Malik Oussekine, 1986 . . . Adama Traoré, 2016 . . . George Floyd, 2020

Rue Monsieur-le-Prince, from Shutterstock.com

There have been world-wide protests about the death of George Floyd, but in France these protests also have a local connection.  In 1986 Malik Oussekine, a 22-year-old student, was beaten to death by police.  Thirty years later, in 2016, Adama Traoré, age 24, died when he was subjected to the same kind of chest and neck restraint that killed Floyd.  Oussekine died in a vestibule on the elegant rue Monsieur-le-Prince, and Traoré in a suburban Paris  police station.  Traoré was of Malian descent, born in France; Oussekine was of Algerian descent, born in France.  

Assa Traoré, formerly a teacher,  has fought for the last four years to get the truth about her brother’s death.  She rejected the description of her brother by the media as someone “of immigrant stock,” a description that carried with it the implications of otherness and difference–of race, of religion, of culture: “We are heirs of a shared history between France and Mali.  It is from those roots that our words take their strength and their sense.  Our father Mara-Siré Traoré was born in 1943 in Mali . . . he grew up in the midst of a family whose blood had already flowed to defend France, the country of which we [she and her family] are today the children” (Assa Traoré, Lettre à Adama, p. 10).  

The police were looking for someone else when they stopped the group that Traoré was with.  He did not have his identification papers with him, so he ran.  He was apprehended, restrained, and driven away in a police van.  His death was not captured on video, but people in the neighborhood had seen him taken into custody and informed his family and friends.  Assa Traoré recounts their increasingly frantic search as they tried simply to find out where he was.  Hearing rumors of a heart attack, one family member had rushed to four emergency rooms in the area; his mother finally reached the right police station by telephone, and was reassured that Adama was fine. He had in fact died several hours earlier.  

But the family was relieved by the lie, and his mother wanted to make certain that he had a lawyer.  Several of the women in the family went to the police station and were then told that Adama was dead.  As if speaking to him, Assa wrote: “They were looking for Bagui and his friend, but you were there, you threw down your bike, you ran, they caught you, a boy intervened, a gendarme punched him, you fled, you took refuge in the apartment of an acquaintance, they found you, you told them you couldn’t breathe, but [they said] you had had some alcohol and drugs, and it was so hot, and all that had caused your death”(pp. 15-20).

The police had left a few things out of the story.

Then the story gave way to a duel of the experts.

There have been eleven medical documents pertaining to his case, not all of them full autopsies but including various kinds of tissue sample analyses, toxicology reports, and others.  Of the four full autopsies, the first had diagnosed “heart failure,” caused by a malformation of the heart (hitherto undetected), while another report had blamed the extreme heat and intensity of his questioning, which came together with his pre-existing conditions of pulmonary sarcoidosis and sickle cell anemia.  The acquaintance with whom Traoré had taken refuge while being chased by the police stated that he was breathing heavily at that time and was unable to speak, thus providing circumstantial evidence for that diagnosis (Le Monde, May 29, 2020).

On May 29, 2020–just days before the demonstration–a new report stated that his death was due to cardiac edema, or excess fluid in the heart, which fails to pump out enough blood, which then causes swelling and pressure.  Thus this report concluded that “heart failure” was the cause of death, a finding that would “exonerate” those three officers who were questioning him (Le Monde, May 29, 2020). 

  On June 2, 2020, the fourth autopsy stated that his death was due to asphyxiation as a result of plaquage ventral, or pressure against the chest while he was immobilized, face downward, on the ground.  That pressure had brought on cardiac edema, which was “the consequence” of the asphyxiation, rather than the “cause” of the death.  “No other cause of death is identified.” This finding may not end the case; the opposing party has ten days to request yet another evaluation (Le Monde, June 2, 2020).

