In Marseilles, the settling of accounts against the backdrop of drug trafficking now claim almost as many victims as road accidents. For comparison, since the beginning of the year, 19 people have died on the roads of Bouches-du-Rhône, against 17 in shootings. The last two were killed on Sunday and Monday evening, including a sixty-year-old who was obviously in the wrong place at the wrong time.
“These are all dramas that are managed with a rather sad banality”, regrets Hassen Hammou. An EELV activist, he founded the Too Young to Die collective six years ago after the death of a close friend in a shooting. “We can see that the situation is going completely out of hand,” notes the young man, a child from the northern districts. The statistics are worrying: in 2022, 32 deaths were recorded in settling scores in Marseille, which is a record. The figures for 2023 are already in a high range and raise fears of an equally heavy balance sheet, or even more.
“Too much talk, too many broken promises”
To try, once again, to warn about this situation, the collective Too young to die took the initiative to go to the National Assembly and the Senate, on May 3. “This is the first time that we have invited ourselves to the Assembly on this subject”, agrees Hassen Hammou. Other figures and actors from the neighborhoods will also be on the trip to make themselves heard, such as Nasser, a resident of the Bassens district. The 24-year-old was one of those who met President Emmanuel Macron face to face in September 2021, during his trip to this city in the northern districts of Marseille.
“I expect sincere acts and no longer words to come out of these meetings. There have been too many speeches, too many broken promises. After the shootings, we send the CRS 8 to the field for a week, but all the state does is give the image that it is acting,” he judges. According to him, “social, educational, economic issues” must “be exposed to senators”.
The delegation has already thought about some solutions to present, such as the systematic relocation of the families of victims of score settling. Its mission: to convince parliamentarians to create a commission of inquiry or a study mission on violence in housing estates.
Studying the drug economy in its complexity
“The idea is that at the end of these meetings, a working group should be created in order to make a real diagnosis of the situation in the northern districts, and not just a security diagnosis”, continues Hassen Hammou. . He also believes that “the shelling strategy (put in place by the prefecture to hit massively and repeatedly on deal points) has shown its limits”. According to the young man, we should start by really dissecting the economy generated by drug trafficking.
“The drug economy is a subject that we need to study,” admits Guy Benarroche, EELV senator for Bouches-du-Rhône. It is he who will be responsible for organizing the May 3 meeting between the Marseille delegation and his colleagues. “The interest of an information or study mission is to form a cross-partisan group that will be able to hear people from these neighborhoods, police officers, victims or relatives of victims and why not people who were part of networks, he says. The purpose would be to be able to produce a report that would give political recommendations. »
The environmental senator already has some ideas, starting with the legalization of recreational cannabis. “The economy generated by cannabis trafficking kills, but it is clear that it works. However, as long as we do not deconstruct this economy, we will not succeed, ”he believes.
The narcotics war that plagues the neighborhoods of Marseille would, it seems, never have been the subject of a real parliamentary study in order to grasp all its complexity.
At the same time, the delegation is also getting organized in Marseille. It intends to set up a committee which would bring together the four local authorities (city, metropolis, department, region) to pilot actions. With this feeling: if the inhabitants do not organize themselves so that this subject advances, no one will do it for them.