What is France willing to do to maintain order?

French police in riot gear

10 Officers Shot as Riots Worsen in French Cities
By CRAIG S. SMITH

PARIS, Monday, Nov. 7 - Rioters fired shotguns at the police in a working-class suburb of Paris on Sunday, wounding 10 officers as the country's fast-spreading urban unrest escalated dangerously. Just hours earlier, President Jacques Chirac called an emergency meeting of top security officials and promised increased police pressure to confront the violence.

"The republic is completely determined to be stronger than those who want to sow violence or fear," Mr. Chirac said at a news conference in the courtyard of Élysée Palace after meeting with his internal security council. "The last word must be from the law."

But the violence, which has become one of the most serious challenges to governmental authority here in nearly 40 years, showed no sign of abating, and Sunday was the first day that police officers had been wounded by gunfire in the unrest. More than 3,300 vehicles have been destroyed, along with dozens of public buildings and private businesses, since the violence began.

"This is just the beginning," said Moussa Diallo, 22, a tall, unemployed French-African man in Clichy-sous-Bois, the working-class Parisian suburb where the violence started Oct. 27. "It's not going to end until there are two policemen dead."

He was referring to the two teenage boys, one of Mauritanian origin and the other of Tunisian origin, whose accidental deaths while hiding from the police touched off the unrest, reflecting longstanding anger among many immigrant families here over joblessness and other hardships. Mr. Diallo did not say whether he had taken part in the vandalism.
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While the arson is more common than in the past, it has become a feature of life in the working-class suburbs, peopled primarily by North African and West African immigrants and their French-born children. Unemployment in the neighborhoods is double and sometimes triple the 10 percent national average, while incomes are about 40 percent lower.

While everyone seems to agree that the latest violence was touched off by the deaths of the teenagers last week, the unrest no longer has much to do with the incident.

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Most people said they sensed that the escalation of the past few days had changed the rules of the game: besides the number of attacks, the level of destruction has grown sharply, with substantial businesses and public buildings going down in flames. Besides the gunfire on Sunday, residents of some high-rise apartment blocks have been throwing steel boccie balls and improvised explosives at national riot police officers patrolling below.

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Though a majority of the youths committing the acts are Muslim, and of African or North African origin, the mayhem has yet to take on any ideological or religious overtones. Youths in the neighborhoods say second-generation Portuguese immigrants and even some children of native French have taken part.
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Young people in the poor neighborhoods incubating the violence have consistently complained that police harassment is mainly to blame. "If you're treated like a dog, you react like a dog," said Mr. Diallo of Clichy-sous-Bois, whose parents came to France from Mali decades ago.

The youths have singled out the French interior minister, Nicolas Sarkozy, complaining about his zero-tolerance anticrime drive and dismissive talk. (He famously called troublemakers in the poor neighborhoods "lowlifes.")

But Mr. Sarkozy has not wavered, and after suffering initial isolation within the government, with at least one minister openly criticizing him, the government has closed ranks around him. Mr. Chirac, who is under political and popular pressure to stop the violence, said Sunday that those responsible would face arrest and trial, echoing earlier vows by Mr. Sarkozy. More than 500 people have been arrested, some as young as 13.

The government response is as much a test between Mr. Sarkozy and Prime Minister Dominique de Villepin, both of whom want to succeed Mr. Chirac as president, as it is a test between the government and disaffected youths.

Mr. Villepin, a former foreign minister, has focused on a more diplomatic approach, consulting widely with community leaders and young second-generation immigrants to come up with a promised "action plan" that he said would address frustrations in the underprivileged neighborhoods. He has released no details of the plan.

If the damage escalates and sympathy for the rioters begins to fray, Mr. Sarkozy could well emerge the politically stronger of the two.

Any African American who doesn't find this familiar would be lying. The death of the two kids was a charge on long simmering feelings of anger at the police, which is mostly white and French. Sarkozy should put down the Giuliani bio and listen. Order has to be restored, but this will happen again unless real change takes place.

You shouldn't have to lose your culture to be French. That was the same crap the French did in the colonies: be French, but get treated like niggers.

What are the real benefits of assimilation? If one of these kids follows all the rules, gets his bac, goes to the Sorbonne, does everything any French kid does to succeed, is the outcome the same. Someone asked what happens to a black kids at MIT.
Well, if he can make it to MIT, he can expect the same general benefits of any of the school's graduates. His life won't be radically different than a white or Asian graduate starting out. Now, the odds of him running a company he doesn't own is small, but in terms of meaningful employment, he has the same chance as anyone else.

If it isn't that way in France, that's going to drive unrest a lot more than even police brutality.

You have to be treated fairly if you play within the system. It's when you don't that the problems start.

Also, the French permitted an unacceptable level of social isolation for a long time.

posted by Steve @ 12:05:00 AM