At the foot of the blocks of buildings in the Castellane district, in the north of Marseille, the usual deal points have been deserted by traffickers. The “choufs”, these lookouts responsible for warning the network in the event of the police arriving, have been silent for hours. All that remains are the rubble barricades erected at the entrance to a parking lot in the city, to complicate police patrols or the arrival of rival gangs.
On this Tuesday in March, Emmanuel Macron’s surprise visit to the neighborhood, often cited as one of the most affected by drug trafficking in Marseille, placed the dealers on forced partial unemployment. “Wait two hours for the show to end, and they will come back,” jokes a resident, observing from afar the crowd crowding around the president.
In front of the cameras, the Head of State came to promise an anti-drug operation “XXL, everywhere in France”. This has just been launched this Monday, March 25, in several cities in France, notably in the Lille metropolis. The president swears to the Marseillais that the police will, “for weeks, shell the territory” against drug traffickers, in order to “destroy the networks […]and that the few who [leur] make life impossible go away.”
An unprecedented operation
Since the day before, more than 2,000 police officers, gendarmes and customs officers have been deployed in the Marseille city, as part of an “unprecedented” operation which would have made it possible to arrest “more than 82 people” in 24 hours. The scale of the mobilization gives some hope to Kheira, mother of six children and resident of Castellane for thirteen years. “We want to believe it, but trafficking has always existed here. Unless the CRS remain 24 hours a day, I don’t see how they could get rid of it,” she confides. Barring an exceptional presidential visit, “the network”, as she calls it, has not been hiding for a long time.
Every day, Kheira observes his invasive presence, his attempts to recruit younger people, the comings and goings of his clients. “If I could, I would have left a long time ago. I do everything so that my sons don’t fall into it, but I can’t follow them all the time,” admits the mother. At just four years old, his youngest boy is already imitating the adults, shouting “Arah” [“attention”, en arabe] when he sees a police officer in uniform.
In most families, the rules are the same: the “little ones” are not allowed to hang out in the neighborhood after school, go out after a certain hour, or chat with the “choufs”. But nothing helps: for some young people, the presence of the network has become banal. Sabrina, in her twenties and a whole life spent in the Castellane towers, even believes that traffic “is the least serious problem in the neighborhood”. “The real concern is unemployment, precariousness, lack of transport. In the meantime, the network takes the place of institutions and sometimes makes our lives better,” she pleads, referring to the giant barbecues organized by dealers during the summer, “games bought for the little ones” or free meals offered for religious holidays.
“We all know someone who has been killed”
With an increasingly large number of consumers, a historic presence in the neighborhoods and new sales methods via social networks, Marseille drug trafficking seems to have never been so powerful. “I fear that we are losing the war against traffickers in Marseille,” indicated Isabelle Couderc, vice-president of the organized crime unit of the Economic and Financial Judicial Jurisdiction (JIRS) of Marseille, on March 5, in front of a Senate commission of inquiry dedicated to the fight against drug trafficking. In 2023, the violence of drug trafficking has reached a new level, leading to the death of 49 people – including four so-called “collateral” victims, with no known links to the networks.
This is the case of Larbi Dekhil, a 63-year-old retiree who fell under the bullets of a burst of Kalashnikovs on April 24, while he was playing cards in a snack bar in the La Busserine district, in the 14th arrondissement of Marseille. “They shot blindly, without even having a real objective, other than to hit the opposing network,” regrets Mohammed Benmeddour, former neighborhood mediator. Here, the violence of this tragedy has largely traumatized the residents. “Anyone could have been in their place. We said to ourselves that everyone could die from a stray bullet,” testifies a mother, member of a watch group set up by residents to keep a watchful eye on “neighborhood issues”. Like almost all of the people interviewed at La Busserine, the forty-year-old prefers to remain anonymous. “We do what we can, we talk with young people, we sometimes manage to get some of them out of the network… We organize local activities, we maintain links. But it’s difficult, we’re not going to lie,” she whispers.
In La Busserine, traffic is part of the decor: residents have always known the choufs posted at the bottom of the towers, the street furniture burned in the middle of the night to warm them, the regular ‘Arah’ shouted at all hours, the chicanes designed to slow down junk cars. The forceful raids by the police no longer impress, deemed “useless” by residents pinned down for a cracked headlight or prohibited parking outside the school. “We adapt, everyone does their own life,” says Henri Pujol, organizer of the neighborhood’s cultural space. It is not uncommon for the official or his colleagues to ask dealers to move their barricades back a few meters on certain show evenings, in order to allow spectators to park. “Network or no network, we will continue to offer cultural offers,” he wants to clarify. “We continue to live, but we never know how far the violence can go. On a daily basis, people are afraid of being attacked, of seeing their children fall into the network after buying a can from a dealer, of living a new drama”, sighs Anna Buresi, director of the Schebba association, established for almost forty years in La Busserine. It sometimes happens that in the morning, residents learn of the death of a young person from the neighborhood, killed in the night as part of a settling of scores or a “mess-up” with the network. “We all know someone who died. Young people who were in our class or our high school, who were 15, 16, 17 years old, and just thought of making a little money… It has become normal,” admits , prohibited, a young intern encountered at the social center.
Unaccompanied minors hired at low cost
Recently, local associations have also observed the presence of new recruits among traffickers: unaccompanied minors hired at low prices, young people arriving from other cities in France and lured by the promise of easy money on social networks. “The network has become an SME, which recruits on the Internet, promises the El Dorado, surfs on the trend of Marseille badboy rap clips… Young people arrive here, often a little lost. We contract them fictitious debts, they are made trap, or tell themselves that they have nothing more to lose”, explains Mohammed Benmeddour. From his boxing club, established in the neighborhood for more than 20 years, Slim speaks of “peaks of violence”, of score-settling “in waves”, which calm down or resume with the turf wars. In the photos displayed on the walls of the gymnasium, he points out the face of a young person who regularly came to train, also hit by several bullets during the attack on the snack bar. “He survived, but it marked us all. Now, when a car comes at full speed, we immediately think of the possibility of a shootout,” he says before changing the subject. The coach prefers to concentrate on those who, having passed through his club, are now training with the France team. “We show them that another future is possible, that they are worth something, despite everything we hear about our neighborhoods.”
The isolation of the inhabitants is palpable: most often, these victims died or were injured amid general indifference. “We have the impression that people are saying ‘so much the better, they’re killing each other’. We’re being left to cope with our problems,” laments the representative of the monitoring group. Last June, she was also able to observe Emmanuel Macron taking “his tour” at La Busserine, as part of the presentation of his “Marseille en grand” project. For the occasion, the streets of the neighborhood had been cleaned, the walls repainted, the deal points emptied. “He gave a nice speech, and since then, absolutely nothing has changed,” says the mother. The next day, traffic had resumed.
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