French urban unrest hits new high

[Libaax-Sankataabte]

Will the disadvantaged muslim/Black youth in countries like the UK and USA do the same thing?

I am very sure everyone is watching.

 

The French revolution taught these kids something. George Bush would have deployed the "national guard" just like his father did in LA, along with the infamous "Shoot to kill" policy.

 

I am glad the French goverment is not using excessive force to commit mass murder.

 

 

French urban unrest hits new high

Sun Nov 6, 2005 2:18 PM GMT

 

PARIS (Reuters) - Urban violence scaled new heights in France as gangs of youths torched cars, shops and firms in the 10th straight night of violence in poor suburbs of Paris and provincial towns, despite heavy police reinforcements.

 

Prime Minister Dominique de Villepin was to meet police on Sunday afternoon and teachers from tough neighbourhoods to discuss how to respond to youths who have defied all appeals for calm from top officials and exasperated residents.

 

Rioting started 10 days ago with the deaths of two youths apparently fleeing police. The deaths ignited pent up frustration among ethnic minorities over racism, unemployment, police treatment and their marginal place in French society.

 

The Socialist opposition chided the ruling conservatives over their law and order record and demanded President Jacques Chirac, who won re-election in 2002 on security issues but who has kept a low profile, speak out.

 

Residents in affected zones wept and vented their dismay.

 

"This is too much, stop! Stop, do something else, but not this, not violence," sobbed a woman in Evreux, a normally quiet Normandy town where a shopping mall, 50 vehicles, a post office and two schools were destroyed.

 

"My wife's out of a job now," fumed another resident. "I've two kids, a house to pay for and a car loan. What do I do now?"

 

Evreux mayor Jean-Louis Debre, a Chirac confidant who is speaker of the lower house of parliament, told reporters at the scene: "A hundred people have smashed everything and strewn desolation. Well, they don't form part of our universe."

 

GOVERNMENT RESPONSE

 

Authorities say the rolling nightly riots are being organised via the Internet and mobile phones, and have pointed the finger at drug traffickers and Islamist militants.

 

Across France, 1,300 vehicles went up in flames, with 32 cars destroyed in the city of Paris for the first time.

 

"Why would people do such a thing? You should go and ask them. Of course it's not normal -- it's pure vandalism," said one pensioner in the 17th district of Paris where the wrecks of six burnt-out cars sat surrounded by shards of glass.

 

Previously quiet towns like Dreux, to the west, and the western city of Nantes, were also affected.

 

Seven police helicopters buzzed over the Paris region through the night, filming disturbances and directing mobile squads to incidents. Police made 349 arrests and an extra 2,300 officers have been drafted in.

 

The violence has tarnished France's image abroad, forcing Villepin to cancel a trip to Canada, while Russia and the United States have warned their citizens to avoid troubled suburbs.

 

Authorities have so far found no way beyond appeals and more police to address a problem with complex social, economic and racial causes.

 

"Many youths have never seen their parents work and couldn't hold down a job if they got one," said Claude Chevallier, manager of a burned-out carpet depot in the rundown Paris suburb of Aulnay-sous-Bois.

 

WHERE IS CHIRAC?

 

As the government continued to struggle for a response to the crisis, Socialist Party leader Francois Hollande said the riots were a failure of government policy and leadership.

 

"I want to hear Jacques Chirac today," Hollande told reporters. "Where is the president when such serious events are taking place?"

 

Villepin has consulted widely but has released no details to date of a promised action plan for 750 tough neighbourhoods.

 

"I'll make proposals as early as this week," the weekly Journal du Dimanche quoted him as saying.

 

Communist and Green Party officials demanded one symbolic measure -- the resignation of Interior Minister Nicolas Sarkozy.

 

Accused of stoking passions by calling troublemakers "scum", Sarkozy has ignored calls to quit. A survey published on Sunday indicated his public image was holding up, even if many disapproved of his strong language.

 

Villepin also has ambitions to be the right wing's presidential candidate in 2007 and has tried to position himself as a much more consensual figure than Sarkozy. The effect on the crisis on his ratings is still unclear.

 

(Additional reporting by Paul Carrel in Evreux)

[Libaax-Sankataabte]

The week Paris burned

Sunday November 6, 2005

The Observer

 

The riots that have convulsed France over the past week have raised huge questions over the country's ability to integrate its Muslim population - concerns which have implications for the rest of Europe, writes Alex Duval Smith in Aulnay-sous-Bois

 

No one knows if the two boys saw the skull and crossbones as they frantically clambered up the two-metre yellow wall.

Even if they did, the warnings did not deter Bouna Traore, 15, and Ziad Benna, 17, from going into the electricity substation in the Paris suburb of Clichy-sous-Bois. According to a friend, the boys had panicked when they saw other black youths running from police and, worrying they could be mistaken for those being pursued, looked for somewhere to hide.

