Friday, Nov 04, 2005
"Forgotten children of the French Republic"
Vaiju Naravane
The bubbling cauldron of discontent in Paris' run-down, high-rise suburban slums, home to the dispossessed, has finally overflowed.
IN THE harsh light of a sunny November morning, the semi-deserted streets of Aulnay-sous-Bois, a run-down northern suburb of Paris, resemble a battlefield littered with detritus. The burnt out shells of several cars line sidewalks thick with sticks and stones, empty soda and beer bottles, shards of glass, charred garbage bins, cinder and ash, the vestiges of over a hundred fires lit by rampaging mobs of angry youth.
For the seventh night running, the suburbs of Paris were hit by an unprecedented wave of violence, pitting angry mobs of mainly North African Arab and Black immigrant youth against heavily armed policemen. The bubbling cauldron of discontent in Paris' run-down, high-rise suburban slums, home to the dispossessed, has finally overflowed. In this past week of nightly violence, over 200 cars have been burnt, supermarkets, schools, and police stations ransacked by thousands of enraged, screaming young men.
It all began a week ago in the neighbouring suburb of Clichy-sous-Bois following the accidental electrocution of two teenagers who sought refuge in an electrical substation to escape a police check - Bouna a 15-year-old of Malian origin and Ziad, whose parents came from Tunisia. The situation worsened after a police grenade was launched at a mosque during Friday prayers. The police deny having lobbed it. The young men from the housing estates say the police did it to discredit them. Since then violence has spread from suburb to suburb and now covers a huge swathe from the western outskirts of Paris to the north and east of the city, and further north to several outlying areas.
"Those two teenagers had nothing to hide. They had committed no crime. But such is the climate of hate and fear when it comes to the police, that they preferred to risk their lives rather than be checked, insulted and humiliated. My own two boys are in their early twenties. They are good, law abiding citizens. Yet they are harassed and checked incessantly by the police - on buses, on the metro. Our children find it hard to get jobs. These housing estates have no facilities. How are these youngsters expected to become model civic citizens," asks Abu Bakr Saleh, who came to France 30 years ago to work in the nearby Citroen car plant.
The housing estates bear a terrifying sameness - tower blocks surrounded by bald playgrounds, a supermarket and a few shops nearby, a school, a mosque, a church, planted in the middle of nowhere on the periphery of Paris. This is the ugly underbelly of France's gracious capital, the City of Light, the seat of taste, glamour, and high living.
Suleiman is 26 and jobless after five years of university. He is the antithesis of the stereotype that casts young French Arabs as rough, uncouth, and delinquent. His discourse and language are sophisticated and his despair evident: "I have a Masters degree in economics but no job. My name and my address are enough to scare away any prospective employer. This is where I live. Just look around you. What do you see? Box-like structures, whose stairs are covered with graffiti, where everything is broken or trashed. Look at the humidity coming through the walls. The lift doesn't work, the paint's peeled off, the corridors smell of piss. In a week's time those trees planted in the middle of the concrete walkway will have lost all their leaves. There is over 50 per cent unemployment amongst the young, failure at school is endemic, and gangs and drug dealers make the law. How could it be otherwise, when the state has boxed us away here, far from its conscience and public scrutiny? They call us the children of the Republic. We are in fact the forgotten children of the Republic, those to which the state has denied basic rights. Our anger has to come out somewhere. What is happening now is far bigger, deeper than the anger caused by the pointless death of those two young boys."
France has long had a problem in its cites or suburban housing estates, built in the 1960s for immigrant labour brought in mainly from the country's former North African colonies to man the factories springing up in the post-war boom.
Abu Bakr Saleh explains: "When I came here to work in the automobile plant in Aulnay we left behind tremendous poverty. We always planned to go back. But the children were born and we stayed on. My generation was prepared to put up with racism, insults, and humiliation because what we had left behind was so much worse economically speaking. But my children were born here. They hardly know Tunisia. They do not speak good Arabic. They are French both by nationality, by language, and by culture. So they are naturally angry at being treated as second class citizens. They are not accommodating the way my generation was and why should they be? They are French by right and by birth. Other nationalities came to France at the same time as us - the Spaniards, the Portuguese, and more recently the Albanians, Romanians, and other east Europeans have come. They have merged better because they are Christian but mainly because they are white. We cannot help our colour and our facial features. The French continue to think of us as former colonised natives - the bouniouls as they liked to call us. You know there is a great deal of racism here. The Arabs and the Blacks get the worst end of the stick."
Feeling of injustice
It is true, however, that the suburbs have become home to drug pushers and criminal gangs that inculcate young children into delinquency. Sociologist Eric Marliere says that while there may not be any coordination between the mobs and gang leaders in the various suburbs, there is nevertheless a shared feeling of anger and despair. "Whether they are university students or school dropouts, all these youngsters have a shared feeling of injustice. And the bitterness is perhaps even greater amongst those who have tried to pull themselves out of their sordid surroundings through higher studies."
Several observers say the present crisis so quickly worsened because of the way it was handled by the government, and particularly by the maverick Interior Minister Nicolas Sarkozy. He referred to the rampaging youth as "rabble" and vowed to mercilessly bring them to heel through tough police measures. His policy has evidently backfired and Mr. Sarkozy, who is a declared candidate for the 2007 presidential election, has now been sidelined by President Jacques Chirac who asked his Prime Minister Dominique de Villepin to take the situation in hand.
Hughes Lagrange, who heads the Observatory of Social Evolution in the troubled suburb of Mantes-la-Jolie, said: "The dynamics of this crisis, the way it has spread underlines the deep conflict with the police. Repression alone is no solution. The problem of unemployment has not been addressed. Local missions are at a loss to address the problems and the youth of these housing estates feel their voices are never heard. Street anger is their way of telling society at large to sit up and take notice."
Claude Dilian, the Mayor of Clichy-sous-Bois, said in an interview: "France has an estimated 700 such housing estates located on the periphery of big towns such as Paris or Lyon. Over five million people live there - roughly one eighth of our country's population. If you look at the statistics you will note that there is over 25 per cent unemployment in these estates compared to 10 per cent elsewhere. Income levels are just 40 per cent of the national average of 10,500 euros. Can France really afford to have such islands of deprivation and poverty in its midst and not pay the price? In all good conscience can we accept such a situation?"
On Thursday, Prime Minister de Villepin cancelled a scheduled trip to Canada and Mr. Sarkozy, who was to visit Pakistan and Afghanistan, did likewise. Mr. Chirac has given his government a month to come up with a plan to tackle the ills plaguing France's suburban trouble spots. But the picture that emerges is of a President who is nearing the end of his term and a government weakened and divided by internal strife, short on concrete solutions.
As the daily Liberation put it in an editorial: "The government has underestimated the reality of these ghettos. As everyone knows they can be torn down, removed only through determined action over a period of time through grass roots work away from the glare of TV cameras. And it must be action on all fronts, economic, social, cultural, which will involve the residents of the suburbs themselves. We must break the cycle of rebellion-repression which is no remedy for what ails the ghettos and we must at all costs stop the risk of contagion."
Copyright © 2005, The Hindu.