In French Suburbs, Same Rage, but New Tactics
By ELAINE SCIOLINO
PARIS, Nov. 27 — Two years after France’s immigrant suburbs exploded in rage, the rituals and acts of resentment have reappeared with an eerie sameness: roving gangs clashing with riot police forces, the government appealing for calm, residents complaining that they are ignored.
And while the scale of the unrest of the past few days does not yet compare with the three-week convulsion in hundreds of suburbs and towns in 2005, a chilling new factor makes it, in some sense, more menacing. The onetime rock throwers and car burners have taken up hunting shotguns and turned them on the police.
More than 100 officers have been wounded, several of them seriously, according to the police. Thirty were hit with buckshot and pellets from shotguns, and one of the wounded was hit with a type of bullet used to kill large game, Patrice Ribeiro, a police spokesman, said in a telephone interview. One of the officers lost an eye; another’s shoulder was shattered by gunfire.
It is legal to own a shotgun in France — as long as the owner has a license — and police circles were swirling with rumors that the bands of youths were procuring more weapons.
“This is a real guerrilla war,” Mr. Ribeiro told RTL radio, warning that the police, who have struggled to avoid excessive force, will not be fired upon indefinitely without responding.
The police have made more than 30 arrests but have been restrained in controlling the violence, using tear gas to disperse the bands of young people and firing paint balls to identify people for possible arrests later.
The prefecture of the police in the Val d’Oise area, where most of the violence has occurred, said Tuesday night that there were no reported injuries among civilians that could be linked to the police.
The events of the past three days, set off by the deaths of two teenagers whose minibike collided with a police vehicle on Sunday, make clear that the underlying causes of frustration and anger — particularly among unemployed, undereducated youths, mostly the offspring of Arab and African immigrants — remain the same.
“We have heard promise after promise, but nothing has been done in the suburbs since the last riots, nothing,” said François Pupponi, the Socialist mayor of Sarcelles, which has been struck by the violence, in an interview. “The suburbs are like tinderboxes. You have people in terrible social circumstances, plus all the rage, plus all the hate, plus all the rumors, and all you need is one spark to set them on fire.”
On Tuesday, there were the first signs of the violence spreading beyond the Paris region when a dozen cars were set afire in the southern city of Toulouse.
In the wake of the unrest in 2005, the government of then-President Jacques Chirac (with Nicolas Sarkozy, now the president, as the tough, law-and-order interior minister) announced measures to improve life in the suburbs, including extra money for housing, schools and neighborhood associations, as well as counseling and job training for unemployed youths. None has gone very far.
At that time, Mr. Sarkozy alienated large numbers of inhabitants in the troubled ethnic pockets of France, but afterward reverted to a low-key approach, which he has maintained ever since. During his presidential campaign, he stayed away from the troubled suburbs, aware that his presence could inflame public opinion against him.
In his six months as president, he has largely focused on injecting new life into France’s flaccid economy through creating jobs and lowering taxes and consumer prices.
His most notable initiative in dealing with youth crime has been punitive: the passage of a law last July that required a minimum sentence for repeat offenders and in many cases allowed minors between 16 and 18 years old to be tried and sentenced as adults.
Since September, Fadela Amara, his outspoken junior minister charged with drawing up a policy for the suburbs, has been holding town hall meetings throughout France in preparation for what is to be a “Marshall Plan” for the suburbs. Her proposals are scheduled to be made public in January.
“We’ve been talking about a Marshall Plan for the suburbs since the early 1990s,” said Adil Jazouli, a sociologist who focuses on the suburbs. “We don’t need poetry. We don’t need reflection. We need money.”
After he returns from China on Wednesday morning, Mr. Sarkozy plans to visit a seriously wounded senior policeman at a hospital near the northern Paris suburb of Villiers-le-Bel.
It was in Villiers-le-Bel on Sunday afternoon that the deaths of two teenagers identified as Moushin, 15, and Larimi, 16, occurred, the event that set off the latest unrest. The teenagers were riding without helmets on a minibike that collided with a police car; rumors that the police had caused the accident elicited calls for revenge.
The crash was reminiscent of the electrocution deaths in another Paris suburb in October 2005 of two teenagers, who, according to some accounts, were running away from police. That event set off the worst civil unrest in France in four decades, plunging the country into what Mr. Chirac called “a profound malaise.”
But Mr. Sarkozy, still reeling from huge transit strikes and student protests throughout France this month, is unlikely to use the current unrest as a vehicle to turn introspective or vent his rage too loudly at those he once called “scum.”
