FRANCE: WHAT IS GOING ON?

There is surprisingly little analysis of the uprisings occurring now in France. Lots of news stories, little in depth reporting. Below is a sample of the little which I found available out there. Sorry, but I didn't take the time to space all the paragraphs like I usually do.



FROM: World Socialist Web Site

France: widening anti-police riots provoke government crisis
By Antoine Lerougetel
4 November 2005

Nightly riots and clashes in the Paris suburbs, between the police and youth mainly of North African and African descent, are entering their second week. A thousand police officers were deployed Wednesday night in Seine-Saint-Denis, northwest of Paris, and half of the department’s 40 towns were affected by violence. Shots have been fired at police officers, and one official spokesman described events as a descent into civil war.
The conflicts have provoked a severe crisis for the French government. Prime Minister Dominique de Villepin has cancelled a scheduled visit to Canada, and Minister of the Interior Nicolas Sarkozy has pulled out of a visit to Afghanisan and Pakistan. Emergency meetings of the government of de Villepin and President Jacques Chirac have been held to discuss the situation.
The rioting began on the evening of October 27 after two youth were electrocuted when they climbed onto an electrical transformer while fleeing from the police. The deaths of the boys, in the northern suburb of Clichy-sous-Bois, sparked confrontations between youth and 400 to 500 riot police dispatched by Sarkozy. Violent protests and clashes with armed riot police have continued every night since and have spread to other working class suburbs.
The eruptions are the product of desperate poverty, mass unemployment and a vicious, openly racist law-and-order campaign spearheaded by Sarkozy, who has been considered the main rival to Chirac within the Gaullist Union for a Popular Party (UMP) and the leading contender to replace him in the next presidential election. Sarkozy has sent armed police into the immigrant slums and used terms such as “scum” and “gangrene” to describe their inhabitants.
On Wednesday, a council of ministers meeting was held, as well as a meeting of Gaullist deputies to the National Assembly. A question session was held in the National Assembly, at which Socialist Party and Communist Party deputies criticised Sarkozy, who sat mute. The deputies blamed him for instigating a social explosion through his law-and-order policies and provocative statements. De Villepin answered for him, trying to present a united government front. However, it was widely reported that deputies at the closed Gaullist meeting had heatedly attacked Sarkozy.
At the council of ministers, Chirac asked for a plan for urban renovation to be accelerated. He relieved Sarkozy of his responsibility for the preparation of the plan to prevent delinquency and entrusted it to de Villepin, who thereupon announced that he would be working for “equal opportunities” and “a plan of action” for youth employment in Seine-Saint-Denis, the department where Clichy and many other such communities are concentrated and the scene of a dozen outbreaks since October 27. De Villepin is Sarkozy’s most likely rival for the presidency in 2007.
The provocative language used by Sarkozy against the youth on suburban housing estates has been part of his attempt to mobilise a right-wing and racist movement under his leadership and that of the UMP. He hoped that this would not only secure his succession as president, but also provide popular support for the attacks on the working class required to break its resistance to the destruction of the welfare state and labour rights.
Since the beginning of the present government’s term of office in 2002, Sarkozy has led a drive to diminish the rights of defendants and extend police powers. He set up special brigades of police to send into troubled estates.
This has gone hand in hand with media campaigns demonising the immigrant youth and whipping up anti-Muslim sentiment, at the centre of which was legislation outlawing the wearing of the Muslim headscarf in state schools—a measure passed in 2004 with the support of virtually the entire political establishment, including the Socialist Party.
More than 20 years of austerity policies and accelerating attacks on workers’ living standards and rights by successive governments—those headed by the official “left” parties as well as those of the right wing—have stretched social tensions to the breaking point.
The chronic national 10 percent unemployment rate rises to well over 50 percent on many Parisian estates. The Gaullist government’s policy of encouraging job insecurity and short-term work contracts has been made more unbearable by savage cuts in benefits for the unemployed. Rises in gas and petrol prices have further increased the economic pressure on these communities.
The mass reaction on the night of the tragedy on the Chêne-Pointu estate has spilled over into many other estates in the Paris suburbs, in recent days involving small groups of youth burning vehicles and rubbish bins, attacking firemen attempting to extinguish the fires, and constantly clashing with the police.
The government fears that the Paris riots could spark broader upheavals all over France. Not only the towns in the Seine-Saint-Denis department have been affected, but also estates in the Val d’Oise and the Yvelines deparments of greater Paris.
Tensions were heightened still further when a tear gas canister was fired into a mosque on October 31. The following night, 1,250 cars were reported burned and at least one primary school was trashed.
Already, the Ousse des Bois estate in Pau, a thousand kilometres away near the Spanish border, has seen three continuous nights of clashes between youth and the police.
Despite the concern expressed within ruling circles, there is unanimity on the need for ever-greater repression to deal with the unrest. Minister for Social Cohesion Jean-Louis Borloo said the government had to react “firmly,” while UMP deputy Jacques Myard complained that the government had been weak because it had “accepted, step-by-step, that every night youths burn cars, destroy business and so on. Those guys will use the pretext of everything to riot, to demonstrate, to destroy.”
While making a show of criticising Sarkozy’s excesses and calling for the beefing up of social services cut by the government, all of the currents of the Socialist Party, the Greens and the Communist Party have called for the police to suppress the rioting.
Dominique Strauss Khan of the Socialist Party, a former minister in Lionel Jospin’s Plural Left government (1997-2002) and contender for the party’s nomination for the 2007 presidential election, stated on Europe 1 radio, “I utterly condemn the incidents at Clichy-sous-Bois. When it comes to law and order, an extremely firm attitude is required...repression and prevention should be employed.”
The Socialist Party and the Communist Party have presided over many of these municipalities for decades and maintained the peace for the French ruling class, while conditions have eroded. They are complicit in the austerity policies and the police build-up that underlie the explosion of anger among oppressed and impoverished youth that is now shaking France.

