rest of your life it stays with you, for Paris is a moveable feast,” Hemingway wrote. The words were not published until three years after his death in 1962 but they resonate today.
Everyone knows there would have been even greater loss of life if two of the terrorists, wearing explosive vests, had succeeded in penetrating the Stade de France during the France-Germany friendly football game.
That part of the conspiracy failed, the explosions occurring outside. The French players went on to cross the English Channel and find warm solidarity at another non-competitive international, at London’s Wembley stadium.
The French midfielder Lassana Diarra, a Muslim of Malian origin whose cousin, Asta Diakite, was shot dead while she was out doing some late shopping, will not quickly forget the standing ovation the England crowd gave him as he took the field at a substitute. “In this climate of terror,” he had tweeted, “it is important for all of us, representatives of our country and its diversity, to speak and stand together against a horror that has no colour or religion.”
Diarra’s dignified response has been repeated over and again in social media messages, interviews and statements by relatives of many of the 129 murdered men and women.
“I will not give you the gift of hating you,” Antoine Leiris wrote at Facebook in a powerful message to the killers of his wife, Helene, at the Bataclan concert hall.
Many declarations of sympathy and solidarity have pointedly avoided treating Paris’s suffering as somehow more important than violent death elsewhere in the world.
The plight of Syrians, Lebanese, Iraqis, Palestinians, Kenyans and others – including the victims of the Russian plane downed over Egypt’s Sinai Peninsula – has also been recognised, if not as vocally as some observers would like. At Facebook, a number of those who have temporarily changed their profile image to bear the colours of the tricolour have posted messages that specifically refer to the loss of life among innocents far beyond French frontiers.
French political leaders have led condemnation of isolated incidents of polarised response. A hijab-wearing Muslim woman was punched in the throat and called a terrorist by a man outside a Marseille Metro station on Wednesday. In the same city on the same day, a Jewish teacher was stabbed when three men accosted her, shouting antisemitic abuse and brandishing a t-shirt suggesting allegiance to ISIL.
The French president Francois Hollande, whose statesmanlike qualities at times of crisis mitigate his presidency's broader reputation for weakness and indecision, has promised to pursue the culprits of such attacks without pity. But their actions demonstrate that not everyone in France believes – even after the horror of a week ago, in a society of tolerance and respect.
The spectacular police operation of Wednesday ended the reign of terror of the alleged mastermind of the Paris attacks, Abdelhamid Abaaoud.
But Parisians do not feel safe from further outrages. The determination to get on with life, to refuse to bow to evil, is tempered by bleak reality. When a firecracker went off during a homage to the dead and injured at the Place de la Republique, close to where people had died last Friday, there was panic and floral tributes were flattened in the stampede.
The hope must be that people can rise above understandable fears and insecurity and collectively echo the anguished eloquence of Antoine Leiris, the husband left grieving the loss of his child’s young mother: “You want me to be scared, to view my countrymen with mistrust, to sacrifice my liberty for my security. You lost.”
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