ON THE RIOTS IN FRANCE

Well, friends it is one of those Friday where all you get is a reprint from another source. The following is from the anti-fascist magazine Searchlight

Riots plunge France into crisis


As we go to press France is in a state of emergency, the result of 18 days of urban unrest and violence that have ripped through the impoverished and dilapidated suburbs of Paris and other French cities and towns.

Stung by the ferocity of the violence that has involved immigrant youth mainly of African and North African origins, the right-wing government has adopted a package of measures – dating from 1955 and the Algerian War – introduced by Nicolas Sarkozy, the Interior Minister, that includes the imposition of a curfew for young people in 30 cities including Strasbourg, Lille, Nice, Marseille, Toulouse, Amiens, Dijon and Le Havre.

More than 300 localities have been affected by the violence which caused, amazingly, just one death but hundreds of casualties among residents, fire-fighters and police. More than 2,800 people, overwhelmingly young males, have been arrested, the youngest aged just ten. According to the BBC, 150 of those arrested were immediately deported on the orders of law and order hardliner Sarkozy. A further 860 are in custody and 178 have been jailed after emergency courts convicted them for violent offences.

The fascists of Jean-Marie Le Pen’s Front National (FN) seem to have enjoyed a short-lived revival by leading the clamour for repressive measures and claiming the riots have caused party recruitment to rocket.

The FN has blazed the trail for government policy to deal with the riots. The state of emergency and curfew that it demanded have both come to pass and the FN has been boasting that its sulphurously racist anti-immigrant policies of the past 30 years have been vindicated. Nevertheless, the rally it staged in central Paris on 14 November was a miserable flop, attracting only 600 people.

The mayhem rocking the suburbs of Paris and other French cities is the product of deep-seated resentment and frustration at long-term social deprivation, urban housing policy and racial discrimination. It has brought confrontations with the police, attacks on firefighters and paramedics and arson attacks on vehicles – almost 9,000 cars were burnt out – warehouses, shopping centres, schools, nurseries, clinics, sports centres and even a synagogue and two churches. In all cases, the violence has occurred in and been confined to rundown, neglected, more populous districts. Richer city centre areas have been totally untouched.

The origin of this violence is well established fact: the death of two boys, Banou Traore, aged 15, and Ziad Benna, 17, on 27 October, in Clichy-sous-Bois, both accidentally electrocuted while taking refuge, probably pursued by the police, in an electricity substation. The two youngsters were not “known to the police” and no offence had been committed anywhere near the location of their deaths.

A police and judicial investigation concluded a week after their deaths that no police officers were chasing the boys but many questions were left unanswered: the witness at the scene who could not remember, the young people stopped by police shortly after the tragedy without any clear explanation, and the failure to explain why Ziad and Banou climbed a wall protected by razor wire to hide in a place that was well signposted as lethal.

News of the boys’ deaths spread rapidly and the town, among the most dehumanised and poorest of the Parisian suburbs, almost instantly burst into an orgy of violent protest. Very quickly, the same type of violence – much of it copycat but also rooted in social grievance – spread to other districts of Paris and neighbouring towns, and finally erupted across the whole of France, mainly on the outskirts of the great conurbations.

Even before the situation became inflamed to its level at the time of writing, Sarkozy, leader of the conservative right in the National Assembly, had been busy multiplying his opportunistically “muscular” statements about reasserting the power of the state in the suburbs. As early as June, he was boasting of his intentions to clean up a Paris suburb with a “Kärcher” (a high-pressure hosepipe). More recently he had announced his firm intention to wash away “the rabble” and “hooligans” that supposedly infest the suburbs dominated by windswept, bleak, high-rise buildings.

Sarkozy, who has transparent ambitions to succeed Jacques Chirac as president of the French Republic, is known for his wild populism and his obsession with law and order, a gambit he is now using to capture the territory of the fascist Front National. He also chooses to be blind to the gigantic scale of the social deprivation and unemployment generated by the crisis of the stagnant French economy.

In his two terms as Interior Minister, he has distinguished himself by his enthusiasm for trampling on civil liberties in the name of the “fight against terrorism” and by beefing up the state’s fight against “illegal” immigrants. Since the end of the summer Sarkozy’s crackdown has meant raids and identity checks on an unprecedented scale in many towns – met with general indifference – and the forced expulsion of several hundred people.

