French President Jacques Chirac warned on Wednesday of a ”dangerous situation” and the Prime Minister, Dominique de Villepin, called an emergency Cabinet meeting after a wave of serious urban unrest spread to more than a dozen towns and housing estates around Paris.
”The law must be firmly applied in a spirit of dialogue and respect,” Chirac told ministers. ”An absence of dialogue and an escalation of disrespect will lead to a dangerous situation. There cannot be no-go areas in the republic.”
The violence has once more trained a spotlight on the poverty, anger, despair and lawlessness of France’s rundown big-city suburbs and raised questions about an immigration policy that has, in effect, created sink ghettos for mainly African minorities who suffer from discrimination in housing, education and jobs.
In Aulnay-sous-Bois, a half-hour drive north-east of Paris, the streets were all but deserted on Wednesday in the pouring rain. In the early hours of the morning, about 15 cars blazed and police fired rubber bullets at youths from the town’s Cité des Trois Mille estate who lobbed petrol bombs at an annex to the town hall and stoned the fire station.
”People here don’t want to live in violence, and we’re not yobs,” said Amadou (19), standing at a bus shelter outside the main shopping centre. ”But nobody in Paris knows what it’s really like on that estate. There’s so much frustration. All this was just waiting to explode.”
Momo (26) was equally down as he sat in the station bar.
”Anything could have started it,” he said. ”When you’re an immigrant here, you’re just stuck in your shit. Does it really surprise you it’s going up in flames?”
Late on Wednesday night, the rioters returned to the streets for the seventh consecutive night. Young people threw rocks at police in six suburbs in the Seine-Saint-Denis region north of Paris that includes Clichy, police said. About a dozen cars burned in the Le Blanc-Mesnil suburb.
Nearly 200 vehicles have been torched since the violence began, police said. On Tuesday night, more than 70 vehicles, including police cars, were set alight and 34 people arrested following violence that saw police and fire officers stoned, and shops and warehouses attacked or burned.
The unrest was triggered by last Thursday’s accidental death in Clichy-sous-Bois, 8km from Aulnay, of two African teenagers who were electrocuted while hiding in a power substation from what they believed, apparently wrongly, was police pursuit.
An interior ministry official described it as ”more like sporadic harassment, lightweight hit-and-run urban guerrilla fighting, than head-to-head confrontation”. Small, highly mobile groups of up to a dozen youths emerge, hurl stones or petrol bombs, and disperse, the official said: ”It’s hard to contain.”
The violence has also highlighted a rift between the aristocratic and poetic De Villepin and his hard-line deputy, Interior Minister Nicolas Sarkozy, accused even by some in his own party of fanning the flames by preaching zero tolerance, sending squadrons of riot police to deal with teenage troublemakers and often talking of ”louts” and ”scum”.
The two men, likely rivals in France’s 2007 presidential elections, both delayed or cancelled foreign trips on Wednesday — De Villepin to Canada and Sarkozy to Pakistan and Afghanistan. Instead they will attend a special Cabinet meeting.
The latest outbreak of unrest has focused attention on France’s sink estates, where petty crime and drug-dealing are rife and unemployment can reach or surpass 50%. Built to house immigrant workers after World War II and the families who later came to join them, many of these cités are today sink estates with little possibility of escape.
The country’s immigration and integration policy is based on one of the founding principles of the republic that all its citizens are equal. Few politicians will yet admit, however, that radical and anti-republican measures such as positive discrimination may now be unavoidable.
A social worker in Val-Fourré, one of France’s most notorious sink estates west of Paris, said the country’s cités have now become ”their own universes, where everything outside is a threat”.
”We need to reverse 30 years of injustice and discrimination. We need to make insertion and integration for everyone as basic and fundamental a right as reading and writing and counting. Otherwise we’re heading for meltdown,” he said. — Guardian Unlimited Â