In 2005, he vowed to clean out young troublemakers from one Paris suburb with a Kärcher, the brand name of a high-powered hose used to wash off graffiti; when he pledged in another suburb that year to rid poor suburban neighborhoods of their “scum,” he was pelted with bottles and rocks.
On Tuesday, Prime Minister François Fillon told Parliament that the clashes were “unacceptable, intolerable, incomprehensible,” and he pledged punishment for the offenders in the affected suburbs.
“Those who shoot at policemen, those who beat a police officer almost to death, are criminals and must be treated as such,” he said, adding, “We will do everything so that tonight there is a maximum security presence.”
Under heavy security on Tuesday night, Mr. Fillon visited Villiers-le-Bel, where the two youths had died, in what he called a show of support for the police and firefighters. About 1,000 police officers were deployed there.
Critics of the Sarkozy government complain that many areas in the suburbs are without a police presence, and that the only time there is a show of security is after violence erupts.
“Sarkozy promised to send more police to the suburbs, but in so many places there are fewer police than there were two years ago,” said Mohamed Hamidi, the French founder of Bondy Blog, a popular political blog created in the Paris suburb of Bondy after the outbreak of violence in 2005. “He didn’t keep his word. Who suffers from all the violence and the burning cars? The people who live in these neighborhoods.”
In Villiers-le-Bel on Tuesday night, the atmosphere was tense, with white police trucks and antiriot police officers on the streets. Earlier in the day, about 300 people, including children, marched silently in memory of the two dead teenagers.
At a bakery on a small plaza in town, Habib Friaa, the baker, mourned their deaths, especially that of Larimi, who had started an apprenticeship with him two months ago.
“Baking was his passion,” Mr. Friaa said. “He was a courageous young man, someone who had hope.”
Ariane Bernard contributed reporting from Paris, and Basil Katz from Villiers-le-Bel.
New French riots speak volumes
Two nights of youth violence in immigrant suburbs show little has changed since 2005.
By Geraldine Baum
Los Angeles Times Staff Writer
November 28, 2007
VILLIERS-LE-BEL, FRANCE — They burned the library overnight during a riot in this gritty suburb outside Paris. The blackened shelves and books were thrown around like garbage the next morning, and singed desks were piled on top of one another like old firewood.
As they examined the wreckage Tuesday -- the senator, the sports coach and the teenagers with sticks and pipes still walking around in the light of day -- all had similar explanations. Why the arson up and down the commercial streets? Why the attack on a preschool and the area's only train station? The deaths of two teenagers after their motorbike collided Sunday with a police car had ignited a melee.
But why two nights of unparalleled violence against police by disaffected youth?
"It's a way of making people understand we've had enough," says Charlie Koissi, the 31-year-old coach who seems to know every kid who passes by and gives each one a high-five. "When you touch one of our brothers, no matter what [his] origin, it concerns us."
Raymonde Le Texier, the senator who represents the area in Parliament and has lived here 40 years, describes pent-up rage by black and Muslim children of immigrants who feel lost and abandoned in the projects.
"People feel forgotten by those in power," says Le Texier, a member of the Socialist Party. "It's the truth -- they have been forgotten."
As for the kids, they speak without words. They throw rocks at outsiders and stare angrily at officials such as Prime Minister Francois Fillon, who breezes quickly past the burned-out library and later calls the rioters "criminals." Journalists with their relentless questions are circling around the kids, who half want to be heard and half want to fight them. No, they aren't talking today, and they shout down their "brothers" who try to speak.
By midnight the area had mostly calmed down, but bands of young people set more cars on fire and 22 youths were taken into custody, the regional government said. Unrest flared briefly in the city of Toulouse, in southern France, where 10 cars and another library were torched by roving posses of disaffected youth.
A world apart
Theirs is a world apart, with its own codes and subculture. When France was paralyzed for most of November by widespread strikes, the young in these poor neighborhoods remained calm, quietly enduring the chaos like everybody else. But then two of their own, identified as Moushin, 15, and Larimi, 16, lay dead on the street. They immediately blamed the cops. Cars were set on fire, and blurry photographs of the teenagers with "We Love You" written on them were taped on storefronts and street signs. This time around, the violence came faster and more furiously than in 2005.
During 200 nights of clashes between ghetto youth and riot police that year, there was only one death and sporadic injuries. But after only two nights of confrontations this week, 80 police officers were hospitalized, including six who were seriously injured when rioters assaulted them with stones, gas bombs and firecrackers. At least two dozen officers were hit by pellets fired from guns.
