Africans have long felt marginalised in parts of France. Many in the eastern suburbs of Lyons have asserted their Muslim identity - and for some that includes linking up with al-Qaeda, say the French authorities, Lara Marlowe reports
Like hundreds of thousands of North African immigrants, Chellali Benchellali left his native Algeria to seek work in France in the 1960s. A decade later he met Hafsa, 10 years his junior, from his home village. They married and had six French children, whom they raised as Muslims in Les Minguettes housing project in Vénissieux, a suburb east of Lyons.
Today, five of eight members of the Benchellali family are imprisoned on suspicion of participating in what French officials call "the International Jihad Network," a term they prefer to al-Qaeda. The youngest son, Mourad, now aged 22, has been held by US forces at Guantanamo Bay for two years, along with a family friend and neighbour of Tunisian origin, Nizar Sassi (24). They had been given false passports by the eldest Benchellali son, Menad (30). Menad was arrested 13 months ago while allegedly plotting to attack the Russian embassy in Paris with 16 other members of the "Chechen network".
And on January 6th, Chellali (59), Hafsa (49), and their last free son, Hafed (26), were among seven North Africans arrested on suspicion of supporting Menad's organisation. The previous day, Chellali and Hafsa had been interviewed for their French nationality applications. Chellali was about to leave on the haj (pilgrimage) to Mecca.
Over the past two decades, the eastern suburbs of Lyons have earned a reputation for violent unrest and Islamic fundamentalism. In October 1983, the famous marche des beurs started here. Thousands of second-generation North Africans walked for six weeks to then-president Francois Mitterrand's office in Paris to demand equal rights.
Twenty years after the march, there is still not one deputy of Arab or African origin in the 577-member French National Assembly. Integration has failed, but no-one has a clue how to stop the exclusion of nearly 10 per cent of the country's population.
"The whites left and we were stuck in the ghetto," says Tewfik Kabouya (48), one of the instigators of the 1983 march. "You're born, you live and you die in Les Minguettes."
Because they felt rejected by French society, North African immigrants began asserting their Muslim identity in the 1980s, in unison with the fundamentalist movement that was sweeping the Arab world. Hafsa began wearing the veil and reading stories from the life of the Prophet to her children at bedtime.
Chellali, a window-cleaner by trade, declared himself the imam of the Abu Bakr prayer room on the ground floor of their building. Faraway events found resonance in the housing projects.
"I saw a big change during the 1991 Gulf War," says Jacques Debray, a lawyer who represents the Guantanamo prisoners and Hafsa Benchellali. "They kept hearing things like 'how will the Muslim community react?' when most of them were born here. They were made to feel like foreigners."
The war between the Algerian generals and the banned Islamic Salvation Front (FIS) also radicalised the eastern suburbs of Lyons. The letters "FIS" are still scratched on the walls of the lift in the high-rise where the Benchellalis live.
In September 1995, a 24-year-old Franco-Algerian fugitive named Khaled Kelkal, suspected of participating in a bombing campaign, was gunned down by gendarmes in the hills outside Lyons. France's alienated young Muslims became known as the "Kelkal generation". The family of Nizar Nawar, the suicide bomber who killed 21 Germans, Tunisians and a Frenchman in Djerba, Tunisia in April 2002 - an attack thought to be the work of al-Qaeda - live in the eastern suburb of Bron, next to Vénissieux. Three of the seven French Muslims held in Guantanamo are from the Lyons area.
The seven arrests on January 6th and President Jacques Chirac's law on secularism have raised tension to red-hot intensity. Twenty cars were burned in the eastern suburbs on the night of January 23rd alone.
Israeli repression of the Palestinian Intifada, the Russian slaughter of Muslim Chechens and the occupation of Iraq all feed French Muslims' sense of persecution.
"For the first time last year, when Chirac opposed the invasion, I heard North Africans say they felt French," Debray says. "Now that has been wiped away by his law on the headscarf."
