After The Flames
The violence has many in Europe asking what has gone wrong. The problem isn't hard to find--but fixing it is
When French Interior Minister Nicolas Sarkozy visited one of the crime-infested high-rise housing projects outside Paris to see how the government's measures against violence were working out, the answer was apparent: not so well. He was pelted with bottles and rocks by the poverty-ridden neighborhood's residents, made up mainly of the French-born children and grandchildren of North African immigrants. The nation's top cop, a tough talker (and 2007 presidential hopeful), promptly called the perpetrators scum, dregs, or gangrene, depending on your translation. Days later, two teenagers of North African descent were electrocuted while hiding in a power station, allegedly fleeing a police identity check.
It was an explosive confluence of events. What followed was the worst civil unrest that the country has seen since the famed student revolts of 1968, sparking two weeks of riots (though only one death) in violence that spread to more than 300 towns across France. As the current crisis seemed to ebb by week's end, the soul-searching continued in a country where one of the largest immigrant populations in Europe grapples with widespread racism and dismal economic prospects amid a growing consensus that the French system of integration has failed. "With his comments, Sarkozy was basically saying, 'Bring it on,'" says Alexis Debat, a former French defense ministry official. "And they did."
Warning and appeal. The interior minister was forced to soften his stance, asking the police to address rioters using the more formal vous pronoun, though promising the deportation of any immigrants caught causing mayhem. Prime Minister Dominique de Villepin, who is Sarkozy's chief rival for the presidency, made a point of noting that the riots were both a "warning and an appeal." He also conceded that "the effectiveness of our integration model is in question."
But the debates surrounding the tough talk of politicos belie the deep-rooted troubles within the banlieues, as the suburban ghettos are known. Powder kegs of the pent-up frustration, they are isolated parallel communities where French-born children of immigrants wrestle with their identities as citizens and Muslims in a secular state--though religious extremism seems to have played little role in the riots. Locked out of European society but alienated from their parents' culture, they are stuck in decaying neighborhoods where violence is nothing new. An average of 80 cars were burned every day in France even before the riots began--a practice that has long been an expression of anger and civil disobedience by the nation's underprivileged. "We don't have a choice; we are ready to sacrifice everything because we have nothing," said a young man in one neighborhood hit by rioting. "We even burned the car of a friend. He got angry, but he understood."
True, the frustration is often decidedly diffuse. And a good number of the rioters were what Debat calls "hard-core delinquents." Nonetheless, their anger has a common denominator. "Perhaps [the rioters] are thieves, rabble, and anarchists," wrote a commentator in a London Arabic daily. "But they have a [just] cause, and there is no choice but to listen to it." The rioters lament that they are still viewed as foreigners in a country that treats them like latter-day colonial subjects. When President Jacques Chirac's center-right government dusted off a law created to control civil unrest during the Algerian war of independence--declaring a state of emergency that gave authorities power to impose a curfew--the move drew outrage. The daily Le Monde said that exhuming the 1955 measure "sends to the youth of the suburbs a message of astonishing brutality: that after 50 years France intends to treat them exactly as it did their grandparents."
Indeed, in a land of liberte, egalite, and fraternite, where laws are admirably colorblind and hyphenated identities are eschewed (there is no French-Moroccan, only French), racism remains a sad fact of life. Job applicants with traditional French names, for instance, are far more likely to be hired than those with Arab names. The government is now considering revamping hiring procedures to consider applicants by number, not name. It is also unleashing some $35 billion for housing renovation, education, and, particularly, crime prevention.
Yet unemployment in France remains a brutal reality--the rate has been permanently stuck at around 10 percent nationally for the past 15 years. If you are young, Arab, or black, it's even worse. Unemployment in the banlieues is double the national average--and approaches 40 percent for 19-to-29-year-olds whose parents are Moroccan or Algerian.
Fertile ground. This joblessness--accompanied as it is by resentment and simple boredom--means the banlieues are seen as a fertile recruiting ground for Islamic extremists, even though the vast majority of residents are nonpracticing Muslims. Still, French politicos bristled last week when local imams issued a fatwa against rioting and sent "big brothers" from mosques to help quell the violence--quite successfully in some areas. The head of Paris's Grand Mosque, who is widely seen in the banlieues as kowtowing to the French establishment, grumbled that "some Muslim organizations . . . think they can invoke God's name in a call for calm."
Though any calm was welcomed, there remains fear that the violence is contagious--as seen in copycat car burnings in Brussels and Berlin. Paola Subacchi at Britain's Royal Institute of International Affairs observes that with low employment rates and burgeoning immigrant populations, "the situation is broadly the same across Europe. This could be Naples in a couple of weeks. It could be Dusseldorf or Rotterdam."
VIOLENCE IN FRANCE
[labels]
Seine River
Paris
Orly Airport
Suburban areas of rioting
Charles de Gaulle Airport
MILES
0
15
Riots started on October. 27 in Clichy-sous-Bois
[inset box]
Areas affected by violence
Paris
FRANCE
BELGIUM
GERMANY
ITALY
SPAIN
SWITZ.
Sources: AP; ESRI; AND; Le Monde; local governments
With Eduardo Cue and Thomas K. Grose
This story appears in the November 21, 2005 print edition of U.S. News & World Report.