The enemy beside us

Earlier this week, the French Interior Minister, Manuel Valls, addressed journalists about the man who has been detained on suspicion of his involvement in the attack on a French soldier last Saturday.

What we are facing is an enemy beside us, not inside

The soldier was stabbed in the neck while patrolling the city and narrowly missed having a main artery torn. The attack has raised the spectre of a new wave of public assassinations in France. Last year, Mohammed Merah, a French citizen of North African immigrant background, allegedly killed three soldiers before attacking a Jewish school in Toulouse.

The fear of a new wave of random killings is exacerbated by the recent savage attack in London, where a British soldier was hacked to death by terrorists who were clearly seeking publicity, posing for photographs and shouting Allah Akbar.

So far, the French forces do not think there is a link with the London attack. Therefore, Valls limited himself to a reference to last year’s killings in Toulouse. Still addressing journalists, he said: “There are dozens, maybe several hundred potential Merahs in our country... There is an enemy inside us.”

I winced when I saw that phrase: “an enemy inside us”.

I do know what Valls means, of course. The phrase “enemy inside” is a natural one to use. It is also a term of art in the intelligence community. Even business strategists use the term to refer to an employee who handles sensitive information and who could be using it against the interests of the organisation.

There are special procedures and techniques for gathering intelligence for homeland security when dealing with an “inside enemy”. Valls was therefore using a term he would have used even in talking to his officials.

Nevertheless, I think the phrase should be used sparingly in public, where it can be given a different meaning and turned against entire immigrant groups. It is a powerful image that could easily lead one to think of a social body being invaded by a disease that needs extermination.

I should add I winced for another reason. This same week it was reported that in one attack, 50 people were killed in Iraq. This brought back memories of my visit to Baghdad two years ago, as part of an EP delegation.

At the time, as I wrote in this newspaper, assassinations had become the new fashion in violence in the city. In the two weeks prior to my arrival there had been 80 assassinations, the targets being anyone in authority. The clear aim was to disrupt and discourage society.

The assassinations were to be added to a whole spate of other killings, through road bombs, mortar fire and suicide bombings. I lost count of the tanks along the roads I travelled, the amount of car searches, undercarriage mirrors and sniffing hounds. Despite all these checks, I was still given a heavy bullet-proof vest while travelling by car. While I was in my room I was told to immediately hit the ground if I heard a siren.

Wherever one looked, one saw raised turrets, walls of concrete crowned with razor-wire and sand-bag bunkers with machine-gun muzzles barely visible. Every so often I heard the whirr of helicopters flying above us, keeping an eye on what was going on below.

As I recalled all this I wanted to exclaim: “That is what it’s like to have an enemy inside! It is for ordinary people to be in real, immediate danger of death, day in, day out.”

I do not want to minimise let alone dismiss the horror of what occurred in London and Paris last week. Even one incident is too much. What we are facing, however, is an enemy beside us, not inside.

The enemy is ‘inside us’ when the basis of free society has been uprooted by armed groups. When the enemy manages to instil fear but has not succeeded in destroying our institutions, then the enemy is ‘beside us’.

I do not think this is a matter of word play. Words carry weight. They can spark social reactions against particular groups which, in turn, will truly begin to destroy the bonds of trust and freedom.

In fact, however, our institutions are still working well. Both of the London attackers were previously known to the security forces as is the man detained in France. It is true that this time they slipped through the net. That is, however, because others were in the process of being caught or stopped.

The security of our society depends, naturally, on the forces of law and order. It depends on the freedoms of our society too, however. Without them, we would risk losing the guarantees of dignity that are among our greatest achievements. If we behave in a way that begins to place those guarantees in jeopardy, then we may begin to say that we have an enemy inside.

John Attard Montalto is a Labour member of the European Parliament.