What is a “news item”? It is an event without real meaning that we do not know where to classify. This is why, in the nineteenthe century, newspapers invented the heading of the same name. “The news item would proceed from a classification of the unclassifiable, it would be the unorganized waste of formless news”, said the writer Roland Barthes.
As soon as an apparently isolated event becomes significant and an explanation is found for it that links it to other events, the news item is no longer one. It is transformed into a “fact of society”. This could unfortunately be the case with the sordid murder of little Lola two weeks ago, when the country was barely emerging from the shortages caused by refinery workers.
The 19the arrondissement is far from being the most peaceful district of the capital. However, around Buttes-Chaumont, it sometimes takes on the appearance of a small provincial town. It was there that after leaving Georges Brassens college and having traveled the 350 meters that separated her from her house, little Lola disappeared. She will reappear much later, in a trunk, dead and mutilated. Even if the investigation is far from over, everything suggests that this sordid crime was the work of Dahbia B., an Algerian national who allegedly tortured her 12-year-old victim without anyone knowing why.
The case will remain in the realm of news items until we learn that the alleged assassin had been living illegally in France for years and that he was under an “obligation to leave French territory” ( OQTF). It was then that she became political.
If the crime had been committed by a repeat offender on parole, the country would have wondered if this release was justified. If it had been committed by an individual released from a psychiatric institution, we would have wondered about the conditions of this release. As it was the work of an illegal immigrant, it was inevitable that one wonders if little Lola would still be alive if France enforced its borders better.
Unfortunately, everything leads us to think so. What we know about Dahbia B. makes her a textbook case of the negligence that reigns in France in terms of immigration. This young Algerian arrived legally in 2016 with a student residence permit for ordinary secondary studies in catering. As if Algeria didn’t have the means to train its assistant cooks and waiters on its own!
In 2019, she assaulted a secretary in a medical practice. Since 2018, she was one of the 900,000 illegal immigrants who live without a residence permit in France, according to figures from the former secretary general of the Ministry of Immigration Patrick Stefanini. It will be necessary to wait until August 21st for him to be served with an OQTF. Simple formality, since in France, more than 90% of the 125,000 OQTFs formulated each year are not executed, either through negligence, or lack of space in detention centers, or because the countries of origin refuse to recover their citizens. We understand why, according to a recent survey by the CSA institute for CNEWS, nearly 8 out of 10 French people consider the government incompetent in this area.
The elected officials quickly understood that the affair could inflame the country. This is why the Minister of Justice, Éric Dupond-Moretti, a specialist in what is called body checking in hockey, was dispatched to the front while the Minister of the Interior, Gérald Darmanin, scoured the sets of television. Objective: to saturate the media space and dig firewalls by bringing this murder back to where it was 24 hours earlier, to the rank of news item.
Recent history is not lacking in these sparks which set the plain on fire. Starting with little Aylan who died on the beach in Bodrum, Turkey, whose photo featured in the international press precipitated the opening of German borders to more than a million migrants. We could also cite the video of the live death of George Floyd, which caused riots sometimes bordering on insurrection.
One can of course wonder about the time of mourning and the silence that should surround such a tragedy, but one had to be blind to believe that Lola’s murder would not starkly pose the question of the state’s impotence in the face of illegal immigration.
On August 9, 2021, was Father Olivier Maire not assassinated in Vendée by a Rwandan subject to three OQTFs? In 2020, a student from Angers was kidnapped and raped by a Kosovar repeat offender who was also targeted by two OQTFs. Three weeks ago, in Grenoble, a woman was killed after an exchange of fire between police officers and a Moroccan criminal targeted by an OQTF. Seven days after the Lola tragedy, Imam Chalghoumi, whom we interviewed last year, almost fell under the blade of an Algerian who was in the same situation.
These facts are neither right nor left. They are also recognized by the Minister of the Interior, according to whom foreigners represent “48% of people arrested for acts of delinquency in Paris, 55% in Marseille and 39% in Lyon”.
Once the emotion subsided, it only took a few days for the hypermediatized society that is France to move on. Waiting for the next irruption. She shouldn’t be late.