The ban on headscarves in French schools is portrayed as an attack on Islam. Most of the women in Vénissieux are veiled now. Take out a camera in the street and people vanish. Journalists are deeply distrusted.
After this month's arrests, the communist mayor of Vénissieux, André Gerin, vowed to shut down a dozen prayer rooms and demanded that an "anti-terrorist" police unit be stationed in his town of 60,000 inhabitants. French investigators claim the prayer rooms, usually vacant garages or storage areas, are meeting places for extremists.
The Benchellali's home is in La Darnaise, the most rebellious sector of Les Minguettes, which is the worst neighbourhood in Vénissieux.
"We've had nothing but problems for the last 10 years," Gerin told me. "There's trafficking in drugs, counterfeit documents, car parts. Last year, they burned 47 cars in La Darnaise. Someone burned the shopping centre down in 1998 and we still haven't arrested anybody. People know, but they won't tell us who did it."
At first glance, La Darnaise seems clean and peaceful. The entry of the Benchellalis' building reeks of disinfectant. The grounds are landscaped with pine trees but when the wind blows from the refineries and plastic factories at nearby Feyzin and Saint-Fons, Vénissieux smells like a sewer.
The first act of the Guantanamo prisoners' support group was to paint graffiti saying "Long Live Bin Laden" on a building in the boulevard Lénine, where Mourad Benchellali and Nizar Sassi grew up.
"Mourad wanted to learn the Koran quickly," his elder sister, Amel (25), says in the Benchellalis' small 10th-floor apartment. "In Islam, anyone who learns the Koran by heart goes to paradise."
Everything around her was green, the colour of Islam: her voluminous veil and robe, the satin curtain, the sofa. Amel and her sister, Anissa (20), were among the first French Muslim girls expelled from school in the late 1990s for refusing to remove their headscarves. The youngest daughter, Miriam (12), will soon face the same problem.
"Mourad was 19 years old then," Amel says. "He'd dropped out of school and he worked sometimes with youth groups - he gets along well with people. He had short hair that he fixed with gel, and he never wore a beard. I think he liked girls. He loved our religion but it didn't show in his appearance. He fasted during Ramadan and prayed five times a day."
Amel shows me the last snapshot of Mourad before he left home, wearing a diving suit on a boat.
"I didn't recognise him," she says, handing me the blurry image transmitted on a pro-jihad Internet site in late 2001. The words "do you know him?" figure in Arabic at the bottom. Mourad wears Afghan clothing and has long hair.
The Benchellalis claim they did not know that Mourad and Nizar were bound for Afghanistan. US forces have not said where or how the young Frenchmen were captured, but the most popular theory in Les Minguettes is that they were enrolled in a Koranic school in Pakistan and that the Pakistanis "sold" them to the Americans for bounty.
Ounsi Hassine (31) is the president and spokesman of the Guantanamo prisoners' support group.
"Mourad planned to marry a Tunisian girl called Miriam when he returned," he explains. "It looks impressive on your CV to know the Koran and have military training - more man-like. But Miriam got tired of waiting and she wrote to him saying it was hard enough for her parents to accept his being Algerian, let alone a terrorist."
Hassine believes Mourad and Nizar went to Pakistan to learn the Koran.
"It takes only six to eight months there," he says. "You study 15 hours a day, but it's the sort of thing a religious person dreams of. When the US bombardment started, I think the imams said: 'We have to help our brothers.' I can't imagine Mourad and Nizar saying: 'No, no. We're French.' "
Mourad and Nizar travelled on other Frenchmen's passports, in the names of Jean-Baptiste Mihoub and Abdel-Wahab Jouba. The passports were given to them by Mourad's elder brother, Menad, a year and a half before he was arrested with the "Chechen network".
Menad had told Jouba, who worked for the county government in the town of Auxerre, that his passport would help someone defend Muslims under attack by Russian forces in Chechnya.
By most accounts, Menad is the black sheep of the family, the key to the Benchellalis' downfall. The most charitable interpretation is that he dragged the others into militant Islam.