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FROM: Alt. Muslim
Paris Is Burning: What's Religion Got To Do With It?

While religious ideology may have a role in other types of violence (i.e, al-Qaida), in this case it just happens to be the faith of the disenfranchised population.

By Shahed Amanullah, November 4, 2005


When the sun sets, the violence begins. Burning cars, balaclava-clad youth battling police (sometimes with real bullets), and an increasing sense of hopelessness cover neighborhoods long afflicted with high unemployment. It could be the West Bank, but this time the unrest is happening in the French working-class neighborhoods that are home to immigrant populations who have been excluded (or have excluded themselves, as some critics charge) from the relative affluence of French life. "The deep problem is the sentiment of exclusion from the social and economic game," explains Laurent Mucchielli, director of the Center for Sociological Research on Law and Penal Institutions near Paris. "The riots are of the same nature as in past years, which reminds us that the problems haven't been solved." While tensions in these areas have been simmering for years, the escalation into violence started when Interior Minister Nicolas Sarkozy visited the Clichy-sous-Bous region with media in tow, pledging a "war without mercy" on street crime (taking a page from the book of Ariel Sharon?). Local youths, who have long complained about being harassed by police, responded by pelting him with stones and bottles. Days later, when two immigrant youth fleeing a police identity check were electrocuted when hiding in a power relay station, the crowds grew more defiant. The next several days were followed by a series of escalations: police roundups, burnings of hundreds of cars, and the spreading of violence to other cities. Imams in the area had some success in calling for restraint among the Muslim population (urging, for example, that mothers keep their teenagers at home after sunset), but they lost control when a teargas grenade struck a mosque on Sunday. French politicians such as Interior Minister Dominque de Villepin appealed for calm (President Chirac didn't commment until the fighting was nearly a week old), but even de Villepin's valiant opposition of the Iraq war hasn't been able to give his pleas for calm more weight among France's restive Muslim populations. While right-wing politicians in France (most notably the Le Pen family and the National Front party) are using the riots to strengthen their anti-Muslim stances, the truth is that the reasons for the unrest are the same as those that caused riots in many Western cities over the past few decades. Poor or immigrant communities have not been successfully integrated into the larger society (and in this case, both French and immigrant societies share the blame), unemployment gives rise to crime that compounds the misery of the population, and mistrust between authorities and those in the ghettos snowballs into confrontation. While religious ideology may have a role in other types of violence (i.e, al-Qaida), in this case it just happens to be the faith of the disenfranchised population. Those seeking a solution to the problem would be more effective by looking deeper than that.

Shahed Amanullah is editor-in-chief of alt.muslim.

