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."
My grandparents wouldn't teach my mother German either. Only a little bit here and there. Her older brothers only knew German when they started school. I figured they must have decided by the time she came along that wasn't such a good idea.
Is Paris Burning? Is Paris Burning?
Liberalism and Islam in France have managed to achieve what even Hitler couldn't get done... They should be PROUD.
They ought to fume.
Thank you for that post. It's so very apropos!
ping
Jennyscool said it first, I just made it bigger! :-P
The French unions bear some responsibility for the rampant socialism that has not created one new net job in ages in France.
The so-called "SMART" car wouldn't look so smart in the US when a Hummer driver doesn't see it...Ooops!
Actually, any accident would probably be deadly for the "SMART" driver.
It is a good question and I fear the answer lies in religious beliefs.
Everything Kerry did or said in that campaign was so useless, stupid. And along come events in France to bite him in the bum. Who knew.
"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."
This idiot os 20 y/o what does he think he is going to be CEO of the major compAny????
Aren't these the same folks who said that they knew who the rioters were, but wouldn't idenitfy them?
Becki
> I will admit that I've never been to France.
Nor have I, but a family member did a couple of years
ago, and related a tale from a B&B there.
> However, I've always heard how quickly the French
> will tell a person that they aren't French and
> therefore don't understand the French way.
They are snobbish with each other as well. The B&B
owner related that a neighbor, upon visiting the home,
reprimanded the owner about the corner mouldings at
the ceiling - not that they were untasteful - but too
fancy - they were "above her class".
> Has anyone wondered how these second and third
> generation immigrants must react to being told that
> they aren't French? In the United States by second
> or third generation everyone is pretty much an
> American. It doesn't matter where you came from.
What? You mean that John French Kerry's role model
country is not an egalitarian paradise? Why I'm shocked,
simply shocked.
C'es vrais mon choux.
The Colonial (Imperial) Frogies caused a bleep load of trouble.
I can't help myself, Paris is still my favorite city.
actually I prefer Bruxelles -- much more quieter and genteel -- and the chocolate shops are better... mmmmmmm Rue de bouchers...
What kind of people trash the free things that a tolerant civilization has provided for them?
Can't say it here. Remember the LA riots?
To set the record straight:
Sarkozy called them "racaille" - riff-raff, or rabble. Not scum.
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