"We're not talking about urban violence anymore, we're talking about insurrection," says Patrice Ribeiro, head of the police union Synergie Officers. "It's more violent than in 2005. . . . We have armed people shooting at police. We knew it was going to happen and it happened."
The senator, the sports coach and the kids with sticks each in their own way could also have predicted the outbreak of violence. Since 2005, not much has changed in the lives of the young rabble-rousers. Despite the money the government has poured into these areas to rehabilitate them, the mood is the same.
In this town of 27,000 -- with its quaint center city of two-story stucco buildings and hulking high-rise apartments on the periphery -- young and older men still roam the streets with nothing to do most weekdays. The jobless rate remains steady at 40%.
Young people "don't have work," says Koissi, the coach. "That's the point."
The City Council built a park for riding motorbikes, a favorite, if not rowdy, pastime of the young in such neighborhoods. But the police tightly control it, complains Koissi. "The police shoo the kids away, and they have nowhere else to go."
The French government has been trying to bring renewal to these tumbledown areas, spending almost $9 billion a year on programs and construction projects. But a recent watchdog report showed that much of the money had been wasted through inefficiency and repetitive services.
There is now a new president, Nicolas Sarkozy, promising more renewal, but he is also the loathed former interior minister of the previous administration who fanned the violence in 2005 by referring to marauding youth as "scum."
Sarkozy, who returns from China today, has made it clear that he'll side with law enforcement and the people who have lost their cars and their businesses to the unrest.
But he also reached out to the parents of the teenage accident victims, inviting them to visit the presidential Elysee Palace so he could express his condolences. They declined the invitation, and the brother of one victim has publicly accused police of inappropriately leaving the scene after the collision.
Two investigations are underway to determine who was at fault.
In the meantime, Le Texier, the senator, scoffs at Sarkozy's urban affairs minister, Fadela Amara, a Muslim who grew up in the projects and is a former Socialist who defected to join the new center-right government. Amara has been on a mission since summer to hear from the residents of the ghetto about what they think must be done and is expected to deliver a plan of action by early next year.
Le Texier says people who know the problems are disgusted by Amara's search for the best strategies: "We've been telling the government for 10 years what needs to be done here."
The most difficult hurdles, she and others agree, are the ones money cannot easily fix. They are endemic to the culture of France's 5 million immigrants, particularly many of the second generation who are born in France but don't feel French.
And so during a night of rage they target a police station, a library: "It's a symbol," says Le Texier, "of the republic, of the city, of the state."
Lost dictionaries
But the hopelessness that might explain away the destruction this week does not justify the misery it brings to the lives of three little boys. At least they don't seem to think so.
On his way home from school for lunch Tuesday, Matthew Touissant, 12, and his two buddies pass by the remains of the library. They survey it soberly.
"The dictionaries were over there," says Yazid, 11, pointing behind the teetering pile of desks.
"In the middle," adds Michael, 11, "was where they welcomed young kids like us."
Matthew lives nearby and came to the library to do homework but also because there was nothing at home to do.
His parents, he says, weren't so much sad as they were shocked that it was destroyed.
"Now," he sighs, "they won't know what to do with me."
geraldine.baum@latimes.com
Achrene Sicakyuz of The Times' Paris Bureau and special correspondent Devorah Lauter contributed to this report.
Revolting High Rises
By CHRISTOPHER CALDWELL
There is a somewhat comic lining around the cloud of France's suburban riots. Suddenly the word banlieue has been embraced by people not known for peppering their conversation with French words - callers to right-wing talk shows, for instance. Obviously, they want to stress how different those suburbs (burning cars and hip-hop hand gestures) are from our own (swing sets and Weber grills). European politicians, anxious lest their countries be perceived as "the next France," have made a similar point. Wolfgang Schäuble, a prominent German Christian Democrat, said recently, "We do not have these gigantic high-rise projects that they have on the edge of French cities."
Meanwhile, people in Marseille, which has one of the heaviest concentrations of immigrants' children in France, were relieved that their city was left mostly unscathed when those children staged a nationwide uprising. What is different about Marseille, residents say, is that it is too hemmed in by mountains and sea to ship its poor to the outskirts. Executives, entrepreneurs and others who don't have to punch the clock are the ones who live farther out - in Aix-en-Provence, for instance, which is reachable by fast trains. Marseille is not like most French cities, where the urban core is made up of neatly tended architectural treasures and the disorder is pushed to the periphery. It is turned inside out, so that "inner city" and "suburbia" retain their American connotations. That may have spared Marseille a lot of problems.
