LAST Wednesday proved to be a moving but also stressful day for France when an official ceremony took place at Napoleon’s tomb, Les Invalides,in Paris to pay homage to Arnaud Beltrame.
Lt Col Beltrame was a young army officer who was in charge of civil security in the Aude region, south of France. Last Saturday a man named Redouane Lakdim claiming allegiance to the militant Islamic State group entered, heavily armed, into a supermarket in the small town of Trèbes and shot dead three people, taking at the same time 16 hostages, two of whom remaining gravely injured today.
At this point Lt Col Beltrame negotiated with the terrorist the release of a woman hostage, an accountant at the supermarket, by offering to take her place. Once the lady was allowed to walk out free, following three hours of painful suspense during which the officer tried to convince Lakdim to give himself up, he was shot a number of times and stabbed in the throat.
The security forces then raided the place and shot dead the terrorist. The conversation between him and the officer was heard by the police as Beltrame had kept his mobile phone on.
Once the details came out in the media, the deceased officer was immediately treated as a national hero who had gone far and beyond his duty to save a woman by willingly giving up his own life.
During Wednesday’s ceremony homage was paid, next to the coffin draped in the tricolour national flag, by President Emmanuel Macron in person who compared Lt Col Beltrame’s sacrifice to those of France’s Second World War heroes and said his example would “remain etched forever in the hearts and memories of the French people”.
The President added: “To be willing to die in duty so that innocent civilians could go on living is the very essence of what it means to be a soldier. So many other officers, even if they are undoubtedly brave, would have wavered or hesitated, but Beltrame did not.”
Following his public eulogy in front of the hero’s family and fellow officers, the president posthumously promoted Lt Col Beltrame as full Colonel and awarded him the Legion d’Honneur, France’s highest award.
However, many wonderful stories often have a dark side too and behind every hero sometimes hides a villain. Add to this the fact that we are living today in a world dominated by the so-called ‘social networks’.
A few minutes after Col Beltrame’s honouring ceremony, a political leader named Stéphane Poussier, a failed candidate from the Calvados region in last year’s parliamentary elections, qualified the officer’s killing in his repeated twitter messages as a ‘positive, very positive thing’. He further said every policeman deserved to be gotten rid of by being shot to death.
Stéphane Poussier was arrested immediately and produced before the judges who sentenced him to one year in prison and deprived him of all social security benefits for the next seven years.
The writer is a journalist based in Paris.
Published in Dawn, April 1st, 2018
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