Menad was especially close to his father, Chellali. In 1993, Chellali and two other Muslims from Vénissieux were captured by the Croatian militia at Kiseljak, outside Sarajevo. It was their fourth convoy carrying clothing and medicine for Bosnian Muslims under siege. They were held for five months in terrible conditions. Amel Benchellali denies rumours that her father was running guns to Bosnian Muslims.
"The Croats arrested him because he wore a beard," she says. "He was beaten and starved. The Croats gave them one tin of food for 20 people. When my father saw how the Bosnians were treated, it tore him apart. No one did anything about it. There was a genocide there, and now the same thing is happening in Chechnya."
Double standards are a constant grievance of the Muslims of Vénissieux.
"When [French philosophers] Bernard-Henri Lévy and André Glucksmann go to Bosnia or Chechnya, everyone thinks it's great," says Boualem Azahoum (36), a Moroccan who works for DiverCité, an association that is trying to raise political consciousness among immigrants. "Chellali Benchellali was more sincere, because he went to Bosnia without television cameras, and he's treated like a terrorist.
"French Jews do military service in Israel. The Americans gave money to the mujaheddin in Afghanistan. [The singer] Charles Aznavour helps the Armenians. But when Muslims support anyone, solidarity becomes a crime."
Ounsi Hassine portrays Chellali Benchellali as a scatter-brained eccentric. "Before I started going to the Abu Bakr prayer room, I met him once in the market," he says. "He wore a pink shirt and sunglasses, and he had a red beard."
French newspapers say the self-styled imam made inflammatory speeches, but Hassine defends him thus: "When he said that [Russian president] Putin was a war criminal whom God would punish, that Bush invaded Iraq for the oil, he was saying what French people think."
It was Menad, not Chellali, who circulated video-cassettes of Russian atrocities against the Chechens, Hassine says. Reports that Menad shook down young men in the eastern suburbs of Lyons for passports and money may be true, he admits.
In the early 1990s, Menad began disappearing for long periods. He told his family that he went to Spain, Morocco and Turkey. He told Hassine he visited Sudan, Mauritania, Yemen, Syria, Jordan and Israel, where he disguised himself as a Jew to visit the Wailing Wall. French authorities say he also went to Afghanistan.
During his stay in Syria in 1995-1996, Menad learned Arabic and mastered the Koran.
"I was fascinated by his command of the language," Hassine says. "We used to meet at the McHalal fast-food restaurant to discuss theology. He had magnetism, and liked to show off his learning."
But the two friends would fall out.
"Menad had a Manichean vision of the world," Hassine says. "Good was too white; evil too black. Some Muslims think that Islam will solve every problem. Menad was certain of it."
Around 1998, Hassine moved - with half a dozen young Muslims, including Menad's brother, Hafed - to Vannes in Brittany, where they worked in a halal (meat slaughtered according to Islamic standards) food-processing plant.
"Menad visited one weekend, and he showed a side of himself I'd never seen before," Hassine says. "He was like an anarchist - against authority, against the established order. He said: 'The West is against us. We have to fight them.' I told him to get out. He had the right to think what he wanted, but I was afraid the young men might be persuaded by him."
Mourad was already a prisoner in Guantanamo when Menad telephoned his parents from Georgia, asking them to send €2,500 so he could come home.
Georgia's Pankissi Gorge is a training ground for Chechen rebels. French officials say there are thousands of foreign Muslims there, including emirs from al-Qaeda. Although they suspect Menad and his cohorts of plotting an attack on the Russian embassy in France, the French see them as far-flung satellites of Bin Laden's group.
Whatever his affiliation, Menad began experimenting with what the inhabitants of Les Minguettes call his "magic potions," allegedly mixed in empty Nivea jars. In custody, Hafsa and Chellali have complained of sickening odours coming from the kitchen. Anissa was allegedly sent to the pharmacy by her brother to buy ricin oil, a laxative that contains tiny amounts of the deadly poison, ricin.