La crise des banlieues turns out to be an ambiguous phrase. Is there a problem in France's suburbs or with France's suburbs? For Schäuble, it's the buildings. For the boosters of Marseille, it's where you put them.
The Swiss architect Le Corbusier, as Francophobes have been more than ready to explain, bears some of the blame for both. His designs inspired many of the suburbs where the riots of October and November began. In fact, he inspired the very practice of housing the urban poor by building up instead of out. Soaring apartments, he thought, would finally give sunlight and fresh air to city laborers, who had been trapped in narrow and fetid back streets since the dawn of urbanization. But high-rise apartments mixed badly with something poor communities generate in profusion: groups of young, armed, desperate males. Anyone who could control the elevator bank (and, when that became too terrifying to use, the graffiti-covered stairwells) could hold hundreds of families ransom.
Le Corbusier called houses "machines for living." France's housing projects, as we now know, became machines for alienation. In theory, the cause of this alienation is some mix of the buildings themselves and the way they're joined to the city. But in practice, the most effective urban renewal has tended to focus on the buildings. It focuses on the buildings by razing them.
The Netherlands provides the best example of how this works. Amsterdam and Rotterdam stand in the same urban-planning relationship as Paris and Marseille. The core of golden-age buildings along Amsterdam's canals are surrounded by industrial-age apartments and then by a fan of housing projects. Rotterdam, because it was rebuilt after heavy bombing in World War II, has big concentrations of poor and working-class people, many of them immigrants and their children, living in the bull's-eye of the metropolitan area.
So the two cities are urban-planning opposites. And since the murder of the filmmaker Theo van Gogh by a Dutch Islamist last year, it has become common to speak of them as political opposites. Amsterdam's mayor, Job Cohen, represents the Labor Party, which has controlled the city for decades and is often accused of excessive multicultural sensitivity. Rotterdam's housing policy is in the hands of Leefbaar Rotterdam, the party of the populist Pim Fortuyn, who was assassinated in 2002. Until recently, the housing boss was Marco Pastors, a charismatic and controversial leader known for tough talk on immigration.
Yet the cities' redevelopment policies are virtually identical. Both are well into a headlong retreat from gigantism and uniformity. The notorious high rises of De Bijlmer in southeastern Amsterdam were completed only in 1975 but were soon generating the kind of pathology on display in the banlieues. A succession of Labor mayors have presided over their dismantling to make way for smaller "garden houses." When the city determined that 11,000 units of housing were needed in the Nieuw West area, it decided to demolish 13,000 units and build 24,000 on a more neighborly scale, to avoid what Cohen calls "huge, stretched-out deprived areas."
In right-wing Rotterdam, meanwhile, Pastors has done almost exactly the same thing. He poured resources into mixed-income projects started by the Labor Party in the once-dismal neighborhood of Bospolder-Tussendijken and added others of his own. His reasoning is the same as Cohen's. Both argue for maximum residential diversity on the grounds that people now have "housing careers."
In the old days, the argument runs, a person with a working-class identity could live in "working-class housing." But today people have housing careers that vary as much as their professional ones. When they are young and not terribly bothered by noise, they might choose small, functional places close to cultural attractions and nightlife. They can move to larger, quieter ones when they have families and then trade space for comfort when their children leave home. Corbusier-style city planning shows no evidence of having considered this. If you don't vary the housing units in a given neighborhood - if you fill entire quarters of the city with standard-issue monoliths - you condemn upwardly mobile people to constant movement. The only people who develop any sense of place are those trapped in the poverty they started in.
In the course of the October uprising, French observers called this slum-based sense of place a "nationalisme de quartier." It is a problem. Residents of some of the most dismal projects have often proved unwilling to relocate, even when the government has promised to move them into much nicer places. Perhaps they have grown attached to their dangerous homes and neighbors. It is more likely that they're leery about accepting the promises of any government that once stuck them in such a depressing spot to begin with.
Christopher Caldwell, a contributing writer, has recently written about Turkey for the magazine.
France Turns to Tough Policy on Students' Religious Garb
October 22, 2004
By ELAINE SCIOLINO
PARIS, Oct. 21 - To enforce its new law banning religious
symbols from public schools, the Ministry of National
Education has decided to get tough.
