The death of a child is the worst drama that parents can know. The death of Lola, 12, kidnapped, raped, killed, then found in a trunk in the 19 e arrondissement of Paris on October 15, is appalling for the relatives of the girl, but also for the whole company.
that thousands of people wanted to express their support for the bereaved family throughout the weekend in Pas-de-Calais, which the funeral, celebrated on Monday October 24, have formed a moment of intense emotion, has nothing but human. Everyone can feel concerned, affected, in their own way, by a tragedy whose victim belongs to the category of the population supposed to be the most strongly protected by the community: minors.
But if the excitement is highly understandable, the political exploitation which has been made of this murder revolves. As soon as the Algerian nationality of the suspect is known, Dahbia B., 24, Eric Zemmour’s party bought internet domain names comprising the first name of the small victim. And Jordan Bardella, acting president of the national rally, practiced amalgamation by connecting the death of Lola to the tributes of Emmanuel Macron to the Ballon d’Or Karim Benzema, French of Algerian origin, and to the Algerian demonstrators killed by the police French on October 17, 1961 in Paris. That Lola’s parents had to call for the political use of the name of their child to stop the recovery speaks volumes on the degree of cynicism at work.
The political use of atrocious “various facts” is far from being a new phenomenon in France. To trigger fear and justify security speeches, or to direct the vindictive on a minority of the population. In 1973, in Marseille, the murder of a bus driver by an Algerian unbalanced had aroused hateful articles and led to the death of around twenty Algerians in “Ratonnades”.
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This rhetoric consisting in stigmatizing a murderer because of his origins, even to explain his crime by them, remains at work. In a context where identity reflexes, always fueled by the Memoirs of the Algerian War, are used more and more political business, the exploitation reaches an even more scandalous degree: without knowing anything specific or the profile Nor on the mobile of the suspected murderer, the extreme right, and some on the right, seek to present his act as racial, religious, even civilizational. A dangerous process of essentialization which claims to explain the drama not by what a woman does but by what she is: an Algerian in an irregular situation targeted by an “obligation to leave French territory”.
The very low application of the laws governing to rebound the border of “undocumented” is a political problem that deserves a debate and requires responses. That the death of Lola puts it in light is logical. But that the ordeal of a girl is used to feed the controversy is not decent. The indignation aroused by such a murder is independent of nationality both of the victim and the alleged perpetrator.
If the murder of Lola risks raising a question of society, it is, according to the testimonies of his relatives, that of criminal responsibility. A file far more complex than the designation of “immigrants” as scapegoats or the exploitation of a popular emotion that does not belong to anyone.