A few weeks after Menad and his friends in the "Chechen network" were arrested in the Paris region in December 2002, seven Muslims were arrested in London on suspicion of making ricin. Though traces were found in their flat, no vials of the toxin were located, and police fear stocks made by both the Paris and London groups may still be hidden. They were part of the same network.
Menad's group had a "shopping list" of chemical ingredients, a small amount of conventional explosives and two empty gas canisters like those used in the 1995 bombings. Hidden in a washing machine were electronic components which the French believe were intended for use as a remote-control detonator.
Menad can be held in preventive detention until 2005 on the orders of anti-terrorist judges. He sent only one letter to his family after his arrest, and they have not been allowed to visit him in prison.
"Menad is responsible for his own actions," Amel says coldly.
French authorities criticise Menad's parents and brother for failing to denounce him to the police, for sending him money, and for facilitating communications with other Islamists. It appears likely that Chellali, who has not visited Algeria since 1978, may be deported to his country of origin.
Amel shows me the burn-marks on the front door where French police detonated an explosive device at 6 a.m. on January 6th.
"There was so much smoke that my family thought the building was on fire," she says. "There were 20 of them and they searched the apartment until 9.30 a.m. They took my brother, Hafed, right away. My mother lay on the sofa. She suffers from diabetes, high blood pressure and a slipped disc. When they left, they told her to bring her medicine and money so she could eat properly in prison."
Amid tales of police brutality, the inhabitants of Les Minguettes have repeatedly staged demonstrations of support for the Benchellalis and those arrested with them. As worshippers in the Abu Bakr prayer room file out after noon prayers, I speak to an Algerian who works in building maintenance in Les Minguettes. He looked nervously around and, like most of the residents I talked with, would not give his name.
"I can be arrested any time, just because I walk out of the prayer room," he says.
The young man nods at the windows of the high-rises around us. "Believe me, everyone is watching. People think the DST [French intelligence service] and CIA are everywhere. They're afraid of the police, and now they don't know who's with al-Qaeda."
No charge: Working to free the Guantanamo 'small fry':
Jacques Debray's law office is cluttered with mementos from the Arab world, gifts from clients in Lyons' eastern suburbs who are unable to pay their bills.
When the Benchellali and Sassi families learned two years ago that their sons, Mourad (22) and Nizar (24), were imprisoned by US forces at Guantanamo Bay, they naturally turned to the kindly lawyer in Lyons. The communist mayor of Vénissieux, André Gerin, also joined the prisoners' support group.
The French committee travelled to London last month to co-ordinate efforts with the families of nine Britons held in Guantanamo. They are working with the American Civil Liberties Union and Human Rights Watch, which are also protesting the absence of due process of law on the base in Cuba.
Next month, the French lawyer and mayor and several members of the support group are due to meet US congressional staff and UN officials. They place their greatest hope in a possible Supreme Court ruling against the Bush administration.
There are 33 Europeans from seven countries held at Guantanamo, the two largest groups being the British (nine) and French (seven). Last December, seven of nine Britons were supposed to have been freed.
"It was blocked because the US demanded that the British file criminal proceedings against them," Debray explains. "To their credit, the British said their judiciary was independent."
Official French delegations have visited the French prisoners three times. The support group was received at the French foreign ministry. But Debray complains of "inaction" by the Paris government. The French, he suspects, do not want to antagonise Washington over the detention of men whom they deem undesirable. Only the British and Swedish governments have directly challenged the US over its failure to observe the Geneva Convention, Debray says.
"The Americans have provided no evidence, no charges," Debray says. "Going to Afghanistan is not a crime."
The French foreign ministry told Mayor Gerin that US contacts had said Mourad Benchellali and Nizar Sassi were "small fry".
"The Americans have said it's out of the question that any of the Guantanamo prisoners return to a hero's welcome," Debray says. "They insist they be incarcerated."
Debray has appealed to French anti-terrorist judges to charge the two young men with a crime so that they might be extradited - but to no avail. In the meantime, the prisoners are in a legal twilight zone, with the threat of the death penalty hanging over them.