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FROM: Christian Science Monitor

Deep roots of Paris riots

President Chirac has called for dialogue after a week of clashes.
By Peter Ford | Staff writer of The Christian Science Monitor
AULNAY-SOUS-BOIS, FRANCE - The fire engine and police sirens blaring through the darkness Wednesday night, as officers raced to put out yet another fire set by angry youths in this poor Paris suburb, signaled more than an immediate warning of danger.
After a week of nightly disturbances that have left hundreds of cars and buses torched, and several buildings burned down, the horns echoing off the concrete walls of grim housing projects sounded a broader alarm. The spreading violence has lifted the lid on an ugly stew of poverty, discrimination, and desperation amongst immigrant-descended families that most French citizens have long preferred to ignore.
"Frankly I am not surprised by what is happening," says Dounia Bouzar, an expert on French-born Muslims who has worked in the mostly black and North African districts on the outskirts of Paris. "Given the way these kids live, I wonder why it doesn't happen more often."
The outburst of violence, pitting youths throwing stones and Molotov cocktails against riot police, erupted after two teenagers in the nearby suburb of Clichy-sous-Bois - apparently hiding from the police - died by electrocution.
That incident, says social worker Michèle Lereste, "crystallized the hatred" that some of the most disaffected and hopeless young men living in what the government calls "sensitive urban zones" feel toward authority.
In these 751 zones that the government has designated for special programs, unemployment stands at 19.6 percent - double the national average - and at more than 30 percent among 21- to 29- year-olds, according to official figures. Incomes are 75 percent below the average.
Stung by charges that the government has mishandled the wave of unrest in a dozen suburbs, Prime Minister Dominique de Villepin and Interior Minister Nicolas Sarkozy have both cancelled planned trips abroad. President Jacques Chirac called Wednesday for "dialogue" to cool tempers.
Mr. De Villepin and Mr. Sarkozy met Thursday to discuss ways of dampening the violence beyond deploying more riot police, which has been the government's approach so far. But after two decades of policies that have tried, and often failed, to strengthen schools, provide jobs, and improve housing, critics say it is time authorities took the problems more seriously.
The ugly, often poorly maintained blocks of public housing that have become a nightly battlefield are testament to 40 years of government policy that has concentrated immigrants and their families in well-defined districts away from city centers, as housing there became more expensive.
"Working class suburbs have become ethnic ghettos," says Marc Cheb Sun, who edits "Respect," a magazine aimed mostly at young black and North African readers. "That is the origin of the problem."
And it is not easy for even ambitious young people to break out if they come from a district with a bad reputation, as Jean-Francois Amadieu, a university professor who founded the "Discrimination Observatory" discovered in experiments over the past year.
He sent out fictitious applications for sales jobs, allegedly coming from six different sorts of applicant, ranging from a white male to a woman of North African origins, all with the same résumé.
Applicants writing from addresses known to be in "difficult" areas received half as many invitations to an interview as those from less notorious districts. The "North African" male candidate received five times fewer invitations than his white counterpart, says Prof. Amadieu.
At the same time, complains Michèle Lereste, who runs the "Green Light" social-work agency in Villetaneuse, just North of Paris, where the projects are almost entirely inhabited by immigrant-descended families, government funding cuts have closed a number of job-training institutes, "and we are finding it harder and harder to get employers to take apprentices from our district."
"The kids learn all the French republican values such as equality in school, and then they find in practice that it's an illusion," says Ms. Bouzar, who was recently named one of Time magazine's 50 "European Heroes" as a role model for those seeking to be good Muslims and good French citizens. "There is an enormous gap between theory and practice."
Nowhere is that gap clearer, say young men in Clichy-sous-Bois and adults who work with them, than in the behavior of the police. "They check our papers everywhere, all the time, for no reason," complains one youth in Clichy who did not want to be identified. "And the checks are getting rougher and rougher."
Those sorts of experiences "delegitimize the state" in young peoples' eyes, worries Bouzar, which helps explain why authority figures such as firemen and doctors have been stoned on recent nights even as they tried - with police protection - to save lives and property.
Taïb Ben Thabet, who has been a social worker in the projects north of Paris for 35 years, fears that the kind of discrimination his young wards face undermines his patient efforts to help them find their place in society.
