As a member of France’s
team of anti-terrorism magistrates, he knows how hard — read impossible
— it is to penetrate the island’s tightknit criminal world, where
nationalism and banditry have blended into a combustible mix.
Mr. Thiel has been giving a lot of interviews recently, ever since a
well-known Corsican lawyer was shot and killed in his car Oct. 16. That
murder shocked France, coming as an unwanted reminder that Corsica, an
island of 305,000 people about 175 kilometers, or 110 miles, off the
French coast, is still under the thrall of an old legacy of vengeance
and death.
“You think if it’s small, it should be easy, but no,” said Mr. Thiel,
speaking Nov. 15 in his high-security office in the Palace of Justice in
Paris. “Everyone is connected. You can’t infiltrate, even if you have
the right accent and the right complexion.”
“The first question they’ll ask is which village are you from, and
that’s it,” Mr. Thiel said. “It’s over. There were two attempts to
infiltrate informants, and it didn’t take long for both to turn updead.”
On the morning of Nov. 15, the number of assassinations in Corsica this
year stood at 16. By that evening, it had ticked up to 17, with the
murder of Jacques Nacer, president of the local Chamber of Commerce and
Industry, shot and killed as he was closing up his men’s clothing shop
in Ajaccio, the island’s capital.
“These are assassinations,” Mr. Thiel said that morning. “We’re not
talking about some guy who kills his wife, or a wife who kills her
husband. These are settlement of scores among rival bands of organized
crime, or fratricidal struggles between nationalist groups.”
As Mr. Thiel likes to put it, Corsica is a mountain in the middle of the
sea, where isolated villages hold onto an ancient culture of vendetta
and resist the authority of the French government.
… Since mid-October, he has spoken out against the French government’s
lack of a consistent response to the violence in Corsica. He has cited a
series of amnesties in the 1980s that were followed by other halting
initiatives. He has criticized a flawed reform of intelligence-gathering
that he said had led to confusion, and few results.
It is no wonder that Corsican society today is paralyzed by fear, he
said. “How can a population rebel against this kind of violence when the
state apparatus is seen to be underperforming?”
That “code of silence” was vividly confirmed last week by France’s top
security official, Interior Minister Manuel Valls, who said on national
television that he had been stunned by the reticence of people on the
streets of Ajaccio. “I saw fear on their faces,” he said. “Some didn’t
dare talk to the minister of the interior.”
Crime in Corsica has evolved since 1998, when, in a stunning act of
political terrorism, France’s top government official in Corsica — the
prefect Claude Érignac — was gunned down. Mr. Thiel was the
investigating magistrate in the case, in which Yvan Colonna was
eventually convicted of the murder.
… Mr. Thiel’s last big Corsican case involved a number of young thugs,
arrested for a series of violent acts committed in 2007 and 2008,
including the tossing of a grenade into a police station.
He compared the defendants, who were convicted and sentenced last July,
to “children soldiers,” who turned to crime as much for the money and
the thrill as for the politics. “If you ask them, they’ll say they’re
doing it for Corsica, but they can’t say much beyond that,” he said.
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