The kind of immobilizing hold that killed George Floyd and seems to have killed Adama Traoré burst into the public consciousness in France early in January, 2020, with the death of Cédric Chouviat, who is white. Chouviat, a motorbike delivery man, age 42, was stopped because he seemed to be looking at his cell phone while driving.  He was said to be argumentative and the situation escalated.  He was placed on the ground and subjected to pressure on his chest and neck.  He had heart trouble and suffered a heart attack in the course of his “interrogation”; he was rushed to the hospital and died within 48 hours.  The autopsy revealed death by asphyxiation, with a fractured larynx as well.  The episode was captured by cell phone video  (20minutes.fr, January 8, 2020; this source includes the video).  This particular hold has been outlawed in Belgium, Switzerland, New York (after the death of Eric Garner, and as a result of his daughter’s efforts) and Los Angeles. Two circulars from the Ministry of the Interior (the office that controls the police), in 2008 and 2015, upheld the procedure but have stressed that it must be only for as brief a time as possible (LCI, January 9, 2020).

In the wake of the George Floyd protests, Assa Traoré called for a demonstration on behalf of Floyd, her brother, and other victims. The Prefect of Police banned the demonstration, on several grounds: it had merely been announced, but not formally declared, to the Prefecture; the language of the announcement was provocative; and it was in contravention of the early prohibition (in relation to COVID-19) of gatherings of more than ten people:

On the day of the planned protest, Assa Traoré made this video, defiantly basing herself on the right of peaceful protest, and stating that the demonstration would take place as scheduled.

And this was the result.

Le Monde estimated a crowd of 20,000, with “I can’t breathe” and “BLM” signs among the rest.  The demonstration lasted two hours, and as it became dark, there were some acts of vandalism against store windows; scooters and motorcycles were set on fire; cafés hastily pulled their tables back inside and deployed their shutters to protect the windows; the inevitable tear gas was fired.  And of course, while some wore masks, there was little social distancing (Le Monde, June 3, 2020).  Prefect of Police Didier Lallement, who had attempted to cancel the demonstration, wrote a letter to his 27,500 police officers, meant to support them but utterly tone deaf considering the  likelihood of its being leaked.  He understood, he said, the “‘pain’” felt by the police when “‘faced with accusations of violence and racism, repeated endlessly by social networks and certain activist groups’” (quoted and translated in The Local, June 3, 2020; in English).

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In 1986 Malik Oussekine, a 22-year-old French student, suddenly found himself at the straggling tail end of a demonstration that had played out earlier in the evening. The trigger for the protest was the proposed Devaquet law. (The terms of the law, involving changes in the university system, can be found here.) The planned changes had given rise to two massive demonstrations, one called for November 27 (estimates of the turnout went up to 600,000, though that is likely too high). Because of the unexpected success of the first, a second march was called for the early evening of December 5.

This second demonstration was smaller but more violent because of the presence of casseurs, the so-called black blocs. These are insurgents, often armed with baseball bats or similar sorts of clubs, whose faces are hidden by ski masks or scarves. The loosely organized group sprang up in the 1980s, and has appeared “on the fringes,” to use the preferred French media term, of various events, from the Seattle G7 in 1999 to some of the Gilets Jaunes demonstrations (see Dupuis-Déri, p. 278). Their purpose is to commit property damage and to provoke a violent response from the police. They had not been present on November 27; they were there, however, on December 4.

Malik Oussekine had attended a concert and was on the streets at about midnight, hours after the demonstrations had ended, though there were still small groups roaming through the city. The forces of order were going after them, “cleaning” the streets. Oussekine was overtaken by the police, and died shortly after being taken to a hospital. The initial story was that he was suffering from kidney problems that required twice-weekly dialysis, and that fact, in addition to a weak heart, had essentially caused him to die of “natural causes.” His body, however, showed evidence of a severe beating. Robert Pandraud, Minister of Security at the time of the protests, had remarked, “If I had a son on dialysis, I would keep him from fooling around at night” [the phrase was faire le con].”  This callous remark made its way into Pandraud’s obituary (Le Figaro, February 18, 2010).  