It was apparent that there had been a worrying change in the attitude of the police and the nature of their mission. Increasingly focused on the maintenance of order instead of dealing with criminality, the police seem to have concentrated on a systematic encroachment of public space with many officers increasingly exerting pressure on those sections of the population considered most “at risk”: young people, the poor, foreigners and immigrants. Routine checks, arbitrary arrests and humiliations have become facts of daily life, without any single incident – until now at least – seen as sufficiently serious to cause a violent reaction.

In addition, a widespread feeling of impunity has developed among many police officers, because almost every complaint against the police force (several hundred are made each year) is turned against its author and branded an “insult” or “rebellion”. Police officers themselves are seldom penalised. This feeling of impunity is inevitably accompanied by violence, verbal or physical, and a swiftly deteriorating image for the police, 11,500 of whom have been mobilised to restore order in France’s troubled cities.

More generally, the violence of daily life, whether at work (unpredictable and insecure employment prospects, harassment by employers, mass sackings and redundancies) or at home (poverty, unhealthy and crowded housing, failure at school), with all the sense of exclusion and disorder this precipitates, goes hand in hand with a society that has become increasingly and visibly more unjust and unequal.

The districts that have erupted into rioting are all too often described as repositories of delinquency or a burden on society. Their inhabitants are seen as social “misfits” who are best forgotten, as the near total disappearance of vital social facilities – post offices, small businesses and care services – clearly shows.

As to the nature of the violence triggered by pent-up hostility and social exclusion, it is difficult to define in a word what it is – easier to say what it isn’t.

Is the violence rioting? Is it an uprising? The former, yes, the latter, a definite no. In the first couple of days in Clichy-sous-Bois, a genuine feeling of revolt was briefly discernible but any insurrectionary character quickly evaporated to give way to a kind of “inter-city rioting competition” aimed at grabbing media headlines. The extreme youth of the “rioters” and arsonists – mostly aged between 12 and 20 – confirms the impression that the “events” have turned into “a bit of a game”.

Without any concrete slogans, without any meaningful demands, without an organisation or even spokespeople, the so-called “uprisings”, even if they undoubtedly are the expression of social frustration and anger, are directed not against the state (in the Parisian suburbs, confrontations with the police, however omnipresent, have actually diminished) but increasingly against the impoverished inhabitants of these districts, the real-life neighbours, friends and members of the same communities as the arsonists themselves.

The nightly violence in France is not the first step in a civil war, even less in an inter-ethnic one, as the extreme right and badly informed foreign media are hysterically suggesting. This notion might comfort fools who believe in the “clash of civilisations” but it has zero to do with the actuality and tensions of life in the most poverty-stricken suburbs of France.

What is common to most of the people implicated in the violence – as perpetrators and as victims – is that they live in the worst districts and where the concentration of people is most dense. If most of the young people involved are Arab or black, it is because of the fact that racism is a social reality and because social misery hits the immigrant population – 17.4% of which is jobless – hardest, undermining the “one France” republican model of integration.

The growth of anti-terrorist panic and suspicion towards Muslims has also fuelled racism and given the various elements of the right-wing orchestra – Sarkozy, Philippe De Villiers and Jean-Marie Le Pen – new tunes to play at an ever louder volume.

Contrary to popular belief, the populations of the towns are not grouped according to religious or ethnic communities. On the contrary, the various nationalities live jumbled up, with all the exchanges and tensions that that can involve and ghettoisation is generally according to class not race.

Thus, the imams of mosques are invited by Sarkozy and the media to serve as interlocutors, not because they are a genuine voice of the suburbs but because all the other associative and community structures in these districts have disappeared, written off by the state as “uneconomic” and because the state is relying on these religious so-called “authorities” to assert social control.

As part of its strategy, de Villepin’s government has used the situation to increase the pressure on the victims of social exclusion by pushing through a law to prolong the state of emergency, including the curfews, for three months even though the fires are now petering out. This is being done to deter in advance any social movement of opposition to the government’s onslaught against civil liberties and basic democratic rights. All Chirac’s talk about combating the “poison of discrimination” is flannel.

When Sarkozy refers to “organised groups”, ridiculously implying that an invisible hand is pulling the strings behind the riots, he is only feeding the fears of those who want simple answers to very complex problems. It is misguided to believe that the young people who ran amok on the streets have been “manipulated” by anyone or that their behaviour, which is simultaneously autonomous, connected, justified and blind, is anything other than the disordered expression of a revolt that has not found the words to make sense of itself.


© Searchlight Magazine 2005