 

Bouna and Ziad died when 20,000 volts of electricity found them instead. Two families were left devastated and France exploded into urban rioting such as it has not seen for a decade.

 

By last night, the ninth of unrest and protest, there had been 258 arrests, a dozen men and women had been injured and more than 2,100 vehicles burnt. The suburbs of Paris are ablaze and the fever has spread uncontrollably to Lyon, Strasbourg and Rouen - political mismanagement fuelling the rage of the most impoverished of France's citizens and belying its claim to be a modern, racially integrated society.

 

More broadly, from Britain to Italy, the riots have raised urgent questions about multiculturalism and why successive models of integration over 30 years have gone wrong. The continent has woken up to its inability - frightening in the age of radical Islam - to embrace the destinies of thousands of youngsters estranged from the societies their parents entered into.

 

The past week has also shown that many of the 14- to 25-year-olds now rioting, as distinct from those who took to the streets a decade ago, are not crying out for jobs, training or integration. Amid unemployment rates of 20-30 per cent on the housing estates and racism outside, they have given up. Crime, especially drug dealing and petty theft, has become a means of survival.

 

Whether Bouna and Ziad were simply playing or being pursued by the police will be decided in court. But it will be too late for the rumour-mill of the Parisian ghettos, where word spreads faster than the wind that whips between the tower blocks.

 

Two Thursdays ago, within two hours of Clichy-sous-Bois plunging into a power blackout as a result of the boys' electrocution, 100 young men had begun throwing stones at police and fire officers.

 

Cars were torched and buildings smashed. Riot police moved in, firing rubber bullets and tear gas. Fighting escalated. The rioters grew in number to 400. Last Sunday word spread that a tear-gas canister of the kind used by the police had been thrown on to the doorstep of the Bilal mosque.

 

When calm returned on Monday, after 63 cars had been burnt and 53 people arrested, the police could not claim credit. Spirits had been calmed thanks to the intervention of a handful of young men from the mosque, known as les grands-frères, who stood between the rioters and the police, shouting 'Allahu akbar!' - 'God is great'.

 

Khalid El-Quandili, a former world kick-boxing champion, who in the past few days has been acting as a mediator in Clichy-sous-Bois, says that few have any authority over the young men, who are mainly of North African origin and 'more or less practising Muslims'.

 

'The fathers have the least authority of all,' he adds. 'They sometimes have no work and live on benefits, or have a very traditional outlook so are out of phase with France. The mothers can be a powerful influence, but they are hamstrung by the very macho culture that prevails on the estates.

 

'Schoolteachers in these zones are very often young and inexperienced. The grands-frères play a role, but they are self-appointed peacekeepers, which is dangerous.'

 

Many - but far from all - of the rioters have been children of North African immigrants. France is home to Europe's largest Muslim population and a third of its estimated six million people of Algerian, Moroccan and Tunisian origin live in the ghettos.

 

But also among those arrested last week were children of French parents and grandparents and the offspring of sub-Saharan immigrants. What they all have in common is their alienation from mainstream society and, often, an Islamic upbringing.

 

For years, French integration policies have been based around the republican tenet of secularism. On the basis that France should be indivisible and able to assimilate all its components by officially erasing their particularities, the government does not allow official statistics to be broken down by ethnicity and religion.

 

But because of the nature of its post-colonial immigration, France finds itself with more Muslims than it had reckoned with. In the age of Islamic militancy, that is a worrying trend - especially since so many of the Muslims are stuck in the ghettos.

 

Christophe Bertossian, an immigration specialist at the French Institute for International Relations, believes it is time for a rethink: 'Part of the problem is the French approach to integration, based on the concept that everyone is equal. The idea that we are equal is fiction. Ethnic minorities keep being told they do not exist.'

 

El-Quandili argues that integration policies have been undermined by the very people who created them: 'Twenty years ago we had a wave of policies aimed at supporting neighbourhood associations. But these groups were, in time, co-opted by politicians and lost their credibility. Other associations had their funding cut.'

 

The Muslim upper hand is clear at Aulnay-sous-Bois, which has a population of about 90,000 and was the scene of some of the worst rioting in the past week. Here, 41 per cent of the population is under 25. Amid the four- and five-storey buildings that have in recent years replaced the tower blocks of the 1970s, dozens of cars and lorries were burnt or damaged, as was a police station, a fire station, a school, an old people's home and a car salesroom.

 

On the Rue du 8 Mai, leading into the Mille-Mille estate, hairdresser Agnès Fréchon, 36, waits anxiously for electricity to be restored to her salon. The Crédit Lyonnais branch next door was rammed with a car in the night, then burnt, along with a kebab shop in the parade.

