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."
These are not poor people. most the rioters are middle class.
That critter would have to have a serious roll cage before I'd think about getting into it. :)
Melting pot beats the stew pot every time.
You'd think the people who invented fondue would understand that.
Yeah, don't tell the French ... they will suddenly forget that THEIR girls had sex with OUR soldiers in WWII ... and expect us to come over and take care of them again.
Like we really want another dose of their ingratitude.
Thank God we have the second amendment in the USA. It keeps rioters in their own neighborhoods. You come to destroy what I have lived for a lifetime to build you better bring some body bags.
Believe it or not, its pretty common on the roads in Europe. Its called the SMART.
Army Brat raised in Europe.
Was thrown into a local French school in 1st grade and learned to read and write in French.
Later lived in Paris and attended local (French) schools.
Witnessed Anti-Vietnam demonstrations and U.S. flag burnings outside our apartment window.
If I'm not qualified to laugh at the Froggies, then nobody is, LOL.
Anti-vietnam demonstrations? I thought the US went into vietnam to help the french?
Answer: No. A total blackout.
Deport? Hell no. They need to be shot or hung. This is a war.
Something very interesting has been going on, something that seems to be happening way below the radar. And it is something that could very well have a tremendous impact on the future of political discourse in this country. No joke.
Where do you think most voters get the bulk of their news? I'll tell you where: Most casual voters get the bulk of their news in their cars, usually during the commute back and forth to work, from those "top-of-the-hour" newscasts that invade our senses every day, whether we listen to rock stations, oldies stations, talk radio, sports talk, whatever.... Many other people get their news AT work from the "soft rock" radio that's piped into the office.
Well, HERE is some good news indeed (from nearly a year ago - - like I said, "below the radar"). And it is just the tip of the iceberg. My understanding is that things are progressing quite nicely as ABC, CBS, and NPR are finding themselves thrown out into the street, one station at a time as their contracts expire.
Regards,
LH
"things are progressing quite nicely as ABC, CBS, and NPR are finding themselves thrown out into the street, one station at a time as their contracts expire."
That's good news. Now if we could only get them off AFRTS.
I needed only read this far...
Gun them down. That will stop it immediately. Then, when an uprising starts for gunning the violence down, gun them down. Mini-guns to Normandy!! Should be a new bumper sticker!
I don't disagree at all. The problem is, they don't. Which tells a little story it'self...
I guess you can say they were given "sweeping responsibilities"
>>>"Even if you have a university degree, in the end all they give you is a broom," hisses an Algerian cafe owner.
So true. My dad got off the boat in the 1920s and used to get SO ticked off at his fellow Germans who romantically remembered the Fatherland, and bragged about their heritage and names ("von this" and "von that").
He told them, in as many words, "This is America. They don't care who or what you were in the Old Country. They give you a clean slate and tell you to show them what you've got. In return, they ask you to learn their language and adopt the culture that attracted you here. If you can't do that, go back and make room for those who will."
He told me that AFTER he boxed my ears for asking him to teach me German. "You don't need it, you're in America now."
That's why you don't see any German, Hungarian, Polish, etc. ghettos any more. They all assimilated and moved on - and up.
Well, you can move out of the Islamic ghetto, for one.
Excellent points.
I tire of reading about their run down low income areas with high unemployment.
If they were really broke, they'd be
scrounging, not rioting.
If they have no jobs they have all the time needed to neaten up the area.
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