"I teach them that the state is for everybody, that it treats everybody the same," he says. "But what credibility do I have when everything I say is contradicted by experience? The kids say it's all lies."
He is particularly upset by the manner in which Mr. Sarkozy referred to youths in the projects recently as "scum," pledging a "war without mercy" against them.
"We are giving power to the (Islamic) radicals," he argues. "When kids hear the minister call them scum, the obscurantists are there to take advantage of the way they feel."
"This is not just a problem for the kids in the projects," warns Mr. Cheb Sun. "Society created these ghettos and now it has to deal with them."
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FROM: French Press Agency (AFP)
What is behind the Paris riots? Organised gangs of criminals -- even Islamic radicals -- out to undermine the state, or a failure by successive governments to give millions of immigrants a chance in life?
Rampages that have gripped the poorer immigrant-populated outskirts of Paris since October 27, spreading for the first time Thursday night to other parts of the country, have left many in the country struggling for an explanation.
The rioters are young, overwhelmingly Muslim men, second-generation immigrants from France's former Arab and African colonies, who claim they are protesting economic misery, racial discrimination and provocative policing.
This argument has been widely echoed in the press, by Muslim and community representatives and by the left-wing opposition, which accuses the centre-right government of slashing budgets for social work in these communities.
Hardline new law-and-order policies implemented by Interior Minister Nicolas Sarkozy have also been widely accused of fuelling anger in the high-rise, mainly immigrant estates where the trouble has spread.
Sociologist Michel Wierviorka, speaking in Le Parisien newspaper, charged that Sarkozy had "stigmatised entire communities" by arguing that crime-ridden areas should be "cleaned with a power-hose".
But the interior minister -- while recognising more must be done to haul the suburbs out of poverty and exclusion -- insisted on Thursday the violence was being orchestrated by unknown ringleaders.
Police union leader Bruno Beschizza described the riots as "urban terrorism", led by small knots of criminals as well as Islamic radicals.
"This is a form of urban terrorism led by a minority of kingpins, who have a financial interest, such as drug trafficking, or an ideological one, such as Islamic radicals who have been seen by our colleagues."
These ringleaders were a "tiny minority", the head of the Synergie union said on Friday, adding his view was backed by a number of social workers and lawmakers in the worst-hit Seine-Saint-Denis region northeast of Paris.
The role -- if any -- of Islam in the recent upsurge in violence, which has affected mainly Muslim neighbourhoods, is a highly sensitive issue in France.
Paris Mayor Bertrand Delanoe, a Socialist, has warned against lumping together "a religion, Islam", with "a handful of extremists" and with "criminal networks".
In many cases Muslim community leaders have been acting as mediators between youths and the authorities, going door-to-door to talk to the families of young rioters, or stepping in at night to stop the clashes.
Most observers searching for the root causes of the riots accuse successive governments of turning a blind eye as immigrant ghettos, synonymous with unemployment and social deprivation, swelled outside France's big cities.
Today, some 750 areas are classed as "Sensitive Urban Zones" (ZUS), where unemployment hovers at 20 percent -- twice the national average -- and average incomes are 60 percent of the national average, government statistics show.
Among young men between 15 and 25, unemployment reaches 36 percent -- and even higher if only young Arab men are counted.
Youth violence -- with car-burnings a regular feature -- has been steadily building in these dilapidated estates, with major outbreaks of rioting around once a year and countless minor incidents which go unreported.
Sociologist Wieviorka said the riots stemmed from years of "broken promises" by the French state, and called into question the country's entire model for integrating newcomers into French society.
The French model, secular and republican, insists that all citizens are equal before the state, but has been accused of leaving cultural minorities without a voice, notably France's estimated five million Muslims.
"(These riots) demonstrate the failure of the so-called Republican model for social integration. We need to find something new, some combination of social solidarity and economic realism," Wieviorka said.
Le Figaro newspaper, in an editorial, said the run-down estates had "rotted" away to become "prisons" for the estimated five-million people who live there.
For the newspaper, the main culprit was French immigration policy since the 1970s, which had allowed family reunification but failed to provide sufficient mechanisms to integrate newcomers into society.

