They are around their twenties, are sometimes teenagers and kill each other with Kalashnikovs. The phenomenon is not new to Marseille, but it is particularly striking at the start of 2023.
On January 11, 2023, in the heart of the city of Aygalades in the northern districts, Hamza, a 27-year-old VTC driver, drops off a client at the foot of a building. He is driving when he sees an armed and hooded man approaching in search of his target. “I tell him: ‘Listen, I’m a VTC, I’m waiting for a client.’ He doesn’t believe me. He says, ‘OK, you’ll see.’ And then he starts shooting, shooting, shooting. And then I see that there’s a bullet coming in, hitting my back and a bullet exploding my shoulder.”
>> “You can’t do anything, that’s how it is, it’s Marseille”: in a city in the northern districts, resignation in the face of violence
Hamza miraculously escaped, despite some 22 Kalashnikov casings found at the scene. The shooter was very young. Hamza is convinced of this: “I saw at the beginning that he couldn’t handle the Kalashnikov. It can be seen that it is a small, it is always engraved in my head.
A few days later, still in January, a father was shot dead in the Consolat estate. It happened right under the windows of Gérard, who has lived in the neighborhood for over 40 years. franceinfo had met him a few hours after the fact. No doubt for him, there again the age of the shooters is around their twenties, and even maybe less: “It’s terrible. They’re 15-16, and they think they’re men. We give them some shit, we give them a caliber, and they’re ready to kill father and mother for it. Damn, from my time, it did not exist all that.
“Young people from all over France”
Young people who kill, others who die. This is the case in February 2023 of a 17-year-old teenager known for drug trafficking. And then there are also the wounded who are numerous among the lookouts, those who are responsible for monitoring the deal points. A 17-year-old and a 14-year-old have, for example, been seriously shot in recent days.
Young people who are mostly from these neighborhoods plagued by drug trafficking. But not only, some are not even Marseilles. “We also have young people from all over Franceexplains Rudy Manna, departmental secretary of the Alliance police union, since there are calls for tenders that are made by social networks, in particular SnapChat, to recruit often to be lookouts.
“The prices are extremely attractive in Marseille, which makes it attractive since we see kids of 13, 14, 15 years old who enter this drug trafficking. They are often idle young people, almost all of the time out of school .”
Rudy Manna, Bouches-du-Rhône departmental secretary of the Alliance unionat franceinfo
Once in the trap of traffic, these young people are at the mercy of the network. “Imagine when it’s a young person who comes from Grenoble, Dijon or Rennes, he finds himself totally isolated and totally helplesscontinues Rudy Manna. And there, there are few people who are able to get him out of the traps set by these traffickers.”
They are on the front lines of a violence gone blind. To escape, some prefer to surrender. “Indeed, it is not uncommon, and it is even more and more frequent, almost weekly, that young people call the police on the 17th, or report themselves to a crew who is passing through a housing estate, to have them questioned, to call for help because they are kidnapped or threatened or beaten by the network that employs them”, says Frédérique Camilleri, police chief of Bouches-du-Rhône. Violence between rival gangs is also an indirect consequence of the police strategy known as “shelling” which destabilizes the networks. “Punch” operations at the request of Interior Minister Gérald Darmanin. Thirty-nine deal points were dismantled in 2022, and more than five tonnes of cannabis seized.
“Darmanin’s speech has its limits”
But in Marseilles voices are raised to denounce this method deemed useless, even counterproductive. According to them, arresting small traffickers will not be enough to put an end to the infernal cycle of violence. “Today, the ephemeral occupation of our neighborhoods with CRS buses, the networks have adapted very wellexplains Hassene Hammou, president of the collective Too young to die. This is where I say that Darmanin’s discourse has its limits. We all know, association leaders and residents, that the real organizers of trafficking in our neighborhoods are found abroad. Instructions are given from a long distance. The manpower they use remotely is none of their business. Their business is that their networks rotate and their networks rotate.”
“I believe that police raids are communication tools that serve precisely to respond to journalists or to be close to the news by saying that the State is acting. I do not have the impression that this is the real tool that resolve the situation.”
Hassene Hammou, president of the collective Too young to dieat franceinfo
For her part, the prefect of police ensures that everything is done to carry out these long-term investigations: “There is an action which is less visible and which is very important, it is that of the judicial police to dismantle the networks from A to Z, to go and find the heads of the networks. At the beginning of the year, I I have eleven additional judicial police officers who have arrived to deal with these subjects and there are ten others who will arrive in the course of 2023. All aspects are covered, whether consumers, deal points in housing estates, but also the network heads who pull all the strings of all this traffic.”
Nevertheless, some associations, and in particular the one chaired by Hassene Hammou, are currently calling on deputies and senators. Their objective is to convince them to open a parliamentary commission of inquiry. “I think we can no longer rely on the word of ministers alone.declares the president of the collective “Too young to die”. We need a real assessment of the action of the state in our neighborhoods, after so many years of settling scores and violence in our neighborhoods. I think that’s the least we owe to the locals.” A letter to this effect has just been sent. A letter addressed to the various parliamentary groups with the exception of the National Rally.