 

'If you look at the shops that have been burnt down, you can tell that the Muslim grands-fréres have had their say,' she adds.

 

'The halal butcher has not been touched, neither has the pizzeria, owned by a Moroccan. I try to stay neutral - after all, I cut everyone's hair - and I get the impression that, if my shop has been damaged, it is by accident because it's next door to the bank.'

 

Her customers, a steady stream of whom turn up during the afternoon to re-book their appointments, agree that the rioters probably wanted their mothers to be able to continue to go to the hairdresser.

 

Sonia Mabrouk, a 45-year-old secretary with two children, says she regularly confronts young troublemakers on the estate when they have set fire to dustbins or cut off the electricity in her building.

 

'For them, vandalism is something to do in the evenings. The vandalism has simply taken a new turn in the last few days because they feel provoked by [interior Minister] Nicolas Sarkozy's comments about "louts". They are blaming everything on Sarkozy, but the problem is much bigger.'

 

Mrs Mabrouk, who is of Algerian descent, has lived on the estate for 34 years. 'There has been a malaise on this estate for the past 15 years,' she says. 'I do not think the trouble will stop until Sarkozy resigns. But even if he goes, the underlying problems will remain.'

 

Yesterday the right-wing mayor of Aulnay-sous-Bois, Gérard Gaudron, led a silent march of 600 residents between the destroyed fire station and the burnt-out pensioners' day centre in Mille-Mille. 'This march is neither a provocation nor a demonstration of force, but a republican response to acts of delinquency,' he said.

 

Gaudron, who proudly boasts of Aulnay's capacity to attract business - a Citroën plant, l'Oréal and a range of hypermarkets of warehouse stores along the motorway leading to Charles de Gaulle airport - is perceived by many as a Sarkozyist. The Interior Minister's rivalry with Prime Minister Dominique de Villepin has probably worsened the spate of riots.

 

Not only do suburban youths loathe Sarkozy's rhetoric about them, but in the past week they have seen evidence that the Interior and Prime Ministers are obsessed only with their own ambitions to be become the next President.

 

It became so intense during the past week that both politicians cancelled foreign trips to position themselves at the centre of the riots issue. On several occasions, Sarkozy made comments about the Clichy-sous-Bois deaths that were, at worst, ill-informed and at best sought to blindly defend the police.

 

Yet in a country where 28,000 cars have been burnt on housing estates this year alone, Sarkozy's gamble for the intolerant right-wing vote could still pay off. In today's Le Monde, the Interior Minister is unrepentant in a personal opinion piece titled 'Our strategy is the right one'.

 

Last week, on the day Bouna and Ziad were killed, Jean-Claude Irvoas, 51, got out of his car in Epinay-sur-Seine to take a photograph. As his wife and daughter sat in the car, Irvoas was attacked by three men, said to be Arabs from a nearby housing estate, and savagely beaten. He died in hospital later that evening. While speaking of the perpetrators, Sarkozy speaks to France's 'victims' - and they don't live in Clichy-sous-Bois or Aulnay-sous-Bois.

 

If in the past the 'louts' were forgotten, it looks like they could now be used as pawns by France's politicians.

[Nephissa]

Heard this on the radio. Many of the current rioters were born and raised in france but viewed by european french natives as outsiders. Underemployed or unemployed, crowded into ghetto-like projects. They'r going to riot ofcourse, and it's not their fault! The blame lies on rich white corporations and government.

[Sky]

Will the disadvantaged muslim/Black youth in countries like the UK and USA do the same thing?

I am very sure everyone is watching.

 

The French revolution taught these kids something. George Bush would have deployed the "national guard" just like his father did in LA, along with the infamous "Shoot to kill" policy.

 

I am glad the French goverment is not using excessive force to commit mass murder.

France had always been vulnerable to massive protests. As you pointed the French Revolution, but more interestingly Charles De Gaulles also had to bite the dust in 1968 after the protests against him had hit the fan. Who knows if it works again this time in France, others will follow.

 

Chirac doesn't have to worry though. But his Interior Minister Nicolas Sarkozy can forget about winning the presidential elections in 2007. Have you heard what this minister said about the disadvantaged youth of France Libaax? He called them thugs and he swore to clean these thugs from the streets. Chirac has mildly criticised him, which shows you how deep in trouble he is. For Chirac its probably wise to denounce him, but I doubt that he'll move an inch because of the riots. His government allready stated that riots are unacceptable and countless people are now hounded by the police.

[N.O.R.F]

One should visit the suburbs of Paris to understand the situation. The French are the most racist people you will ever encounter but then they have a 90% black world cup winning football team :confused: Yet their national stadium, Stade De France, is in the middle of the infamous St Denis.