This week it held formal disciplinary hearings and began
expelling students who violated the law. The goal was to
get rid of those defined as hopeless cases before the
10-day All Saints school vacation that ends with a national
holiday honoring all of Catholicism's saints.
The French government sees no contradiction or irony here.
Nine female Muslim students who have refused to remove
their Islamic head coverings have been thrown out of
schools across France. After the All Saints break, dozens
of cases that are pending will be reviewed.
"The phase of dialogue and consultation is over," said an
official at the ministry, who refused to allow her name to
be used. "It was an unbearable situation for the teachers
and the pupils. It was a crazy situation. The law has to be
respected at some point."
Since school started a month ago, students who have refused
to remove what school administrators define as conspicuous
religious symbols have been quarantined in study halls or
libraries and not allowed to attend class.
The banned symbols include anything that can be construed
as an Islamic veil (head scarf, bandanna, beret), a Jewish
skullcap, a large Christian cross and a Sikh turban.
Officially the law is aimed at enforcing France's
republican ideal of secularism. Unofficially it is aimed at
stopping female Muslim public school students from swathing
themselves in scarves or even long veils.
There have been odd, unintended consequences.
Despite the
1905 law separating church and state in France, public
schools have been allowed to keep chaplains, most of them
Catechism-teaching and Catholic, on their staffs as long as
they were not paid by the state. In 1960 a law set up a
formal process to create new chaplain posts and allowed
existing ones to continue.
But this fall some teachers at the Dumont d'Urville high
school in the southern city of Toulon objected to what they
said was a double standard: Muslim girls had to doff their
scarves, but the Rev. Antoine Galand, the school's Catholic
chaplain, could wear his priestly garb.
So Father Galand was barred from the school and may return
only if he removes his collar and cassock and dons a
business suit.
"We regret this interpretation of secularism, because it's
not what the law says," said the Rev. Charles Mallard, the
priest responsible for youth instruction in the Catholic
Diocese of Toulon. "But it's not worth fighting over an
article of clothing, knowing that in Catholicism, 'the cowl
doesn't make the monk.' "
He added that even in secular France it was considered
"normal" to have Catholic chaplains in public schools.
Cennet Doganay, a 15-year-old Muslim of Turkish origin from
Strasbourg, showed up on the first day of school in a large
beret. The school administrator told her that the beret was
a religious symbol, refused to admit her to class and
advised her to take a correspondence course from home, Ms.
Doganay said.
She refused. She asked her parents to help her shave off
her hair, returned to school in the beret and when she was
required to remove it, she revealed her bald head in
protest. Since there is nothing particularly religious
about baldness, she is going to school again.
"They drove me crazy and tried to brainwash me so much that
I got fed up and I did it - I shaved my hair off," she
said. "Now I feel alone; I feel like a monster. It's like
being naked on the street."
France's Sikh community, meanwhile, challenged the new law
in court after the Louise-Michel school in the Parisian
suburb of Bobigny barred three male Sikh students from
classes because they were wearing turbans.
The three boys were at first put into a separate room where
they could not attend class and then banished from school
without having the chance to defend their case at a formal
school hearing, Antoine Beauquier, one of the boys'
lawyers, said.
"For the moment we are in this no man's land of no law,"
Mr. Beauquier said. "These three kids, who are good
students with no problems, have had no access to classes.
The effects are terrible."
Confusing matters, he added, some Sikh boys in other
schools have been allowed to attend school wearing a
hairnet or a small piece of fabric on their heads.
In a letter to President Jacques Chirac nearly a year ago,
the Sikh community argued that the turban should be allowed
because it is a cultural, not a religious, symbol.
Under the new law, expelled students have the right to
appeal to their local school boards. If they are under 16,
the legal age for quitting school, they have a stark
choice: they must be schooled at home or by correspondence
or find a private school. France has only one Muslim high
school.
In an interview with France Inter radio on Tuesday,
Education Minister François Fillon said he was pleased with
the way things were going. He said that at the start of the
school year there were 600 cases of students refusing to
remove their religious symbols - most of them Muslim girls
in scarves - but that most had agreed to do so after a
"dialogue."
A number of opponents of the law criticize the "dialogue"
process as nothing more than pressure to break the will of
students. "It's a machine that destroys the individual in
the name of a fundamentalist secularism," said Dr. Thomas
Milcent, a Strasbourg physician and convert to Islam who
heads a Muslim lobbying group. "Some girls have been
treated with cruelty, kept in isolation for days. This is
extremism."
Hélène Fouquet and Ariane Bernard
contributed reporting for this article.
