Paris terrorist attacks raise stakes for laws to secure democracy

When terrorism made the poor in Africa cry, this was not news. But now that terrorism is making the rich in Europe also cry, the world is stirred up into action.

On January 7, 2015, gunmen attacked the offices of a newspaper and later a Jewish Kosher supermarket in Paris, killing 16 people.

This has awakened the world to the sad reality that Jihadists are on the prowl, now posing the most potent threat to liberalism after the demise of Fascism and Soviet Communism. Democracy must now either protect itself against jihadism or disappear into the dustbin of dead ideologies in the world.

The Paris shootings have eerie similarities with the siege of the Jewish-owned Westgate high-end mall in Nairobi in September 2013, which left 67 people dead.

The shooting in the offices of French satirical weekly newspaper, Charlie Hebdo, by two brothers, Chérif and Saïd Kouachi, was an attempt to shut down the media organisation for lampooning the Prophet Muhammad. Another gunman, Amedy Coulibaly, killed four other people in a Jewish Kosher supermarket in a tidal wave of anti-Semitism.

DIFFERENT RESPONSE

What is different is the response. Globally, the Paris attacks reveal the world’s double-standards in response to terrorism in Africa. Within Africa, the continent’s badly divided and timeserving power elite has tended to politicise the war against terrorism in ways that have benefited jihadists.

In contrast, the Paris attacks have united the French power elite against terrorism. The French have returned to the history, spirit and values on which their nation is founded — “Liberty”, “Equality” and “Fraternity.” An estimated four million people spontaneously poured into the streets in peaceful demonstrations against the terrorism. In Paris alone, more than 1.6 million people participated in the “Republican march”.

The message was clear: Attacks on Charlie Hebdo and Kosher supermarket were an affront on “freedom”. But as the French Prime Minister, Manuel Valls, declared in an emotive speech in parliament on January 13, France is a nation “at war” not against Islam as a religion, but “against terrorism, jihadism and radical Islamism”.

The attacks saw a rare gesture of national unity between the government and the opposition. After Mr Valls’s speech, for the first time since 1918, the Left and Right broke into a rendition of “La Marseillaise”— the French national anthem. French President François Hollande and opposition leader Nicolas Sarkozy united to plan the Charlie Hebdo solidarity march in Paris, although Marine Le Pen, leader of France’s far-right Front National, has charged that she was not invited to the “Republican march”.

OPPOSITION DEMOS

This bipartisan spirit in the face of terrorism has become rare in Africa. In Kenya and Nigeria, terrorist attacks have been invariably followed by press statements, street demonstrations and rallies by opposition politicians and donor-funded civil society groups condemning the government for “failure to protect”.

In December last year, this column accused neo-liberals in Kenya’s opposition and allied sections of civil society of unwittingly aiding terrorism by their responses (SN, 13/12/2014).

As response to the massacre of 28 passengers and 36 non-Muslim quarry workers by Al-Shabaab militias near the north Kenyan town of Mandera in November-December last year has clearly shown, elite “fiddling with terrorism” is increasing the vulnerability of democracy in Africa.

Also putting Africa’s democracy in jeopardy is the lackadaisical response by Africa’s Western partners to the scourge of terrorism on the continent. In contrast, the Paris attacks touched a raw nerve in the wider world. More than 40 world leaders joined the French in the historic “Republican march” on January 11, 2015.

This global expression of solidarity has confirmed that the values of the French Revolution — that underpin liberal democracy — still resonate across the world. But the West’s solidarity with France has exposed a deep-seated policy of double-standards at several levels.

TRAVEL ADVISORIES

First, Africa’s Western partners have routinely responded to terrorist attacks in Africa by issuing travel advisories to their citizens, which end up hurting the tourist industry. Even though no country – rich or poor – is immune to Islamic radicalisation, the world has been less than kinder and lenient to Africa.

In France, poverty, unemployment and petty crime are pushing a disaffected French-born generation of Muslims into terror.

With Europe’s biggest Muslim minority, France is the largest source of jihadist recruits to the Islamic State (IS) now fighting in Iraq and Syria and other terrorist networks. Uncannily, the recent wave of radicalisation and terrorist attacks in Africa has been cynically blamed on “state failure”, “corruption” and “bad governance”.

Finally, Western countries have enjoyed a free hand in introducing new anti-terrorist legislations to deal with the changing nature of the terrorist threat.

French opposition, civil society and think-tanks have been less hawkish and more sympathetic to government efforts to tinker with the law to protect the nation and its values against terrorism.

Last year France passed a new anti-terrorism law designed to stop would-be jihadists from travelling to foreign battlefields. The new law has given French authorities power to confiscate passports of terrorist suspects. The law has also criminalised the condoning of terrorism, and France has also announced plans to isolate convicted jihadists in jail.

his has given France robust intelligence and anti-terror powers.

In contrast, the opposition in Kenya and sections of civil society and media have fiercely opposed the new Security Laws (Amendment) Act (2014).

Prof Peter Kagwanja is Chief Executive of Africa Policy Institute and former Government Adviser.