 

If you are an Arab or Sub-saharan African in France you will be viewed as one from the colonial countries hence the riots and why arabs and black africans stick together.

 

LST, the UK adopted what was called the Urban Renaissance in 2001 which saw huge investment and redelopment of many inner cities. This has resulted in the trickle effect where community members have found work within their respective 'projects', local businesses given grants to sprouce up their premises, traffic calming measures, new housing etc etc. All this in addition to the new deal (finding work is a must) and PFIs in schools/hospitals etc, has made britain a better place for non-'brits'in inner cities. Thing have become easier since Labour have been in power

[Modesty]

It's not surprising that the French are racists, Europeans are more racists than Americans...at least America is more diverse and the civil rights movement sure has helped blacks and minorities. There is this girl from "Sweden" in my class, I don't think she has ever seen a black person before, she always keeps staring at me and this black girl...it's annoying, because they have that look (dumb) that I'm better than you. They are xoolo to me. Anyways, I heard this store in France discriminated against Oprah too! Indeed it is shocking. It's not surprising that the minority folks in France are rioting, because they need to have a movement.

[Tuujiye]

Salama caleykum ciyaal kuni kuni....

 

Waraa LST salaama caleykum horta sxb kee...

I hate to say this but I don't feel sorry for anything that is happening to the frunch muslim in france..when you leave allah's way of life, you get punished and thats what is happening to them.. madaxa halooga istaago qashiimiinta...lol..

 

Wareer Badanaa!!!

[Libaax-Sankataabte]

Waraa Tuujiye, aw-guuryo hee. Waa maqlay arooskaaga.

[Tuujiye]

kkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkk

 

Adoomoo qarxiska jooji waa ku tuugaa suuqa ha iga xirin.. seecamal adi..najoota bil cilmika...waraa saas maa macruuf ku nahay maraxaa tahay dhawee!!!

 

Aroos maxaa la dhahaa?..luubta geed hindigaa???

 

Wareer Badanaa!!!!

[N.O.R.F]

Modesty, we are talking about France, not Sweden. The Swedes are one of the most hospitable people you will ever meet.

 

Tuujiye, your theory is exactly that, your theory. What are they being punished for exactly? for living in a country that is racist to the bone? Maybe they should move to Canada where allah may not punish them :rolleyes:

 

ps congratulations

[Alle-ubaahne]

Nomads, Check this radio program, an interesting head-on discussion by some prominent talking-heads in french and Tarik Ramadan. It seems the issue is very much pertinent to the realities in the U.S. as the gap between the impoverished and well-to-do people widens.

 

code:

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 http://www.onpointradio.org/shows/2005/11/20051111_a_main.asp 

[Yoonis_Cadue]

Everything is calm now and the curfews have been lifted.

 

No more unrests and every day fewer cars are set ablaze.

[Baluug]

French people are among the most racist people on the face of the planet, and I'm not just saying that because of the hijab ban. My wife and I have seen it first hand, even if they were from Quebec, but they're basically the same.

[Muhammad]

just few nights before the riots broke out, the BBC world service had a program titled 'Has Multiculturalism Failed?' they covered malaysia, nigeria, the u.s. and france.

 

it was an intersting program. did anyone catch it?

[Senora]

Will the disadvantaged muslim/Black youth in countries like the UK and USA do the same thing?

The apathethic mindset englufed in Americans today would allow me to answer No.

 

It's not surprising that the French are racists, Europeans are more racists than Americans

I wouldnt go so far as to say that. Its very tricky to compare the Americans to the Europeans, or more specifically the French. The mutli-cultural societies pervasive in many of the major European communities today has not lasted as long as the United States. When high immigration waves struck the US in the 1800's and early 1900's, Europeans were continuing to deal with their Colonial matters. Only after nations were granted independence from these powers were we beginning to see large numbers of immigrants/regugees fleeing to their respective Imperial powers.

 

Blacks were fighting racism for over a century before the Civil rights movement in the US finally got attention. The Europeans have only spent a third of that time dealing with its racial issues.

 

Modesty, we are talking about France, not Sweden. The Swedes are one of the most hospitable people you will ever meet.

Under 14% of the population is either foreign-born, or children of foreign-born parents. And only half of that population is non-white. So essentially, were looking at a population of less than 8% that is non-white.

It easy to point to Sweden as this succesful representation of democracy when they aren't dealing with percentages comparable to other Multi-racial societies. Let's see if the statement holds true when say,its percentages tip over 20% non-white.

 

What we are seeing is a French society unable to accomodate its multi-racial/ethnic groups. Until this is solved, the unrest will only escalate