Bondy, France – It would be an exaggeration to blame the riots that have swept France on a poor choice of words, but Nicolas Sarkozy, the country’s tough- talking interior minister, hardly helped when he characterized the young men responsible for the violence as “la racaille.”
The rough translation is “scum.” The word is thoroughly offensive, and it personalized the antagonism between the government and the angry young men from immigrant neighborhoods who have been so enthusiastically attacking its authority for the past two weeks.
“It was an outrageous thing to say. If I were the president of France, I would have fired the guy,” said Brigitte Fouvez, deputy mayor of Bondy, a working- class suburb of Paris that has been hit by the swelling violence.
“If I were a young guy living in the neighborhood, … I can understand the anger,” said Michel Wierviorka, a sociologist who has written a book on political violence.
Police, teachers, shopkeepers and other adults in the community often refer to these young men as “des voyous,” a gentler expression that means “louts” or “rascals.” But who are they really?
For the most part they are French citizens, the second- and third-generation offspring of North African immigrants who began pouring into France in the 1970s. Their parents and grandparents came to work in factories, or to take the menial jobs no one else wanted. It was assumed that their presence in France would be temporary. They were sent to live in housing projects on the margins of urban areas, and they never left.
A few working-class white families were also housed in the projects, known here as cites, but most of them have left. In recent years, large numbers of black African immigrants have moved in.
Bondy is fairly typical of these communities. Its 48,000 people come from 65 countries, but mainly from North Africa. In overwhelmingly Catholic France, about 70 percent of Bondy’s residents are Muslim.
The cites also are home to soaring crime and to the country’s highest unemployment rates.
Youssef Akdim, 20, a rap musician with a growing following among young residents of the cites, grew up in Bondy.
His family moved to France when he was 5. His grandfather, along with many thousands of other Moroccans, had been a conscript in the French army during World War II; his father was recruited to work in an auto factory in France.
“They came and they looked at his teeth, they felt the muscles in his shoulders, and they gave him a job,” said Akdim, who is acutely conscious of his father’s humiliations.
Akdim’s school, along with just about every other public building in France, prominently displays the credo of the vaunted French social model: Liberte, egalite, fraternite. It means that all French citizens are considered equally French. There are no distinctions for race, religion or ethnicity.
“The problem,” according to Wierviorka, the sociologist, “is that the institutions in charge of this idea don’t translate it into reality.”
Like the worst urban school systems in the U.S., the schools in the French immigrant communities simply pass the students through.
“The kids understand that they are pariahs,” a young teacher named Pascal Odin told the newspaper Liberation this week. “They don’t identify with France or the French nation; they identify with their stairwell.”
He was referring to the dimly lit communal stairwells in the housing projects that are often the only places young people have to congregate. Akdim said he was not surprised when Sarkozy, who hopes to succeed Jacques Chirac as president, referred to the young people of suburbs as racaille.
“He was only saying what most people think,” said the soft-spoken young man. “We hear the insults everyday. Sometimes it’s just the look in a person’s eye. Other times it’s the click of a car’s central lock when we walk down the street.”
He was 13 the first time he was stopped and searched by police.
“It was on the Champs Elysees. I was with some friends. We were well-dressed because we were hoping to meet girls,” he said. “I was shocked, humiliated. People were looking at us like we were guilty of something.” Since then, he has grown accustomed to these kinds of encounters with the police. “Always, they approach you from a position of superiority. They are the accusers; we are the guilty.” (END OPTIONAL TRIM) Most officials and commentators agree that the riots now erupting across France have been 30 years in the making. But the spark was an incident two weeks ago in which two teenagers from an immigrant community were electrocuted when they tried to hide from police in a power substation in the neighboring suburb of Clichy-sous-Bois “Riots occur when there is a strong feeling of injustice. Remember Los Angeles,” said Wierviorka, referring to the 1992 riots in Los Angeles that left more than 50 dead. “It didn’t start with the Rodney King beating; it started when a jury said the police were not guilty.” The rioting on the outskirts of Paris didn’t begin until a local prosecutor said it appeared the police were not to blame for the deaths of the two teenagers.
The violence spread with breathtaking speed, catching both the government and the police flatfooted. On Tuesday, the government invoked emergency laws that will allow local authorities to impose curfews, but the unrest continued for a 13th consecutive day, with attacks reported in cities such as Toulouse and Lille.
Nightly television images of burning cars have fueled the young perpetrators’ sense of triumph and power. Internet blogs have helped them incite others to join and to spread the unrest from city to city.
(EDITORS: STORY CAN END HERE) Mahmoud Bourassi, 30, a social worker in Bondy, said that burning cars has turned into a competition. “The different gangs try to outdo each other,” he said.
Because an overwhelming majority of the youths involved in the violence and vandalism are Muslim, some commentators have characterized it as yet another manifestation of the “clash of civilizations” that lead to terror bombings in London and Madrid as well as the Sept. 11 attacks in the United States.
Bourassi disagrees. “This is absolutely not about Islam. It’s not some kind of religious war. It’s a political problem that needs a political solution.” In a television address to the nation this week President Dominique de Villepin said he was beefing up police and giving local officials extraordinary powers to impose curfews. He also said the government would be restoring millions of euros in funding for community projects in “sensitive” urban zones – funding that the government spent much of the last three years eliminating. But many think the solution will have to go deeper.
“Liberty, equality and fraternity” is a fine slogan, said Khalid Hamdani, a businessman with a degree in law and economics, but he suggested that France needed to try something more American and very un-French: affirmative action.
“In France, a young boy with my name or my face, he has about one-tenth of a chance of getting a job,” he said.
“But in the U.S., affirmative action has done a fantastic job in changing this mentality,” he said. “Black Americans, I think, feel proud to be Americans. In France we have not been able to build this kind of social cohesion.” (EDITORS: STORY CAN END HERE) In the immigrant communities, the only institutions that do have the means to promote this kind of social cohesion are the mosques.
It is no small irony that the government, which last year introduced a headscarf ban and has tried hard to limit the role of religion in public life, is now turning to religious leaders to help quell the rioting.
“So it is not Islam that is organizing the riots. On the contrary, if there is a problem, it is that Islam is helping the government solve the problem. This is the collapse of the French social model,” said Wierviorka.
As the nightly fires continue to burn, Akdim says he does not condone the violence, but he understands the anger that drives it.
“Right now, it has nothing to do with Islam,” but he said that if it goes on, “terrorists” will try to “hijack” the anger.
Asked if a Muslim born in Morocco could ever feel truly French, he smiled and scribbled the lyrics of a rap song he wrote a year ago: The blood that flows in my veins, I owe it to myself to honor it.
France, we built it. They only decorated it.