This case has long remained in the public consciousness, in large part because Malik Oussekine represented a positive and reassuring example of the French ideal of assimilation. He had gone to Algeria to get in touch with his roots, and yet had voluntarily chosen French nationality at the age of 18 (as the law required then); he wished to serve in the military. That dream, unfortunately, was impossible. He had spent most of his first nine years in the hospital on dialysis, which continued throughout his life.  In spite of health challenges that would have defeated many, he was gregarious and curious. In an era when dress codes were casual, he dressed to stand out by wearing a suit and tie and sometimes a hat like Bogart.  He was involved in sports. He was ambitious and eager to get ahead and make money, as his older brother and father-figure Mohamed had done. His potential, as well as the enormous courage and humor he had already shown in life, made his loss and the manner of his death all the more poignant (Le Monde, December 9, 1986). 

Oussekine’s background also gave rise to an early conversation about race and ethnicity in France, as in this brief National Assembly exchange in 1986 between former Prime Minister Pierre Mauroy and the flamboyant Minister of the Interior Charles Pasqua:

Pierre Mauroy, former Prime Minister: He was a student like all the others.  His name was Malik. And this is the reality of France today. From preschool to the university, the children of France work together, know each other, and there is no question of excluding Paul, Jacques, or Yasmina and Malik (Applause). 

Your role [speaking to Pasqua] of maintaining order in our country has led to an evening where the police beat a man to death, Saturday evening.  On Saturday we saw the police in complete disorder, allowing casseurs to do as they wished for several days. Why, M. le Ministre de l’Intérieur?

Charles Pasqua, Minister of the Interior [in charge of policing]: What I have to say will in fact be a defense of the police (Applause).  It’s true that the death of the young student has touched us all. And you have the monopoly neither of heart, nor of generosity–Noooooo (in response to the disapproval of some in the Assembly) nor of intelligence.

In demonstrations, when there is an incident, one always reproaches the forces of order, who are blamed for coming too soon or too late.  The instructions given in this case do not authorize any such criticism. [The instructions] were aimed at avoiding [the need for] intervention of the forces of order, avoiding incidents, and facilitating the questioning of casseurs, who pursued their depredations after the dispersal of the demonstration.

Speculation about those involved in Oussekine’s death soon centered on the PVMs (peloton voltigeur motocycliste).  The voltigeurs, as they were called, consisted of two-man teams, one driving the moto and the other armed with a truncheon and other weapons, including a pistol. The force had been set up in the wake of the 1968 protests, after it was determined that regular policing forces were unable to respond rapidly enough to sudden threats.  The voltigeurs were fast, able to move quickly to break up crowds and go after provocateurs and casseurs; they were disbanded after this death.  

A little over a week after the beating, Le Monde published the results of the investigation (carried out by the juge d’instruction, an investigating magistrate) thus far.  The voltigeurs had been called out at 12:20 am, with news of continuing disturbances, broken store windows, and small barricades.  The head of the brigade, Jacques Duruisseau, took the lead; behind him were two groups of 18 motos. Duruisseau deployed his right wing, led by brigadier Jean Schmitt, to “clean out (nettoyer) the pockets of resistance.”  They were heading in the direction of rue Monsieur-le-Prince when–according to Schmitt’s story, as reported by the skeptical Le Monde–he was hit in the chest by a paving stone.  His moto fell on its side and he got up, “reeling,” as Schmitt later put it, and only half conscious.  He saw that his men were “grappling” with several of the demonstrators at rue Monsieur le Prince. He was confused.  He did not see Malik Oussekine. He didn’t know how many people were involved. He didn’t know who they were (Le Monde, December 13, 1986).

Paul Bayzelon, who lived in no. 20, rue Monsieur le prince, was coming home.  The street was reasonably calm, he said, and then, “I heard the noise of the motorcycles.  People were running around me.  I began to be afraid, . . . I tapped in my code, I went in, and on the other side of the glass door, I saw a young man who wanted to come in.  He came in.  The police arrived and prevented me from closing the door.”  Two policemen that he could not identify–they wore helmets and visors–began to beat Oussekine with their fists and then, when he was on the ground, kicked him with their heavy boots.  Then they left.  Bayzelon spotted a gun on the floor and picked it up, just as one policeman returned, looking for it.  Bayzelon was struck in turn, and required seven stitches.  Oussekine was pronounced dead at the hospital (Le Monde, January 26, 1990).

