On 13 July 1998 I went to sleep as myself and woke up as Zinedine Zidane. It was the day after the victory of the French national football team. And yet, I am not a football player.

On 21 March 2012 I went to bed as myself and woke up as Mohamed Merah. And yet, I have never carried arms and have never shot anyone. The day when the identity of the perpetrator of the killings of Montauban and Toulouse was revealed, I said to myself, ‘We’re in for it’. On top of that, a call came from my cousin, then my uncle, then some old friends from high school, then from activists from all sides. Most of those are Arab or Muslim men and women. And it went on all day. Panic on social networks. ‘We’re in deep shit!’

Why are we linked to Mohamed Merah, like the rope is connected to the hanged?

I cannot deny it. I cannot escape it. I cannot dig a hole to bury myself to wait it out. Mohamed Merah is me. The worst part is that it is true. Like me, he is of Algerian background, like me he grew up in a poor district, and like me he is Muslim. Mohamed Merah is me. How old was he on 9/11? Twelve years old. A child in the process of constructing himself. Since then, like me, he has been subjected to the incredible Islamophobic political and media campaign that followed the attacks against the twin towers. Because Mohamed Merah, 12 years old, was already considered a Ben Laden. And vice versa. Almost certainly, at his school, a minute of silence was imposed for the victims of 9/11. Like me, his school never invited him to pay silent respect to the Rwandans, the Afghans or the Palestinians. Like me, he was subjected to the destruction of the historical home of Mesopotamia and witnessed the massacre of Iraqis on live TV. Like me, he also witnessed the hanging of Saddam Hussein, on live TV, on the day of Eid el-Adha. Both of us, him and me, me and him, were subjected, powerless, to the second affair of the veil, and the exclusion and the humiliation of our sisters at school. We saw how the power system, with no sense of shame, has transformed a fundamental principle of the republic, secularism, into a weapon against us. We went through the bombing of Gaza, and also the popular uprisings of 2005, following the deaths of Zied and Bouna. Like me, he knew that some Jews, and I stress some Jews, young like him, French like him, can take a plane to Tel-Aviv, put on the Israeli army uniform, commit abuses on behalf of what Bernard Henri- Levy called ‘the most moral army in the world’, and then come back to France, all cool and unperturbed. Just like me, he knows he would be accused of antisemitism if he supported the colonised Palestinians, and of religious fundamentalism if he supported the right to wear a headscarf.

Mohamed Merah is me, and I am him. We are both of the same background but, more importantly, of the same condition. We are postcolonial subjects. We are indigenous people of the republic.

• Houria Bouteldja is a spokesperson for Parti des Indigènes de la République. This is the text of a speech she gave at Bagnolet, France on 31 March 2012.