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FROM: International Herald Tribune
In Paris suburbs, anger won't cool
By Katrin Bennhold International Herald Tribune

CLICHY-SOUS-BOIS, France Talk to people outside the Bilal mosque in this rundown suburb north of Paris and they will tell you what has gone wrong: why rioters for the past week have confronted the police in overnight bursts of anger in the streets, torching cars, hurling rocks and even firing bullets in the worst civil disobedience in France in more than a decade.

Beyond the poverty and despair of life in the shoddy immigrant communities ringing the shining French capital, local Muslims say, there is no one left with any sway over the rioting youths. Parents, the police and the government have all lost touch, they say.

On Thursday, after rioters disregarded an appeal for calm by President Jacques Chirac, firing bullets at the police for the first time as the rioting spread for a seventh consecutive night, the government held emergency meetings throughout the day. But despite Prime Minister Dominique de Villepin's vow that "law and order will have the last word," the police were bracing for more violence as night fell.

In Clichy-sous-Bois on Thursday afternoon, outside the entrance of the Bilal mosque - a converted warehouse where a tear-gas grenade landed on Sunday, stoking fury against the police - celebrations of the end of the monthlong Ramadan fast were overshadowed by the widening disturbances.

Opinions about the riots among people gathered at the mosque differed, but everyone from the deputy imam to local council workers and men leaving the midday prayer agreed that the trouble has been compounded by a vacuum of moral authority.

"If you want authority over these kids you need their respect - but all the normal channels of authority lost their respect a long time ago," said Ali Aouad, 42, who has lived in this northeastern town for two decades. "They feel neglected by the government, and the police just provoke them."

Even the government's minister of equal opportunity, Azouz Begag, who himself grew up in an immigrant household outside Lyon, carries no authority here, residents said.

"Where has he been? He is representative of nothing and nobody," said a young man of Algerian descent, who identified himself only as H2B. "He has done nothing for us and now he is trying to compensate by criticizing Sarkozy," the French interior minister, "but it's too late."

The crisis has penetrated the top level of the French government, where Nicolas Sarkozy and Villepin, the two most senior ministers, are sparring over how to deal with the violence and have both come under fire for failing to bring the violence under control.

The trouble erupted in Clichy-sous-Bois on Oct. 27 after two teenagers, apparently thinking they were being pursued by the police, fled and were electrocuted when they hid in an electrical transformer. The disturbances have since spread to at least 20 neighboring towns.

In the early hours of Thursday, rioters torched 315 cars, burned a car dealership and a local supermarket, and attacked two commuter trains, the police said. Nine people were wounded.

But as appeals for calm by the government fell on deaf ears and a heavy police presence across the northern suburbs only appeared to provoke more violence, a number of local organizations seem to have quietly taken on the task of cooling tempers.

Abderamane Bouhout, president of the cultural organization that manages Bilal mosque, mobilized small groups of young believers during recent rioting to go between the rioters and the police and urge the disaffected youths to express their anger in nonviolent ways.

Aouad, who witnessed one such intervention on Monday night not far from the mosque, said it was impressively effective. "It worked," he said. "They went right between the two sides and a lot of the kids listened to them. The damage the next day was a lot less serious than the previous nights."

At the local city hall, Lamya Monkachi says the role of religious personalities along with that of young locals recruited from the suburbs to mediate for the city authorities has been key to reducing the violence in Clichy-sous-Bois in the past two days, even as it intensified in other suburbs. "What helped us here in Clichy to calm nerves was that we work a lot with people who know the local youths and speak their language," she said.

There are eight Muslim organizations in Clichy alone that have been mobilized to participate in starting a dialogue with the rioters. In addition, a group of youths, working closely with city hall, have formed an association in response to the riots last week called Beyond Words. Their representatives - young North African men dressed in white T-shirts with the names of the two dead teenagers printed on the back and the words "Dead for Nothing" on the front - have campaigned for peaceful dialogue.

But, says Marilou Jampolsky of SOS Racisme, a non-governmental organization fighting discrimination, the current government has made such informal mediation efforts more difficult by cutting back public funding for them.

"The number of neighborhood organizations that organize sports, help with school work and just generally check up on these kids has significantly declined since this government came to power" in 2002, she said. SOS Racisme, which also has local branches in suburbs, has lost half its money, she said.

One of the most prominent young mediators is Samir Mihi, 28, who has become an informal spokesman for the various groups that have stepped in to calm the violence and mediated between the rioters and the government.

According to Mihi, who grew up in Clichy, the key ingredient for restoring peace in this and other suburbs is to build relationships with the local youths and give them the feeling that their concerns are being heard.

"If they listen to us it is because we give them what they most want: respect," said Mihi, who organizes sports activities for teenagers at city hall. "If you respect them, they respect you."

One reason politicians fail to make themselves heard in the suburbs is that successive governments have failed to tackle disproportionately high unemployment and crime rates in the suburban housing projects, leaving youth with few opportunities. That feeling of exclusion is exacerbated by a lack of political representatives of North African origin and other role models, Mihi said.

The lack of moral authority is perhaps most flagrant with the police, locals said, because the interaction between officers and residents is often reduced to frequent and random identity checks that are perceived to be humiliating in the mainly North African communities in the suburbs.

