“The violence we have suffered, we keep an almost physical memory of it all our life, it is not a verdict that will erase it overnight”, reacts Friday, October 21 on franceinfo Riss, editorial director of Charlie Hebdo, after the appeal trial of the January 2015 attacks. Ali Riza Polat and Amar Ramdani had appealed their first convictions.
>>> Who are the fourteen accused in the first trial of the January 2015 attacks?
Ali Riza Polat was sentenced Thursday on appeal to life imprisonment for complicity in the 17 murders perpetrated by the brothers Saïd and Chérif Kouachi and Amedy Coulibaly at the editorial staff of Charlie Hebdo, Montrouge and Hyper Cacher. He had been sentenced to 30 years in prison at first instance. Amar Ramdani, former co-detainee of Amedy Coulibaly, was sentenced to 13 years in prison with a two-thirds security sentence. He had been sentenced to 18 years in prison at first instance.
franceinfo: How do you react to the announcement of this verdict ?
Ris: It is a verdict which confirms, in terms of guilt, their role in the attacks. That’s what’s important for us, is knowing whether or not their role was the one we had understood in the first instance. At the start of the trial, we were told that what was at stake was perhaps that some of the two defendants be acquitted, like Amar Ramdani. It was all the same a bit surreal to speak of an acquittal after all that was said and repeated in this second trial.
How did you experience this second appeal trial?
It’s trying, first, to follow a trial, then to testify because you have to relive everything. For some civil parties, it was very hard to see the weapons. These are things that were not shown in the first instance. So it’s always painful to talk about all that again.
You wrote “the legal history is over, not that of the victims”. Is it a story that needs to be written?
The violence that we have experienced, that we have suffered, we keep an almost physical memory of it all our life. It’s not a verdict that will erase it overnight. So all the victims of this trial, like other attacks, will have to continue to live with that. The challenge now is to live together, perhaps to get closer to each other so as not to feel alone.
The story of the victims is not well known to the general public, according to you, because it only retained the amazement. What do you mean ?
The personal, almost intimate stories are difficult to tell because the victims find it difficult to talk about them. But when we talk about it between us, it’s not exactly what is said in the media either. In the media, we talk about the resonance of the event in society. But the personal vision is different, it is difficult to express too.
What do you expect from historians?
With this judicial component, we expected justice to tell us as much truth as possible. It is true that it is an event that is part of the history of France. It is also an event that will be anchored in the historical, political and collective memory. There are certainly other forms that will also be put in place to anchor this in the collective and historical memory.
Last week, the Museum of Terrorism, for the moment virtual, chose not to publish the cartoons of Muhammad. Do you regret it?
I regret it because it’s a bit absurd to make a memorial for terrorist events and not explain why. We are obliged to say things and show them a minimum. From the moment it is a historical event, we are obliged to restore all the events. We can’t do a sorting after the fact, it’s still very, very embarrassing. Of course, there are always people somewhere in the world who will issue fatwas. There will always be fanatics who will find a reason to declare death sentences. But in these cases, you should not make a museum to talk about these subjects, since we are at the heart of terrorism with these death projects.