Seventh Day of Violence Erupts Near Paris

CLICHY-SOUS-BOIS, France (AP) - Menacing youths smoked cigarettes in doorways Wednesday and hulks of burned cars littered the tough streets of Paris' northeastern suburbs scarred by a week of riots that left residents on edge and sent the government into crisis mode.

In a seventh consecutive night of skirmishes, young people threw rocks at police Wednesday in six suburbs in the Seine-Saint-Denis region north of Paris - about a 40-minute drive from the Eiffel Tower. In one of them, Le Blanc-Mesnil, about a dozen cars burned and curious residents, some in slippers and bathrobes, poured into the streets.

Some said the unrest - sparked by the accidental deaths of two teenagers last week - is an expression of frustration over grinding unemployment and police harassment in the communities, where many North African immigrants live. ``It is not going to end. It is going to explode,'' said an 18-year-old who would only give his name as Amine.

Prime Minister Dominique de Villepin and Interior Minister Nicolas Sarkozy both canceled trips abroad to deal with the unrest.

``The government is entirely mobilized. Its immediate priority is to restore public order, and restore it without delay,'' de Villepin said.

Muslim leaders at Clichy-sous-Bois' mosque, meanwhile, prayed for peace and asked parents to keep teenagers off the streets after skirmishes broke out after two teenage boys were electrocuted last Thursday while hiding in a power substation because they believed police were chasing them.

The unrest spread to at least nine Paris-region towns overnight Tuesday, exposing the despair, anger and criminality in France's poor suburbs - fertile terrain for Islamic extremists, drug dealers and racketeers.

The violence, concentrated in neighborhoods with large African and Muslim populations, has highlighted the difficulties many European nations face with immigrant communities feeling marginalized and restive, cut off from the continent's prosperity and, for some extremists, its values, too.

``They have no work. They have nothing to do. Put yourself in their place,'' said Abderrahmane Bouhout, president of the Clichy-sous-Bois mosque, where a tear gas grenade exploded Sunday evening. Local youths suspected a police attack, and authorities are investigating.

The violence cast doubt on the success of France's model of seeking to integrate its large immigrant community - its Muslim population, at an estimated 5 million, is Western Europe's largest - by playing down differences between ethnic groups. But rather than be embraced as full and equal citizens, immigrants and their French-born children often complain of police harassment and of being refused jobs, housing and opportunities.

``If French society accepts these tinderboxes in its society, it cannot be surprised when they explode,'' said Claude Dilain, the Socialist mayor of the Clichy-sous-Bois suburb.

Eric, a 22-year-old in Clichy-sous-Bois who was born in France to Moroccan parents, said police target those with dark skin. He said he has been unable to find full-time work for two years and that the riots were a demonstration of suburban solidarity.

``People are joining together to say we've had enough,'' he said. He refused to give his surname because talking to reporters was poorly regarded in his neighborhood.

Many immigrant families are trapped in housing projects that were built to accommodate foreign laborers welcomed by post-World War II France but have since succumbed to despair, chronic unemployment and lawlessness. In some neighborhoods, drug dealers and racketeers hold sway and experts say Islamic radicals seek to recruit disenchanted youths by telling them that France has abandoned them.

``French society is in a bad state ... increasingly unequal, increasingly segregated, and increasingly divided along ethnic and racial lines,'' said sociologist Manuel Boucher. Some youths turn to Islam to claim an identity that is not French, ``to seize on something which gives them back their individual and collective dignity.''

French governments have injected funds and job-creation schemes for years but failed to cure ills in suburbs where car-burnings and other crimes are daily facts of life.

``No matter what the politicians say, some neighborhoods are all but lost,'' said Patrice Ribeiro, national secretary of the Synergie police officers' union. ``Police patrols pass through but without stopping and with their windows rolled up.''

Police said 180 vehicles were torched overnight Tuesday, most in the Seine-Saint-Denis region that includes Clichy, Aulnay and other violence-hit neighborhoods. Police made 35 arrests in Seine-Saint-Denis.

Youths lobbed Molotov cocktails near Aulnay's town hall and threw stones at the firehouse. In nearby Bondy, a blaze engulfed a store.

De Villepin postponed a visit to Canada and Sarkozy canceled a trip next week to Pakistan and Afghanistan.

President Jacques Chirac told a weekly Cabinet meeting that ``the law must be applied firmly'' but ``in a spirit of dialogue and respect'' to prevent ``a dangerous situation'' from developing.

Chirac acknowledged the ``profound frustrations'' of troubled neighborhoods but said violence is not the answer and that efforts must be stepped up to combat it.

In Aulnay-sous-Bois, another northeastern suburb where riot police fired rubber bullets at advancing gangs of youths Tuesday night, workers cleaned up charred debris Wednesday. A group of teenagers chased and threw stones at Associated Press reporters, some shouting ``Go home!'' and others yelling: ``See you tonight.''

``I am afraid. I have children,'' said Aulnay resident Houcine Yahiaoui, who watched the violence from his windows. ``I have never seen anything like this here.''

The Barbarians at the Gates of Paris (City Journal, Autumn 2002), excerpt:

When agents of official France come to the cités, the residents attack them. The police are hated: one young Malian, who comfortingly believed that he was unemployable in France because of the color of his skin, described how the police invariably arrived like a raiding party, with batons swinging—ready to beat whoever came within reach, irrespective of who he was or of his innocence of any crime, before retreating to safety to their commissariat. The conduct of the police, he said, explained why residents threw Molotov cocktails at them from their windows. Who could tolerate such treatment at the hands of une police fasciste?
Molotov cocktails also greeted the president of the republic, Jacques Chirac, and his interior minister when they recently campaigned at two cités, Les Tarterets and Les Musiciens. The two dignitaries had to beat a swift and ignominious retreat, like foreign overlords visiting a barely held and hostile suzerainty: they came, they saw, they scuttled off.
Antagonism toward the police might appear understandable, but the conduct of the young inhabitants of the cités toward the firemen who come to rescue them from the fires that they have themselves started gives a dismaying glimpse into the depth of their hatred for mainstream society. They greet the admirable firemen (whose motto is Sauver ou périr, save or perish) with Molotov cocktails and hails of stones when they arrive on their mission of mercy, so that armored vehicles frequently have to protect the fire engines.
Benevolence inflames the anger of the young men of the cités as much as repression, because their rage is inseparable from their being. Ambulance men who take away a young man injured in an incident routinely find themselves surrounded by the man’s “friends,” and jostled, jeered at, and threatened: behavior that, according to one doctor I met, continues right into the hospital, even as the friends demand that their associate should be treated at once, before others...
An apartment in this publicly owned housing is also known as a logement, a lodging, which aptly conveys the social status and degree of political influence of those expected to rent them. The cités are thus social marginalization made concrete: bureaucratically planned from their windows to their roofs, with no history of their own or organic connection to anything that previously existed on their sites, they convey the impression that, in the event of serious trouble, they could be cut off from the rest of the world by switching off the trains and by blockading with a tank or two the highways that pass through them, (usually with a concrete wall on either side), from the rest of France to the better parts of Paris. I recalled the words of an Afrikaner in South Africa, who explained to me the principle according to which only a single road connected black townships to the white cities: once it was sealed off by an armored car, “the blacks can foul only their own nest.”
The average visitor gives not a moment’s thought to these Cités of Darkness as he speeds from the airport to the City of Light. But they are huge and important—and what the visitor would find there, if he bothered to go, would terrify him.

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