A prominent French anti-drugs campaigner whose brother was killed by drugs criminals last week, five years after the murder of his elder brother, has vowed to stand up to intimidation and keep telling the truth about drugs violence.
Amine Kessaci, 22, was writing in Le Monde newspaper a day after the funeral of his younger brother Mehdi, whose murder last week has been described by the government as a turning-point in France's drugs wars.
Yesterday I lost my brother. Today I speak out, he wrote in his opinion piece.
[The drugs-traffickers] strike at us in order to break, to tame, to subdue. They want to wipe out any resistance, to break any free spirit, to kill in the egg any embryo of revolt.
Mehdi Kessaci, 20, was shot dead last Wednesday as he parked his car in central Marseille in what appears to have been a warning or punishment aimed at his older brother, Amine, from the city's drugs gangs.
Interior Minister Laurent Nuñez commented on the incident, stating, This premeditated murder was something totally new. It's clearly a crime of intimidation. It's a new level of violence.
Mehdi was the second Kessaci brother to be killed by drugs criminals. In 2020 the body of Brahim Kessaci, then 22, was found in a burnt-out car.
That murder prompted Amine to launch his association, Conscience, which aims to expose the damage to working-class communities caused by gangs. Marseille is renowned for worsening drugs wars, and Amine Kessaci recently wrote a book called Marseille Wipe your Tears – Life and Death in a Land of Drugs.
In his Le Monde article, Amine revealed he was recently warned by police to leave Marseille because of threats to his life. He attended his younger brother's funeral wearing a bullet-proof jacket and under heavy police protection.
I speak because I have no choice but to fight if I don't want to die. I speak because I know that silence is the refuge of our enemies, he wrote, urging courage from citizens, and action from the government.
Mehdi Kessaci's murder has brought the national spotlight back on a drugs trafficking problem that French experts and ministers agree is reaching almost unmanageable proportions.
According to Senate member Étienne Blanc, the turnover in the drugs trade in France is now €7bn (£6bn), or 70% of the entire budget of the justice ministry. He said around 250,000 people drew a living from the trade in France – more than the total number of police and gendarmes.
President Emmanuel Macron on Wednesday launched a broadside against consumers, stating that they are sometimes the funding source for traffickers. He called a special drugs summit in response to Amine's murder to review progress on a new anti-drugs law.
The law aims to strengthen the judicial response to organized crime, creating a prosecutor's office dedicated to such crimes. According to Laurent Nuñez, this crackdown on drugs crime appears to be effective, with homicides in Marseille dropping and the number of drug dealing points halved.
Christian Estrosi, the mayor of Nice, referred to narcotrafficking as turning into narcoterrorism, advocating for military involvement as part of a wider strategy to combat this crisis. The worsening drugs problem, as expressed by various leaders, signifies an urgent call for comprehensive measures to save the communities being ravaged by drug violence.
