WHEN the funeral ceremony for the 130 Black Friday massacre victims took place at Napoleon’s tomb in Paris, television cameras kept moving back to President François Hollande’s grieved face, his lips trembling, his voice shaken and even tears in his eyes.

Families of the dead, but also many of the 300 injured people themselves, some in wheelchairs, attended the event and a deathly silence prevailed as the victims’ names were read out one by one.

Given the solemnity of the occasion, not everyone could notice that the pronounced list remained short of all the names of the people killed on Nov 13 in the Bataclan concert hall and on the terraces of adjoining cafes in central Paris. The majority of the media, a negligible number of newspapers being an exception, discreetly ignored the fact that many of the victims’ relatives were boycotting the event, describing it as a sham and absenting themselves from the ceremony.

A youth who has lost a relative turned his back on the president as he began speaking and remained in that position for as long as Hollande continued.

Emmanuelle Prévost, whose brother François-Xavier was killed in the Bataclan shootings, refused to attend the event. She said she was not interested in shaking hands with the government officials who had done nothing since the Charlie Hebdo killings in January this year except leading street marches wearing the ridiculous ‘I am Charlie’ badges.

The parents of Aurélie de Peretti who was shot dead on the terrace of a cafe also did not join the ceremony and asked the organisers not to cite their daughter’s name.

A few politicians, though they attended the occasion at Les Invalides mausoleum, agreed with the boycott. Marc-Philippe Daubress, a Republican member of the national assembly, says: “Following the Black Friday killings a number of measures were taken by the authorities. Stockpiles of arms were seized, a hundred or so people were interrogated and many were arrested under the suspicion of planning future terrorist acts. Why wasn’t all this done immediately after the Charlie Hebdo attack? I attended the ceremony only because it was my duty as a parliamentarian, though I hardly agreed with the idea.”

Catherine Vannier, whose teenage daughter was killed in an assault on a group of French tourists in Cairo in February 2009, told a reporter the name of Farouk bin Abbas, the gunman allegedly responsible for the attack, was on the list of the French authorities and he was even arrested in 2010 but was later released.

“Now his name has emerged once again following the Bataclan massacres. Why was he allowed to roam freely all this time? This is sheer incompetence and there is no other word for it,” she says.

Without revealing his identity at his own request, Le Figaro quotes a military medical analyst: “This so-called national homage was a scandal given the fact that a number of unidentified bodies are still lying in the morgue. This ceremony was a political manoeuvre and little else.”

Another critic of Les Invalides ceremony is Axel Metzker, a lawyer who is handling the case of one of the victims of the supermarket killings by Amedy Coulibaly in January:

“The authorities had sufficient amount of details about Coulibaly’s connection with terrorism before he committed his act. Why was he not put behind bars then? The most suitable homage that the government can render will be to admit its failure in the fulfilment of its responsibilities and resign immediately.”

If the Napoleon’s tomb ritual was only a ‘manoeuvre’ then it has certainly misfired, as shows the disastrous score of the governing Socialist party in the recently held regional elections all over the country following which the far right National Front has established itself as the leading political party of France.

The writer is a journalist based in Paris.

ZafMasud@gmail.com

Published in Dawn, December 13th, 2015