Gardien de la paix Christophe Fernandez saw Schmitt fall, but didn’t have the impression that he was hurt.  He saw him run to No. 20 and then saw him come back, holding his chest, breathing hard, and then heard him say, “I lost my gun.”  Those with him retrieved it from Bayzelon.  This story was also confirmed by a businessman out for a walk, who also saw the fall of the moto. According to this bypasser witness, Schmitt got off his moto and seemed fine; then, as he was coming back from No. 20, he was doubled up, holding his chest and stomach. Bayzelon was able to identify two of the voltigeurs who came back to look for the gun as those who had struck him (Le Monde, December 13, 1996).

The media soon focused in on Schmitt, who continued to maintain that he had been struck full on in the chest by a paving stone and had nearly lost consciousness. His story at least remained consistent: he had immediately gone into the building where Malik was beaten, in the process losing his weapon, which a colleague found.  He had not reported the brief loss of his weapon, and thus had been suspended for that cause (Le Monde, December 20, 1986.  Charles Pasqua had announced Schmitt’s suspension on December 15.  His attorney complained that the announcement of his suspension had given rise to the belief that he was guilty of the beating death; in fact, it was because he had not reported the lost weapon (no matter how short a time it had been lost); he had also been given a medical leave of three weeks (Le Monde, December 19, 1986).

The IGS (Inspection générale des services) immediately began their own investigation, and the majority of the police involved in this incident acknowledged that they had been in the vicinity of no. 20 rue Monsieur le Prince, where Oussekine died, even as they firmly denied any role in his beating.  But one of those questioned, the young naïf Christophe Garcia, said that he had dealt out some blows but had no idea that they would result in death (Le Monde, December 15, 1986).  He would later be tried, along with Schmitt.

The French Senate also undertook an investigation of the demonstrations of that period (Sénat. Rapport sur . . . novembre et décembre 1986). They did not investigate the circumstances around the death of Malik Oussekine himself. As the rapporteur Paul Masson noted (Sénat, p. 12), they were prohibited by statute, in their investigatory role, from looking at any ongoing case, and there were two in regard to Oussekine–the judicial case, which was eventually resolved in 1990, and the civil suit brought by the victim’s mother and older brothers. Nevertheless the Senate investigated the context of the student demonstrations and the nature of the policing in response.

One matter that the Senate proved indirectly was that whether Oussekine was involved in the protests at all–and he seems, by every account, not to have been–his death did not occur in the heat of ongoing demonstrations, in the “fog of war,” for the demonstrations of that evening had been over for several hours when Malik was killed. In addition, the report lists the types of police who were mobilized against the demonstration that evening, for a total of 2,835, and they did not include voltigeurs (Sénat, p. 216). Thus the PVMs involved in Malik’s death had not been in the thick of the very tense moments earlier in the evening. Le Monde, able to investigate this series of events as the Senate was not, reported that only this single PVM unit from this branch of service had been mobilized late that night to get rid of the stragglers.  In retrospect, this seems the wrong unit to have sent out, given their usual role of breaking up large crowds in the heat of battle. According to some of the PVMs in the unit, they were given orders to show “calmness and moderation” before they left their garage headquarters. Le Monde noted that the use of these units in the policing of demonstrations had gradually been reduced in the 1970s and 1980s; they tended to see everyone on the terrain as casseurs Le Monde, December 9, 1986).  

The trial of the two policemen involved in the beating did not occur until 1990.  At that time Jean Schmitt, then 56, and Christophe Garcia, age 26, were sentenced to five and two years, respectively, with a stay; neither man served his sentence (Le Monde, February 20, 1990.)

