The beating of photojournalist Ameer Alhalbi by police exposes the corruption of the French political elite

Photojournalist Ameer Alhalbi escaped the sadistic brutality of Syria under dictator Bashar al-Assad, moving to Europe in the hope of finding freedom. Instead, the 24-year-old found the end of French police truncheons.  

On Saturday, while covering protests in Paris’s Place de la Bastille, he became the victim of a beating by police that was so brutal it left him hospitalised with a broken nose and other injuries. He was shown in a photo on social media with wounds on his face and his head wrapped in bandages.  

Ironically, the protests he was attempting to cover were against rampant police brutality and a law peddled by France’s right-wing interior minister, Gerald Darmanin, that would shield French cops from accountability.  

France has a profound policing problem. The investigative media outlet Mediapart recently reported on how a group of undercover Paris officers opened fire on a group of innocent young men they mistook for criminals, then lied about it to authorities.

Darmanin himself has a history of alleged cruelty, having been repeatedly accused of demanding sexual favours in exchange for services when he served as mayor of Tourcoing, a northern French city. He’s now apparently positioning himself as the successor to his tough-talking “law-and-order” mentor, Nicolas Sarkozy, who is standing trial on charges that he took millions of dollars in illegal campaign funds from Libyan dictator Muammar Gaddafi.  

France’s president, Emmanuel Macron, is also cynically playing the “law-and-order” card and whipping up nativist hysteria against Muslim immigrants like Alhalbi, in a transparent effort to outflank right-wing populists who are surging in France – mostly because of his own corporate allies’ neoliberal economic policies.  

Alhalbi was clearly identified as a journalist, according to press freedom advocates. He is a professional who shoots for Polka magazine and Agence-France Presse, and has won several international awards for his coverage of the Syria conflict in his hometown of Aleppo.

Compare Alhalbi’s dedication to his craft, and his commitment to the French values of liberty, equality and fraternity, to the raging cynicism and corruption of the French political elite and its security apparatus.  

“Ameer came from Syria to France to take refuge, like several other Syrian journalists,” wrote Christophe Deloire, secretary general of Reporters Without Borders. “The land of human rights should not threaten them, but protect them.” 

Yours,

Borzou Daragahi

International correspondent