The trip had a high symbolic value. On Thursday December 9, Minister Marlène Schiappa visited the centre of the Parisian transport company RATP in Les Pavillons-sous-Bois (Seine-Saint-Denis) on the occasion of the Day of Secularism. The next day, Azdyne Amimour, the father of terrorist Samy Amimour, who helped perpetrate the attack on the Bataclan, will testify before the Paris jury court.
Samy Amimour had the notability of being a bus driver for the RATP, in the very depot in Pavillons-sous-Bois that Denis Maillard, author of the 2017 book Quand la religion s’invite dans l’entreprise (Fayard), cites as a stronghold for communitarian ideology: “Pavillons-sous-Bois is one of these centres (there are said to be two others in the Paris region) where management has had to retreat in the face of the strength of the communitarian and religious demands. Closed communal spaces inaccessible to management (with suspicions of black marketing), refusal by some machinists to shake hands with women and even touch the steering wheel after they have done so, buses that stop while drivers say their prayers… The attacks against sacrosanct secularism, the iron rule in the public service, have become legion”.In recent years, several other affairs have overshadowed the life of the state enterprise, which is perceived as particularly prone to “separatism”, a way of life set apart from the rest of society, where the obligations of one’s community take precedence over the rules of the Republic. An information report signed by MPs Eric Poulliat (LREM) and Eric Diard (LR) in June 2019 is extremely alarming. “The phenomenon of communitarianism detected in some RATP depots must be monitored with the utmost attention,” the parliamentarians wrote.”There were examples of staff praying at their workplace or refusing to shake hands with a woman, or the appearance of a communitarian union in the occupational elections in certain depots,” they outline. This is the union against precarity (SAP-RATP), renamed “the union for Muslims” by some staff, as Denis Maillard explains in his book, which won over 50% of the votes in the 2014 works council elections in two bus centres: in the 18th district.
“If you are a Muslim at RATP today and you do not go to prayer on Friday, you will be taken to task. There is a desire that there is a rigorous practice of Islam. And so you become radical in order not to be harassed. This is part of what is being reported to us,” Eric Poulliat tells L’Express, who interviewed senior company executives as well as trade unionists and managers on the ground. www.lexpress.fr