France hit by a burning rage

Timesonline ^ | 11/06/05 | Matthew Campbell

[Pikamax]

France hit by a burning rage Matthew Campbell, Aulnay-sous-Bois

A FEW days ago Georges Bigot, a French firefighter, was standing with colleagues on a street in a suburb of Paris waiting for reinforcements to help put out a fire started by rioters. Suddenly a television fell out of the sky in front of him.

It had been heaved over a balcony eight floors up and shattered on the ground. “Have you ever seen a television exploding on the pavement?” asked Bigot wearily as he stood under a light drizzle. “Well, it gave me quite a shock.”

As he spoke, thick clouds of smoke billowed from a textile warehouse set ablaze the previous night by another gang of youths, mainly of north African and black African origin, in this shabby suburb north of the capital. Firefighters who had tried to put it out during the night were pelted with stones.

“We’re used to stones,” grinned Bigot as blaring sirens echoed off the walls of giant concrete tower blocks built in the 1960s and 1970s to house the first immigrants. “Household appliances are a bit more dangerous. A falling television or a toaster, it could kill you.”

Bigot, 30, was on the front line in an increasingly desperate battle yesterday as the worst street violence seen in France for more than a decade spread from the Paris suburbs to other cities, with 250 people arrested and 900 vehicles torched overnight. This was the highest nightly total in a spate of rioting that followed the death 10 days ago of two youths apparently fleeing from the police.

Last night the rioters returned, setting cars on fire in several suburbs, and burning down a nursery school in Grigny, south of Paris. Arsonists also attacked a recycling plant in Essonne.

Trouble was reported in Strasbourg, in eastern France, Rennes, Rouen and Lille in the northwest and Nice, Toulouse and even peaceful Avignon in the south. Among a series of incidents in the Paris region, two nurseries, one in Yvelines and another in Bretigny-sur-Orge, were set on fire on Friday night along with a school in Seine-et-Marne. In Meaux, a town east of the capital, youths threw Molotov cocktails at paramedics, whose patient was taken to hospital under police escort.

The Foreign Office urged British holidaymakers to be “extremely vigilant” in riot-hit areas. America warned its tourists to keep away from troublespots.

After an emergency cabinet meeting yesterday, Nicolas Sarkozy, the tough-talking interior minister, warned rioters that their actions could “cost dear in terms of sentences”. But he also promised to tackle the causes of violence, conceding that there were “a certain number of injustices in some neighbourhoods”.

France’s media and its politicians have portrayed the rioting as a form of protest against poverty, racial discrimination and the desperation felt by immigrant families who live in the cités — the grim housing estates erected a generation ago, often near big factories, to accommodate a booming immigrant population.

Attacks against firefighters or ambulance crews trying to save immigrant families from the flames suggested something more perverse than despair, however, and the divided government seemed at a loss over how to deal with the problem.

“Without question what is taking place bears all the hallmarks of being co-ordinated,” Yves Bot, the Paris public prosecutor, said yesterday. “The way things are organised is in response to a strategy, with mobile tactics employed by youths who turn up on scooters, throw a lighted bottle at a vehicle and then leave.”

France has often tried to ignore the malaise in what police call “sensitive districts” or, collectively, “the zone”, a world far removed from the picturesque French tourist trail of restaurants, wine and historic monuments.

In these underprivileged pockets the burning of cars on a Saturday night is for many young men a popular sport and rite of passage that seldom makes news. According to one estimate, about 30 cars are burnt every Saturday night in suburbs across France.

The sheer scale of last week’s clashes, however, made them difficult to ignore, particularly with the government acknowledging that it might deploy troops to prevent gangs from marauding through the affluent heart of Paris, a chilling prospect for a city that has come to regard its burgeoning immigrant community on the other side of the ring road as the barbarians at the gate.

Aulnay-sous-Bois is only a few miles from the Eiffel tower but last week parts of it resembled Baghdad. The Renault car dealership looked as if it had taken a direct hit from a car bomb. Black, twisted bits of metal were scarcely recognisable as the remains of vehicles waiting to be sold.

“Well, that’s just great isn’t it,” said Manuel Pires, 55, a Portuguese immigrant surveying the wreckage. “What do they think they’re playing at? They’ve just put all of these garage employees out of work. Talk about shooting yourself in the head.”

Pires, a driver who is married with two grown-up children, has some sympathy for Sarkozy, who raised eyebrows last week by referring to the troublemakers as “scum” that needed to be hosed out of the estates.

The interior minister may have been “a bit direct”, Pires said, “but let’s face it, we do need a bit of order around here. None of the other politicians seems prepared to confront reality. The gangs have taken over. It is a question of restoring law and order”. Several thousand Aulnay residents, singing the national anthem, took to the streets yesterday demanding just that.

Not everybody agreed with Pires. Arguments from politicians across the spectrum about the root causes of violence have multiplied with the hurling of each firebomb.

France’s Muslim population has swollen in recent years to an estimated 6m — 10% of the total population — as people from the Middle East and north Africa have crossed the Mediterranean in search of work and a better life. That percentage could easily double in the next 20 years and compares with about 1.5m — or less than 3% — in Britain.

The ugly, often poorly maintained, blocks of public housing in which many live are a testament to 40 years of government policy that concentrated immigrants and their families in well-defined districts, often in the vicinity of big factories that attracted the first generation of grateful immigrant workers.

Today these districts on the outskirts of Paris and other cities have become hotbeds of joblessness and crime — a parallel society with its own laws in spite of the lip service that government officials continually pay to the notion of integration. Women are often forced to wear veils. In one district a municipal swimming pool was persuaded to offer a period of “women only” bathing each day to satisfy a fundamentalist imam.

