FALLMUNC

Background Guide: French Cabinet

Civil unrest has become a depressing fixture in Middle Eastern urban life, yet another indication of the violence erupting across the Muslim world. This problem, however is not merely one for the battle-engulfed states of Israel/Palestine, Iraq, Lebanon, and Afghanistan. This more-or less guerilla warfare is erupting within the hearts of all major industrialized cities, including our very own Paris. We cannot hope to cure the world of this violence, but it is our duty as citizens of France to ensure that our men and women do not need to fear violence in their homeland. As the President and Prime Minister, we charge you, the French Cabinet to find a lasting solution to the issue of violence within our cities. 

The following are for your reference; please read them in their entirety. 

In the Paris slums, no jobs, no sun

By Elaine Sciolino

Published: SUNDAY, DECEMBER 11, 2005

LA COURNEUVE, France: Djamila has built her life around her sons. A nurse's aide who left the two husbands who abused her, she has soldiered on in the housing projects of this tough town near Paris, long confident that her four children would reap the benefits of being born French.

Yet each son found it harder to make his way in this world. And now, at age 58, Djamila is caught between a determination that her youngest son, who goes by the nickname Looping, will succeed and a sense of foreboding that he will not.

"I was happier than my children are," she said over tea and cookies in her well-scrubbed, lace-curtained, two-bedroom apartment in one of France's roughest housing projects. "This is a place where gangrene has set in."

Looping, who is 22 and jobless, uses a simpler metaphor to describe his life. "The sun never shines," he said. "The buildings are gray. The people are gray. Everything is gray. It's the same people and there is nothing to do, nothing to do. You wake up every morning looking for work. But why? There isn't any."

La Courneuve, a town of 35,000 people of 80 nationalities and ethnic backgrounds, is a world away from Paris, though it is only a 10-minute ride on the train.

Ithas become a symbol of France's failure to integrate millions of Arab and African immigrants - many of them Muslims - and their French-born children and grandchildren. It is also here that events helped start the riots that recently gripped impoverished neighborhoods throughout France.

The frustration and fury of the rioters are still visible in the two charred carcasses of delivery trucks that flank the main road into La Courneuve. But they are even more apparent in conversations with the town's residents, those like Djamila, who struggle to make do, and those like her son Looping, who feel that every way out is blocked.

They asked that their last name not be used, fearing reprisals from the police and even from neighbors.

Promised the ideal of a republican France, where the state is blind to race, religion and ethnicity and all citizens enjoy equal opportunity, both generations feel betrayed.

For Djamila, who is more outspoken than her son, the overcrowded, underfunded schools are "huge vacuums" that turn out students without trades and then blame the parents. The police are not guardians of the peace, she said, but corrupt, extorting money or pocketing the hashish they seize from neighborhood hoodlums.

The young - including her son Looping, she fears - easily fall victim to the cheap and plentiful hashish "that destroys their brains," she said.

Those who burn cars are not evil, but, to her, understandably alienated. Her sons are never considered French, even though they were born in France, but rather "children of immigrants."

"Why do you think the young have revolted?" she asked. "There is no exit, no factories, no jobs for them. They see too much injustice, too, too, too much. Society no longer offers them anything, no values, no morality, no place."

Outside the Barre Balzac, the toughest public-housing building in this tough town, a young man rams a Peugeot car into a parked car, piercing the afternoon ennui with the sound of crashing metal and tinkling glass.

No police officers witness the crime, but a band of comrades approve the act with a loud whoop.

A few hundred meters away, about 50 women gather in a down-at-the-heel community center called Africa for a different sort of neighborhood entertainment. Here it is the music that is loud.

As the crowd sings a song in Arabic about a bride on her wedding night, a woman wearing a smile of mischief arches her back, rotates her hips and starts dancing. Sensuality, not anger, fills the airless, windowless basement.

"We need to find ways to celebrate, to party," said a 71-year-old volunteer as she pulled women onto the dance floor. "We need to get our women out of the house."

La Courneuve is a town that menaces, but also welcomes. Branded by France's police intelligence agency as one of the country's 150 "no-go zones" where police officers should enter only with major reinforcements, La Courneuve was caught up in the violence in which rioters torched cars, trashed businesses and ambushed the police.

