Generations of neglect
http://www.theaustralian.news.com.au/common/story_page/0,5744,17160993%255E2703,00.html
Riots across France reveal a nation's failure to admit the mistreatment of its migrants, writes Emma-Kate Symons in Paris
November 07, 2005
"NO to violence and yes to dialogue." The thousands of silent marchers in Aulnay-sous-Bois, one of the worst-hit suburbs in the Paris riots, yesterday left French citizens in no doubt as to their yearning for respite.
Despite the attempts by police and politicians to talk down the rapidly escalating evidence of sustained urban warfare, the nightly parade of torched cars and buses, firebombed brasseries, warehouses, nurseries and schools has continued unabated for 10 evenings.
On Friday night alone, almost 900 cars were torched, mostly in poor immigrant suburbs. Hundreds more struggling residents of la banlieue -- or the suburbs -- lost their means of transportation at the weekend. At least 3000 cars have been incinerated since October 27, and late last week copycat attacks spread across France to Normandy, Lille, Marseilles and Dijon.
The clashes sparked 10 days ago by the accidental death of two teenage boys -- who were electrocuted after taking refuge in a substation, believing police were chasing them -- in the Paris suburb of Clichy-sous-Bois have paralysed the country.
Arsonists came closer to the centre of Paris on Saturday, striking at neighbourhoods such as Pantin and Montreuil, which are on the Metro line. The heart of Paris was hit yesterday, when Place de la Republique, 10 minutes' walk from Notre Dame cathedral, was closed after the burning of four cars.
"This is like (the protests) of May 1968 -- except it is the inverse," said Philippe Val, the publisher of the satirical weekly Charlie Hebdo.
The idealism of the late 1960s, when factory workers and students rose up together in the centre of Paris for a socially revolutionary ideal, has been replaced by a sinister modern phenomenon.
Rioters working in small gangs have attacked symbols of the state, such as schools and nurseries in their own suburbs.
In perhaps the most shocking attack, a disabled woman was set alight by a gang who invaded a bus in the Paris suburbs. The woman, who suffered burns to 30per cent of her body, was saved by the bus driver.
Yet despite the shocking crime wave, the French Government and the media, struggling to identify the causes of the unrest, have been rendered almost inert by the violence.
Lawlessness is the rule in the suburbs, many of them heavily populated with the impoverished unemployed children of France's former North African colonies.
Newspapers, politicians and religious leaders have failed to condemn the rioters in a united front.
"The words of the ghetto" screamed the page one headline on Saturday in Liberation, the left-wing newspaper founded in the 1970s with the backing of Jean-Paul Sartre.
The newspaper carried a photograph of a 20-year-old resident, Youssef, in a New York baseball cap, with the subheading: "Youth of the suburbs recount for Liberation the reasons for their anger -- unemployment, deterioration of the suburbs, police control. And their hate of Sarkozy."
Liberation has condemned the foreign press for daring to compare the situation in the suburbs with the intifada or condemning the failure of the French model of ethnic integration.
Yet members of the communities at the heart of the attacks show no sign of distancing themselves from the violence -- unlike in Britain in the days after the July 7 terrorist attacks, when those living near the suicide bombers eventually spoke out against them.
Yesterday, Prime Minister Dominique de Villepin met Dalil Boubakeur, leader of the Paris mosque. But after the meeting the imam had only words of caution for the Government, not an unequivocal condemnation of the crime.
"What I want from the authorities, from (Interior Minister) Mr Nicolas Sarkozy, the Prime Minister and senior officials are words of peace," he said.
Many imams have called on parents to keep their children in line and off the streets. But there is a distinct sense that this violence is explicable, if not justified, because of government provocation and the long history of discrimination, poverty and unemployment in the suburbs.
"Sarkozy must say sorry or resign," say many of the angry youths.
Isolated within the centre-right Government, yet increasingly popular with the frustrated French voters, Mr Sarkozy said he had harsh yet "true words" for the rioters.
In an interview with Le Monde newspaper, Mr Sarkozy condemned the security policies of the Left as "angelic and calamitous". Referring to the gangs of youths terrorising communities as a kind of "mafia" or organised criminals, he refused to back away from his original description of the rioters as racaille -- or scum.
Although Mr Sarkozy has come under sustained attack from the Left, Muslim leaders and the young for his use of inflammatory language, he may well emerge from the chaos as a political winner.
The Interior Minister was left out to dry for five days after the riots began as his ministerial colleagues remained silent. Eventually Mr Villepin and President Jacques Chirac spoke out, calling for order.
Yesterday Mr Villepin held another emergency meeting of his cabinet. Last week he met with young people from the suburbs to discuss his "plan of action" -- the latest in 30 years of misguided attempts to deal with France's growing Arab and African, largely Muslim, underclass. But the hypocrisy of Mr Sarkozy's critics was exposed by the revelation that in a 2002 interview with Le Monde, Azouz Begag, the Minister for Equality of Opportunities, had himself used the word "racaille" to describe youth gangs in the suburbs.
Yet France, so perplexed at the intense foreign press coverage of its version of the Los Angeles riots is, as one French journalist explained, so politically correct it cannot admit the complete breakdown of its beloved republican system of blind equality and forced integration of ethnic minorities who, perversely, are rendered more marginalised and separate by this ideology.
The head of state is like a sickly, ghostly figure in the background, offering no real leadership or direction as France confronts one of its most serious social crises in years.
The cynical French electorate sees through its Prime Minister's high-minded words. The latest opinion polls shows his approval rating has fallen 5 per cent, in line with Mr Chirac's.
Mikael Salaun, a sociologist who lectures at the University of Valle-de-Marne, said that in the search for explanations for the violence one must look back at least 30 years.
"None of the politicians really understand the culture of the suburbs, or even accept that there is a different and authentic identity that has arisen over many years," he said.
The flight of the middle classes to the suburbs began in the 1970s, when unemployment skyrocketed, and it has continued ever since.
Professor Salaun said the loss of parental authority is acute in some parts of the suburbs -- because many of the parents cannot speak French.
The cultural tendency to treat young Muslim boys as "little kings" who can lord it over their sisters and have the free run of the house and neighbourhood also may be contributing.
Especially worrying for France, home to Europe's largest minority Muslim population of more than 5 million, is the potential for the violence to fan Islamic extremism in a country that has already suffered terrorist attacks.
Jean-Marie Le Pen and his far-Right National Front have taken advantage of the disorder, calling for a curfew and the sending in of the army to restore peace by force.
However, Mr Le Pen ignores the shameful history of the treatment of people from France's former colonies who came to the country in the 1950s and 1960s to fill a severe labour shortage.
While the first and second generation had jobs, the French social model has spectacularly failed third-generation migrants from North Africa, with unemployment nationally nudging 10per cent, but up to 50 per cent for young people in the suburbs.
"In order to assuage the concerns of the people of the banlieue, France must face up to the shame of its colonial history," said Antoine Kunth, a lecturer in urban economics at the Sorbonne.
"But even for the Left this would require too much self-analysis, and the French are a very proud people."
