That day, when the Charlie editorial massacre began, I was at the Guimet museum. When the news was launched by the AFP alert, I dropped everything to go there – which was useless – because I was personally and politically linked to several of the people in the editorial staff at the time. This day cannot be erased from memories after such circumstances. The truth is that the political meaning and impact were absolutely absent from my mind at that moment. The only thing that overcame me was the astonishment of knowing that, behind the walls of the building, our people were there, torn to pieces by the assassins’ bullets. It was the same in the street after I was told how the unfortunate policeman who was in the path of the criminals had died.
In general, in our societies, death is kept away from all eyes. We don’t know how to live with this reality until life brings it into our homes, among our loved ones. And then everyone feels the same centuries-old astonishment which is undoubtedly the basis of all our constructions of ideas. It is good that she is doing her work. The death of others is the experience of the unspeakable. This is why in the face of death, we owe ourselves to the dead above all else, that is to say, to the cruelty of separation without appeal. Politics comes next.
Political death has been present in my life for a long time, since my childhood in the context of the independence liberation struggles in the Maghreb, then that of the fights against the Latino dictatorships, then here with the metro attacks and those then and the following like those of the Bataclan. In the political fight, I play politics.
The worst thing in such circumstances is to make the enemy’s work easier. The assassins know that they do not frighten those who want to confront them. Their main goal is then to divide us to weaken us. This is why I have made the effort, each time, as much as I could, on this side of political life. And I continue in this spirit.
This is why I am publishing here again what I learned as a lesson from this crime at the time when the Bataclan carnage took place. I continue to identify with this reasoning and offer it to others.
Belgium
