France’s Kurds Are in Revolt Because of Years of Unpunished Racist Attacks
Scenes of burning cars in Parisian streets have been used to paint France’s Kurds as a riotous minority. Yet their angry protests are fueled by a string of racist killings — and French authorities’ refusal to reveal the full facts of the cases.
Protesters took to the streets of Paris on December 24, 2022 to demonstrate against a shooting at a Kurdish culture center, which resulted in three deaths. (Vincent Koebel / NurPhoto via Getty Images)
On Friday, December 23, the Kurdish community in Paris fell victim to a fresh racist attack. Armed with a pistol, sixty-nine-year-old William M. launched his offensive against the Ahmet-Kaya Kurdish Cultural Center in the capital’s Strasbourg-Saint-Denis district. Entering weapon in hand, he killed Emine Kara, who was a leader of the Kurdish women’s movement in France; the musician Mîr Perwer; and Abdurrahman Kizil, an ordinary citizen. The killer was eventually neutralized by the customers of the (Kurdish) hairdresser’s salon facing the cultural center. The police did not intervene until after he had already been subdued by civilians. The killing also came ten years after a previous assassination of three activists from the same Paris cultural center — that time, by an agent of the Turkish secret services.
There were early clues of what lay behind this atrocity. Already in late 2021, armed with a sword, William M. had attacked and injured migrants living in tents. This is the first element of this case: the perpetrator is a radicalized racist who had had already previously “taken action.” Yet there are also wider political factors that prepared the ground for this attack: the trivialization of public discourse dehumanizing immigrants and minority populations; their use as a convenient scapegoat in times of social crisis; the constant Islamophobic targeting of “enemies within”; the racist discourse of the “great replacement”; and the spread of street actions by violent fascist groups, which face little or no state repression. To take just one example: the French government is proposing a new, even more restrictive law for immigrants in 2023, giving all possible help to the right-wing groups who are today outbidding each other in their xenophobic provocations.
Lone Individual?
Those who prepare the ground for such attacks may well distance themselves from the “lone gesture of an unbalanced individual.” But they surely have created the target for this kind of radicalized fanatic. The Macronites and their right-wing partners surf the wave of artificial moral panics — for instance, in recent months, a wave of transphobia — while remaining much more discreet about far-right street violence. There is no similar focus on recent attacks on France Insoumise rallies, or the assaults on left-wing activists in the streets of Lyon — a city where fascists were able to hold a (banned) demonstration unperturbed.
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