At the local market, Muhammad, 24, who declined to give his last name, said such checks sometimes happen even outside his own apartment. He recounted how the police stopped him as he was walking home the night before.

"They grabbed me and touched my hood to see if it was hot or sweaty," he said, describing what he called a regular practice. "If you're caught with a sweaty hood, it means you've been running and that you have probably committed a crime."

Meanwhile, the parents of the teenagers in question lack authority because poverty has often made family life more difficult, says Jampolsky. Neither do they share the quest for identity so prevalent among the younger generation.
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FROM: Open Democracy

Paris in flames: the limits of repression
Patrice de Beer


Nicolas Sarkozy’s hardline, zero-tolerance – and pre-election – rhetoric is foundering on France’s intractable urban realities, reports Patrice de Beer.

A week after the riots in the Lozells area of Birmingham, England, between people of African-Caribbean descent and those of Asian origin, the northeast Paris banlieues (suburbs) of Clichy-sous-Bois and Montfermeil exploded in violent confrontation between police and black and Beurs (north African) youths. There have been clashes for six nights in a row – extending on the night of 1-2 November to the suburb of Aulnay-sous-Bois. They involve the stoning of police vans, the burning of dozens of cars, attacks on firemen, and the vandalising of a police station, a post office, and a city hall. The disturbances have gone as far as a bullet being fired at a police van and a tear-gas canister being thrown at a local mosque during evening prayers – in the midst of the Muslim fasting month, Ramadan.

As in Birmingham, rumour was at the heart of the unfolding events. On 27 October, two teenagers – Ziad Benna and Bouna Traore, sons of working-class African Muslim immigrants – were electrocuted while hiding in an electric substation. The circumstances of the incident are contested; it was quickly alleged – though by politicians rather than police, who strenuously deny the claim – that they had tried to escape a police check.
This is not the first racial riot – and it certainly won’t be the last – in the suburban ghettoes of France or other European countries. Youth violence, and more particularly violence in immigrant communities – legal or illegal, involving French citizens or not – has been here for a long time, and seems here to stay. Nicolas Sarkozy, the French interior minister and candidate to succeed president Jacques Chirac at the Elysée palace in 2007 – the two men hate each other despite belonging to the same UMP party – has adopted a repressive, law-and-order, zero-tolerance strategy towards the banlieues.
The rhetoric is as polarising as it is simple: it threatens evildoers (“them”) with jail sentences if they dare threaten the law-abiding citizens (“us”). Until now, this hyper-mediatic policy has paid off, helping make “Sarko” – himself the son of an Hungarian immigrant – one of the most popular politicians in France.
But today, in a tense situation of racial unrest, unemployment, loss of faith in politics and a bitter pre-presidential fight within the Union pour un Movement Populaire (UMP) as well as the Socialist party, Sarkozy’s strategy is losing steam. Crime may be down statistically , but it remains as visible as ever, and only a third of physical assaults are recorded. The number of cars burned might be down, but the vehicles look as disturbing as ever on a TV screen. Daily “misbehaviour” – the politically-correct word for petty violence – might be unacceptable to many, but the cowboy-like behaviour of police launching armed operations in banlieues look no more acceptable, especially if they prove ineffective; or when they go too far, like firing tear-gas at a mosque.
It seems more obvious than ever that violence attracts more violence, and that it becomes a vicious circle where violent police repression of local riots nurtures even more violence and in turn even more repression. It is true that, in the banlieues as in the more affluent inner cities, people fear petty crime, drug-peddling, and carjacking by jobless youngsters. But nor do they like being fingered by police and politicians as potential criminals because of their appearance or creed. The only Beur member of government, Azouz Begag, “minister for social promotion and equality of opportunity”, criticised Sarko for his provocative words: “You must not call youngsters ‘scum’, tell them that you’re going to hit them hard. You must try to appease the situation,” he said, adding “I use the verb ‘clean up’ for my shoes or my car, not for neighbourhoods”.
Repression has shown its limits. Not that it is useless or harmful, as any government has to protect its citizens against crime. But a repressive policy cannot compensate for racial and social integration, nor offer an answer to discrimination, the housing problems of ghettoised suburbs and (above all) to the unemployment which hits the immigrant population even harder than the majority of job-seekers. Histrionic posturing to attract voters in pre-electoral times can cause more harm than good especially when the very social structure of France is at stake.

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