Malik Oussekine’s name came into the national conversation again just before the 2019 May Day demonstrations, which (featuring the customary union members, as well as gilets jaunes and black bloc participants) were widely expected to be extremely violent. Before the event, National Assembly deputy Jean-Michel Fauvergue of the Macron party, La République en marche, was interviewed on the C à vous show. Naturally enough: a career policeman, he is the former head of the elite corps RAID, created in 1985 as a counter-terrorist and hostage rescue force. In 2015, during his tenure (from 2013-2017), his force was involved in the hostage rescue in the kosher grocery store standoff that had followed the Charlie Hebdo shootings, as well as the Bataclan hostage situation in November of that year. Speaking of his earlier career, he noted that he had never had large numbers of reinforcements. “We were obliged to move a lot, to go into contact [with demonstrators]. For a very long time, in the provinces, [the police] have been making contact [with protestors]. Paris is beginning to police in the same way, but Paris has been prevented from that by the Malik Oussekine affair. Forget Malik Oussekine. It is necessary to forget this now, it is necessary to forget the Malik Oussekine affair.” And he added, with emphasis, “The Republic must be able to defend itself.”

Many weighed in on twitter, including Dominique Sopo, the head of the civil rights group SOS Racisme, who posted a photo of a memorial plaque that had been dedicated to Oussekine at his university.

Fauvergne immediately did damage control in an interview with Le Parisien, in which he stated that he was talking about styles of aggressive policing that he believed had been inhibited by the Oussekine case. “Certainly one must not forget Malik Oussekine, I am 100% in accord with that!  This boy was a victim of police violence, he was taken as a target by policemen who were convicted for that, and that’s right. . . . What I meant, . . . public powers must not be prevented at the time of the current demonstrations from defending the demonstrators and businessmen.  La République should defend itself” (Le Parisien, May 1, 2019). Fauvergne got lucky; his media mistake was largely overshadowed by an even worse media mistake made by Minister of the Interior Christophe Castaner.

As this indicates, however, the Malik Oussekine case was part of the conversation in regard to the Gilets Jaunes movements–and, as has been the case in the later Fifth Republic, protests and demonstrations, whatever their original causes, very soon become protests about policing.

Curiously, the ethnicity of Oussekine and the possible role that racism played in his death have not generally been the focus of attention until recently: rather, the incident was broadly “recuperated,” to use the French term, as a matter of police violence, as a weapon to use in the protests of largely white crowds (the students in 1986, the Gilets Jaunes now) against the police forces against them. Yet on the very day of Oussekine’s death, Abdel Benyaya, of Algerian descent and born in France, was shot in the head by a drunk off-duty policeman. That story received virtually no media traction, then or now (though in fact the police withheld the story for some hours, fearing the effect of news that two college students of Algerian descent had been killed within hours of each other). The trial of inspecteur de police Patrick Savrey turned on one question: how drunk was he, before he shot and killed the nineteen-year-old student? Le Monde’s account, which was altogether too arch, revealed that Savrey had been out with colleagues, stopping at several cafés and drinking ricards until he got to the café Tout va bien, where he switched to whiskey. Benyaya, at another table, got into a loud argument with a Yugoslavian national. Savrey staggered to his feet, shouted “Police!” and killed him. He got seven years, which he served (Le Monde, November 25, 1988). He turned up thirty years later in a documentary by Mustapha Kessous, titled Bavures: Moi policier, j’ai tué un homme (Blunders: I a policeman, shot a man). (“Bavure,” or “Blunder,” had become the term of art for such unlawful shootings.) Savrey stated that if he had not shot him, Benyaya would have grabbed his gun (L’Obs, November 22, 2018).

Malik Oussekine’s case was part of the inspiration behind the brilliant 1995 film by Mathieu Kassowitz, La Haine (The Hate), about the death of a young Muslim man, beaten by the police in the course of a riot:

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Dupuis-Déri, Francis, Les Black blocs. Lux Éditeur, 2019; original edition, 2003.

Traoré Assa, and Vigoureux, Elsa, Lettre à Adama. Éditions du Seuil, 2017.