French Presidency Has “Kill List” Of People
Targeted For Assassination
By Kumaran Ira
August 19, 2015 "Information
Clearing House" - "WSWS"
- - In the name of the “war on terror,” the
French state is dramatically accelerating its use of clandestine
operations to extra-judicially murder targeted individuals. French
President François Hollande reportedly possesses a “kill list” of
potential targets and constantly reviews the assassination programme
with high-ranking military and intelligence officers.
This programme of state murder, violating basic
constitutional rights in a country where the death penalty is
illegal, underscores the profound decay of French bourgeois
democracy. Amid escalating imperialist wars in France’s former
colonial empire and deepening political crisis at home, the state is
moving towards levels of criminality associated with the war against
Algerian independence and the Vichy regime of Occupied France.
Press reports have revealed the French state’s
assassination programme—carried out particularly in the regions
where France has launched military interventions supposedly to fight
terrorism, in Africa and the Middle East—and applauded it.
In an article on August 8 titled “War on Terror,
Licence to Kill,” news magazine Le Point asserted that the
French president has the right to kill an individual who has not
even been charged with, let alone convicted of, a crime. It wrote,
“The rule of law has its dark side. The president of the republic
has the right to kill, despite the abolition of the death penalty. A
republican monarch, the head of the army can give the thumbs-down,
deciding alone and in cold blood to make a man leave the land of the
living.”
Le Point added,
“This right is unchallenged, as it is written nowhere. And because
it is exercised without discussion, oversight, or control.”
Regarding the French president’s “kill list,”
online magazine Slate wrote: “This list includes the names
of terrorists and other stated enemies whose elimination without
trial the president of the Republic has authorised. This means their
execution without warning, anytime, as soon as the secret services
or military intelligence can locate them.”
This state of affairs points to the complicity of
the entire political establishment in the establishment and the
promotion of an apparatus of political killing in France. Le
Point reported the existence of a special death squad belonging
to France’s external intelligence agency, the General Directorate
for External Security (DGSE).
It wrote, “The human resources to launch such
operations exist, with an identified and well-trained chain of
command, overseeing either discreet forces like the Special
Operations Command (COS), or clandestine units of the Action Service
of the DGSE. Inside the latter entity, there is an even more
mysterious and better-hidden unit than the others.”
This unit, known as “Alpha agents,” was created in
the 1980s by General Jean Heinrich, then the DGSE’s director of
operations, “to bury potential operations in the dark folds of the
world of shadows,” Le Point stated.
In his recent investigative account, The
Killers of the Republic, journalist Vincent Nouzille exposes
the assassination programme of successive French governments. To
assert its imperialist interests in Africa and the Middle East, the
Elysée presidential palace secretly leads a campaign of state
murder. Nouzille reveals the existence of a clandestine cell within
the DGSE, whose agents and commandos are trained to carry out
targeted killings or “Homo [homicide] operations,” often in or near
conflict zones.
In an April interview to Sud-Ouest, he
explained: “In the mid-1980s, a mini-cell was formed inside the
Action Service: the Alpha cell, with a dozen members. They were
killers, the ‘killers of the Republic.’ They operate in such a way
that their actions cannot be traced back to the French services.
There is concurrently a rise of the special forces, who operate in
conflict zones such as Mali.… Inside these forces, there have
emerged mini-groups of elite gunmen who can identify and kill an
individual in a few hours.”
During the NATO-led war in Libya to topple the
regime of Colonel Muammar Gaddafi in 2011, these special commando
forces helped Al Qaeda-linked Islamists forces capture, torture, and
summarily execute Gaddafi. “This was the case in Libya, the special
forces acted in civilian clothing. They played a key role in
toppling the Gaddafi regime,” Nouzille said.
It is under Hollande’s Socialist Party (PS) that
the assassination programme has been intensified to a level
unprecedented since the Algerian war of 1954-1962. During that war,
French death squads summarily murdered hundreds of fighters of the
National Liberation Front (FLN).
Under Hollande, more than a dozen “homo
operations” were launched between 2012 and 2014. Nouzille said,
“Never have the special forces and the Action service been used as
much as today. This is because of the context, of course. Starting
in 2012, there was a much more aggressive policy....”
In May, France assassinated Abdelkrim al-Targui, a
Tuareg and a leader of Al Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb (AQIM) in
Mali, who was allegedly involved in the killing of two French
journalists in Northern Mali in November 2013. An officer told
Le Point: “We had to develop forces in the heart of the Tuareg
units of AQMI. To understand them, find the right tracks, and wait
for the favourable moment, we needed five months.”
Hollande’s assassination programme underscores the
PS’s reactionary role and exposes the bankruptcy of pseudo-left
organisations like the NPA, which called for voting for Hollande in
the second round of the 2012 presidential elections. Having backed
the war in Libya, they are totally silent on the French state’s
assassination programme.
The significance of large-scale secret state
murder in France can only be understood in the context of the
escalating imperialist interventions of the NATO powers in Africa
and the Middle East, and rising social tensions in France itself. As
it seeks to recolonise its former colonial empire through naked
terror, the French ruling class also fears rising discontent with
the austerity policies of the European Union in the working class.
The Hollande administration is the most unpopular in France’s
post-World War II history.
In these conditions, there is a massive
bureaucracy of murderous repression. Its targets will not only be
drawn from Islamist forces, many of which have close ties to Western
intelligence services, including the DGSE—as the Libyan war made
clear. They also include the French people, and above all opposition
in the working class.
The reports on Hollande’s “kill list” coincide
with the imposition of sweeping police state measures inside France
itself, including a
surveillance law giving intelligence and police vast powers to
spy on the entire population.
Copyright © 1998-2015
World Socialist Web Site