The exit door is always open
Posted on 11/06/2005 8:43:24 AM PST by Pikamax
Paris slum residents fume as riots ruin their town
By Tom Heneghan Reuters
Sunday, November 06, 2005
AULNAY-SOUS-BOIS, France (Reuters) - Down past the burned-out delivery vans, between scruffy trees and high-rises with rusting balconies, stands a firebombed municipal social club. They used to teach tango and jazz dance here.
Further along, charred patches on the street mark the places where other cars were torched and then towed away. Shoppers hesitate before a supermarket with shattered glass doors. On the edge of town, acrid smoke rises from a smoldering carpet depot.
After more than a week of nightly violence, the rundown northeastern Paris suburb of Aulnay-sous-Bois is a jumble of frayed nerves and flaring tempers. Residents are fed up with rioters upsetting their homes, their lives and their dreams.
"My kids can't sleep at night," says a mother who only gives her name as Samia. "They hear explosions, they see fires and they think they're in a war. When the slightest thing happens, they get anxious and say 'Mama, what's going on?"'
But if the politicians are at a loss for a coherent response to the unrest -- now spreading from Paris's suburbs to other cities -- many of the inhabitants and even the rioters themselves seem similarly trapped between anger and despair.
Henri Huynh, who came here from Vietnam in 1969, sighs in resignation at the sight of the firebombed social club. "That's where we used to have our dancing lessons," he mutters.
Only minutes later, he's screaming as young men turn up a boom box to blast rap music at the town's "silent march against violence" as it passes. "Stop that now! Stop that provocation!" he yells. The grinning youngsters ignore him.
WRONG NAME, WRONG ADDRESS
Just off the highway linking Paris and its Charles de Gaulle airport, Aulnay-sous-Bois is one of many dreary suburbs around the capital where young French of Arab and African origin grow up feeling they have "No Future" tattooed on their foreheads.
As in many suburbs, unemployment is significantly higher than the national average of about 10 percent. In the rougher estates, it probably reaches 30-40 percent or more, feeding a widespread sense there's not much residents can do to get ahead.
"Even if you have a university degree, in the end all they give you is a broom," hisses an Algerian cafe owner.
Fouzi Guendouz worries he won't get a summer job next year because he comes from this riot-hit suburb of 80,000 residents.
"It's already hard enough to get a job when you have an Arab name like mine," says the 20-year-old business student of Algerian origin. "Now my address is against me too."
Guendouz has no time for politicians who urge residents of foreign origin to make more efforts to integrate: "I was born here, I went to school here, I'm a French citizen -- how much more integrated can I get? That's an insult, it's stupid."
Claude Chevallier, manager of the smoldering carpet depot, sees breakdown all around -- "on the family level, in schools and in civic life. Many youths have never seen their parents work and couldn't hold down a job if they got one."
...Continued
Holding her little daughter, a young mother named Ghislaine says the protesting youths have no right to trash things, but sympathizes with their frustration.
"The police are really rough with them," she says. "If they're Arab or black, they constantly get stopped to have their ID card checked. It's no wonder they're fed up with it."
TEMPTED BY TELEVISION
Although nobody uses the word, many residents marching among the housing blocks seem to agree with embattled Interior Minister Nicolas Sarkozy that the rioters are "scum."
"You should see these hooligans in the morning," says Genevieve Bourgognat, a middle-aged woman who watched from her eighth-floor flat as the local social club burned down below.
"They come back to survey what they did and they're proud of it. They show their friends. They boast they got on television!"
Huynh, a mild-mannered small business consultant, searches for the best way to describe them. "They're like dogs -- they bite anything in their way," he finally says.
Sarkozy and other officials accuse drug traffickers and Islamist militants of stoking the flames, an argument that elicits a shrug and a dubious shake of the head here.
"Drug traffickers working behind the scenes? You can go down to the train station and see them peddling drugs in broad daylight," said Ali Sabri, 39. "The police know who they are but they don't do anything about it."
After the "silent march" is over, a few adolescent boys ham it up for a television crew earnestly trying to ask them serious questions about discontent in the suburbs.
"It's like Baghdad here! It's the Apocalypse!" they hoot into the camera before a social worker breaks in and chides the television crew for giving excited kids a platform to perform.
"I know why they called a silent march," a young black woman mutters as she turns away shaking her head at the mutual misunderstanding. "Maybe we don't really have anything to say."
Is any news service besides Reuters reporting on this mess?
JMO, the headline should be, "Western media elites fume as they can't blame George Bush, for their paraidse's woes".
They ruined the slum.
they THINK they're in a war??
the solution is easy..I betcha the rioters are severly out-numbered..all the local populace has to do is turn them in, or surround them and beat the livin hell out of them..the key to stopping this isn't the French, it's the local Muslim population..anyone disagree??
OK, we get it.
WE, the west, because of our hate, ignorance, prejudice, racism, and intolerance have driven these noble and suffering people to seek "justice".
"Fouzi Guendouz worries he won't get a summer job next year...It's already hard enough to get a job when you have an Arab name like mine...Guendouz has no time for politicians who urge residents of foreign origin to make more efforts to integrate: "I was born here, I went to school here, I'm a French citizen -- how much more integrated can I get?"
Change your name, dipwad, and start dressing and acting French. And most of all, move out of that fargin housing project.
Good thing they have gun control there... otherwise it might get ugly.
[[They hear explosions, they see fires and they think they're in a war.]]
That's because it IS a war. But don't tell France that. Thay won't believe you anyways.
"WE, the west, because of our hate, ignorance, prejudice, racism, and intolerance have driven these noble and suffering people to seek "justice"."
So, you don't think the frogsters will be breaking out the machine guns any time soon?
I, of course, am shocked, SHOCKED to learn that Paris has "slums".
Isn't France the model of political and social perfection?
(Paging John Kerry.....)
The townspeople are going to have to do more than march silently!
On WBBM radio, 780 AM in Chicago, a CBS affiliate, they did a short report this morning almost completely taken up with a description of the complaint of the DEMONSTRATERS - that they felt excluded from French society.
If the French government doesn't deal decisively with this,
the next round will be a real isalmic revolution, and the
heads of state will once again be facing the guillotine
(or least a rusty scimitar).
Those two statements complement and explain each other.
When a young adult "can't hold down a job if he had one", and being "fed up with it" is their only possible intellectual response, they are beyond hope.
I can't fix things for them; France can't fix things for them. They are doomed to a non-existence, so long as the country continues supporting them as pets. There is not much call anywhere in the world for professional rap-music listeners.
...Many youths have never seen their parents work ...Is a good summary of the problems, and not unique to France.
Back to Algers then.
Any and all steps by French authorities to stem the violence will, of course, have to pass the "global test."
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