Trial of November 13, week 3: confronting the accused with their own propaganda
Drawing of the courtroom for the November 13 attacks trial, September 8, 2021 in Paris.
AFP - BENOIT PEYRUCQ
Text by: RFI Follow
5 mins
A graduate in political communication at the University of Paris XII, Thibault Guichard, historian at the Institute for the History of Present Time (IHTP), is also a doctoral candidate at the University of Paris VIII.
For RFI, he follows the hearings of the trial of the attacks of November 13, 2015, and gives us every Monday his perspective on the progress of the hearings during the previous week.
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RFI: On Friday, a police officer, former head of the Anti-Terrorism Sub-Directorate (Sdat), presented propaganda documents from the Islamic State group to the audience, released following the November 13 attacks. What purpose ?
Thibault Guichard:
Friday's hearing undoubtedly raised a new issue in this trial which already has so many.
We could put it this way: how can the language of justice effectively oppose that of propaganda?
In any case, this is the challenge faced by this former Sdat official who came to present to us the conclusions of his investigation on the claim side.
He first recalled the interest of studying the propaganda of the Islamic State (IS) organization, stressing the very strong link which associates terrorism and propagandist activity.
To sum up, let's say that establishing oneself in the jihadist field and on the media scene are two inseparable things.
The observation was of course true before the arrival of ISIS, but since its emergence in 2006, this new actor has considerably renewed the codes of jihadist propaganda, its scale as well as its scope, by organizing a mass dissemination by the through the Internet, and by staging content characterized by its outrageous violence.
As the Sdat investigator recalled, this jihadist propaganda pursues at least three objectives: to mobilize, educate and amaze.
On the one hand, to strengthen the morale of its supporters, their operational capacity.
On the other hand, to amplify the terror and the effect of astonishment among his “enemies”.
Thus, it was essential to integrate this propagandist dimension of terrorism in order to understand the logic and the desired effects of the attacks of November 13th.
Several propaganda documents were therefore distributed at the hearing: mainly a
press
release and an
anashîd
from the Clain brothers, dated November 14;
and a clip lasting 17 minutes, from January 2016. How were they likely to instruct the court?
In the course of the trial, ISIS propaganda is indeed used as evidence: the images are diverted from the meaning for which they were produced, in order to serve the judicial investigation and the search for potentially evidence. held against the accused, or simply used to point out the contradiction of their defense strategy.
The decryption of the 17-minute video thus made it possible to establish the precise number of members of the November 13 commandos, and the presence among them of a tenth individual. From his analysis, other hypotheses could be formulated. For example, the filmed beheadings have been interpreted as a sort of ordeal in the journey of the jihadists trained in Syria. This macabre ritual made it possible to test the determination of young ISIS recruits, before they took action in Europe.
The critical study of this clip also showed that it was made from several sequences, shot over at least three distinct periods.
We see in fact nine members of the November 13 commandos whose common point, at the time of the broadcast in January 2016, is to be all dead and to have made a stay in Syria, but on different dates.
Thus, the scenes where we see Akrouh, Aggad, Mostefaï, Amimour, Hadfi and the two other future suicide bombers of the Stade de France, were all filmed in the Syrian desert, in August 2015. The individuals cited wear a colored latticework. sand.
They recite a text and then execute a hostage, beheading him, or even with a bullet in the head.
The second sequence, the one in which we hear Abaaoud's voice, would have been recorded during the latter's flash return to Europe in September.
Finally, the third sequence identified shows Brahim Abdeslam.
He is alone and practices shooting on a wall, dressed in a black uniform.
This video was probably shot during the Syrian stay of the Belgian jihadist, that is to say during the winter of 2015 (February).
So what does this timeline tell us?
First, that the protest film was prepared long before the November attacks.
Above all, that these attacks were planned, if not thought out at least seven months before the first French bombings in Syria, in September 2015.
This is an important point on which President Jean-Louis Périès insisted during the hearing.
The court will be able to rely on this demonstration to deconstruct the arguments of certain defendants, including Abdeslam, according to which the attacks were committed in response to French war crimes.
Beyond the information provided by IS propaganda, are there also other issues in disseminating these images in the courtroom?
I would say that another issue is that of the confrontation of the eleven men sitting in the box with these images.
Your question actually leads me to note that these images carry a radical otherness.
Watching them, even after having purged them of their most atrocious scenes, or listening to the heady words of the
anashîds
of the Clain brothers, remains a staggering experience for us.
But, for the other players in this trial?
The particular space of the court puts in co-presence all the parties, the prosecution and the defense, the victims and the accused, to whom the images were therefore also sent.
It was also, through these broadcasts, to confront the accused with their own propaganda, which can also be seen as the testimony of their presumed adherence to a form of radical hostility against the rest of society.
The question that arises would therefore be that of the effects of this confrontation.
But, this question remains for the moment in abeyance.
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