Police, meanwhile, were told to “tread softly”. They seldom set foot in the quartiers chauds, or “hot districts”, until Sarkozy arrived on the scene. He introduced the “zero tolerance” policing that was famed for taming the badlands of America: police began stopping and searching youths on the streets and conducting raids in the housing estates.

“They are sometimes frisked up to 10 times a day,” said Dounia Bouzar, an expert on French-born Muslims. “Given the way these kids live, I wonder why it (the rioting) doesn’t happen more often.”

Michel Lereste, a social worker, said that resentment felt by many young immigrants had been crystallised by the deaths 10 days ago of two youths electrocuted in a power station where they had hidden after wrongly thinking they were being chased by police.

The ringleaders are well known to police from previous clashes and many have served jail sentences. Others appeared to join in “for fun”, snapping photographs of burning cars with mobile phones in between throwing stones.

In Le Blanc Mesnil, a Paris district, last week Hassan, a 15-year-old schoolboy, claimed his cité was involved in an “intifada” against French authorities — a reference to the Palestinian uprising against Israel in the Gaza Strip and West Bank. “The violence won’t stop until Sarkozy resigns,” he said.

That seemed unlikely and in the end Sarkozy may suffer less from the riots than Dominique de Villepin, the prime minister and his chief rival in the race to succeed Jacques Chirac as president in 2007.

Sarkozy’s tough language against the rioters will at least win him support on the right, while de Villepin did not help his cause by losing his temper with MPs who were critical of his handling of the affair.

As pressure mounted on the government, de Villepin, who was forced to cancel a trip to Canada, met a group of 15 young people from the Paris suburbs on Friday night to discuss ways of restoring calm.

There were concerns, according to some analysts, that the biggest beneficiaries of the latest explosion could be extreme right-wing politicians such as Jean-Marie Le Pen, head of the National Front party, who wants to put an end to the “Islamisation” of France.

Despite his blunt rhetoric, Sarkozy does not come anywhere near that. He has adopted a subtle two-pronged approach — a kind of Gallic “tough on crime, tough on the causes of crime” — that has wrong-footed his critics. Besides advocating a crackdown he is also proposing affirmative action to help young people.

They probably need it. Jean-François Amadieu, a university professor who has studied discrimination, sought to demonstrate it by sending out fake applications for jobs. He found applicants with addresses in “difficult” areas received half as many invitations to an interview as those from more salubrious districts.

Some, nevertheless, have made it. Jamel Debbouze, a comic actor famous for his cracks about life on the estates, has become one of France’s best-paid entertainers; Faiza Guène, a 19-year-old from an Algerian family, has embarked upon a lucrative literary career with a debut novel whose heroine was described as “a Bridget Jones teenager of the suburbs”.

Too often, however, the fame of women from the estates is built on tales of horrific abuse. Samira Bellil, another young woman of Algerian origin, has written a book about being subjected to repeated gang rapes, a sickeningly common crime. On one occasion she was dragged off a crowded train by a gang of youths who wanted to rape her. Nobody lifted a finger to help.

“Terrible things are happening here,” said Mohammed Bouheiri, an elderly vegetable seller chatting with friends on a street corner. “The government must not neglect us.”

[Frank_2001]

Well then, France needs to send them into action, for Pete's sake!

[jocon307]

The French need to ask themselves: why have we let these people into our country?

We in the US need to ask the same question.

And we need to get some straight answers for a change.

I, myself do not wish to live in an Hispanic country, if I did I'd move to one. If I hear press one for English one more time, I might have to have a riot of my own.

[dfwgator]

The French people should not have to pay for the mistakes of their elites.

Why not, they voted for them.

[dfwgator]

Many if not most are french citizens. Where could they be sent ? Hell

France, Hell...what's the difference?

[Seizure]

"...press for English..."

Guess what? I had to "press two for English". So much for the native tongue. lol

[Eighth Square]

Churchill, a visionary man - I hope the majority of our leaders, present and future, comprehend and act on that particular gem. Thanks for the quote.

[Let's Roll]

One thing they COULD do... Announce that for the next five years the only meat which will be sold in France will be pork.

ooh - I like that!

[backhoe]

Is Paris Burning? ( Religion of Peace® Alert )
Click the picture:

Islam, The Alleged Religion of Peace® ( TARP™ )? Click this picture:

No, I am not exaggerating. Click the pic, go to "last," and read backwards.
If you are not informed about this stuff, you will be made sick. If you are informed, you will be made mad, all over again.

---

Kindly note tagline...

Is Paris Burning? ( Religion of Peace® Alert )
Click the picture:

Islam, The Alleged Religion of Peace® ( TARP™ )? Click this picture:

No, I am not exaggerating. Click the pic, go to "last," and read backwards.
If you are not informed about this stuff, you will be made sick. If you are informed, you will be made mad, all over again.

---

Kindly note tagline...

[Cincinna]

Le Pen is not the answer. He is a neo-Nazi and would bring National Socialism i.e. fascism to France...

[Cincinna]

The problem is not with the French CRS special forces, but with the leadership who gives them their orders.

They are top notch, heavily armed and trained in riot control. The orders to not intervene are coming from above.

[RobbyS]

If he were younger, he would be a real threat.

[anthraciterabbit]

Many if not most are french citizens. Where could they be sent ? Devil's island went out of business.

The Atlantic ocean is one possibility, the Sahara desert another.