HARDLY a week following the Bastille Day tragedy on July 14 when a terrorist ploughed his 20-tonne truck into a crowd watching fireworks on the Promenade des Anglais, killing 84 people, polemics started taking unusual proportions over the question of security measures employed by the authorities at the Nice beachfront.
Oddly enough the centre of the controversy happens to be a 30-year-old policewoman, Sandra Bertin, who found herself on that bloody night in charge of the CSU, or the Urban Supervision Centre, that scans the streets of Nice through a video surveillance network round the clock. As the routine goes, after the horror took place she was asked to scan all the computer images and submit them with her report to the ministry of interior.
She went through the travail as required and put down in her statement, among other things, the fact that no police vans, street barriers or any other kind of precautionary steps could be seen in the video pictures that she had studied very diligently, again and again.
A few days after her report was sent to the ministry of interior she was visited by a high official from Paris who “harassed me for an hour”, as she claimed and ordered her to rewrite the report, this time signalling the presence of security forces at a number of points, even if they could not be seen on the computer shots.
“I only wrote in my report what I saw,” she answered, “and if you insist I can add in a second report that if any measures were deployed at all, I failed to notice them on the video images under my observation.”
She further said: “The ministry official then asked me to send him an email, in a ‘modifiable version’ specifying the points where the security forces were ‘theoretically’ present.”
“I had to obey the bureaucrat,” Bertin continued, “but I nevertheless emailed not one but two versions of my statement to him, the first modifiable as he had ordered, but also another unmodifiable one as a precaution, reconfirming my earlier report.”
Upon this, Bertin was ordered to destroy all the computer images that clearly proved the absence of any security devices around the area of Promenade des Anglais. She refused to do that and, to the discomfort of her “harasser”, revealed full details in an interview to the weekly Journal du Dimanche.
The following day the national media picked up the story and many pictures were published in the press as well as the reactions from local politicians that were also aired by TV channels. All this proved too much to the chagrin of Interior Minister Bernard Cazeneuve, who added fuel to the fire by describing the affair as a “villainous campaign against me personally”.
The imbroglio would probably still have remained only a local affair, but then the interior minister filed a defamation lawsuit against the policewoman at the Nice High Court.
To make matters worse, the prime minister and the president of France were unable to avoid the temptation of jumping into the hodgepodge. PM Manuel Valls described the case as “a political manoeuvre aimed at destabilising the government” while François Hollande came out with his own, typically confusing observation: “There is no room for controversy and confrontation. Only an investigation will uncover the truth.”
Bertin, in the beginning rather shy and on the defensive, finally decided to brave the challenge. She has engaged a lawyer who says the interior minister has no evidence to prove his accusation and that the young woman is in trouble for telling the truth.
The scandal erupts at a time when the presidential election is less than a year away and Hollande’s popularity ratings are already lower than any French president’s in the country’s history.
The writer is a journalist based in Paris.
Published in Dawn, August 7th, 2016
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