It is here that a policeman was seriously injured and hospitalized one night last month when a metal ball was dropped on his head. It is also here that the police beat a young man who hurled insults at them, a moment of frustration and panic that was captured by a television crew and prompted the suspension of several officers.

Volunteers help elementary-school children with their homework in a damp storage room with bare light bulbs and a concrete floor, steps away from street thugs who deal drugs, hashish mostly, but keep to themselves. Heroin addiction has plummeted in recent years, in part because of the fear of AIDS from tainted needles.

Residents may refuse to tell outsiders their full names, for fear of retribution by the police or the petty gangsters, then invite them into their homes.

For Djamila, La Courneuve is a community, a place where even the hashish dealers offer to carry her packages, where slightly older, more experienced men protect and settle scores for the younger ones, like Looping.

"The jewel of the family," she calls him, a "good boy who makes mistakes, doesn't work but has a golden heart.

"He has everything ahead of him. Our young are not bad. They are very loyal to each other, like a family. All is not completely lost."

For Looping, the dream is to flee. But getting a job is hard with only a high school degree in accounting, an Arabic name and a five-digit postal address starting with "93" that identifies him as a resident of the suburbs. So he reads mystery novels and trolls the Internet every day looking for work that does not come.

"I didn't have a choice, the national education system told me what I had to study - even though I wanted to know right at the beginning whether there would be a job at the end," he said over coffee with three of his friends in a café-restaurant called Le Pasteur.

"People on the outside see us as car-burners and strange beings, when what I want at 22 is not to have to ask my mother for money."

Unemployment, which plagues three generations and averages 28 percent in the housing projects in La Courneuve, is much higher among young people. The average income is less than $10,000 a year here; the average Parisian makes more than double that. Most families here receive some public assistance.

Looping agrees with his mother that his older brothers had an easier time finding their way a decade ago, a time when France's economy was healthier.

His eldest brother is married and has a 2-year-old son and a secure job as a shuttle bus driver for a Paris airport.

A second brother, who owns a small long-distance phone center, found refuge in Islam. When he was still a teenager, he grew a long beard, donned robes, began to pray five times a day and go to the neighborhood mosque. He married a woman who wears long black gloves and a black veil that covers her body and her face.

A third brother, who had a respectable job in a cosmetics business, recently was laid off.

With the equivalent of $4,700 due in back rent, he moved back in with his mother and sleeps on the pullout couch in the living room.

As for Looping, he is a young man on the edge. He is so respectful of his mother that he won't smoke a cigarette in front of her, yet so desperate that he feels the pull of crime. He has no girlfriend; that would take money.

"When I'm in a really bad state," he said, "I have this desire to go into Paris, grab a few handbags and come back home again."

After all, he added, "In the eyes of people or the police when I walk on the street, in front of institutions or an employer, I am considered like a thug. Women hide their purses when they go by me."

His mother has paid $400 for a training program so that Looping can get a special license to drive construction vehicles. He is grateful, despite the strict rules she imposed on him - the early curfews, the limits on his comings-and-goings, the careful monitoring of his friendships.

But he is disgusted by the litter in the hallways and the habits of the newcomers, who toss their trash out the windows and allow their young children to wander the streets.

"They even throw diapers out the windows," he said. "It's miserable to say this, but it's as if we live in a garbage dump, so what difference does it make if there is one more bag of trash thrown into it?"

In the early 1960s, the landscape of La Courneuve was transformed when a concrete jungle of apartment blocks was built as low-income temporary lodging for migrant labor. The "Cité of 4,000," as it was called, after its number of apartments, was considered then to be a model of modern urban architecture.

But the walls of the projects were thin, the elevators tiny and temperamental, the resources to support the projects meager. The Communist Party, which for decades had given the town's working-class residents a vision and an anchor of social support, lost most of its power and influence. Many of the families who could moved away.

For many of its residents, the 14-story Barre Balzac stands as a monument to a failed urban experiment. The Balzac's elevators have an unpredictable will of their own. A urine smell invades the corridors. The graffiti call the police "assassins." For a fee, middlemen have been known to break down a door and install squatters in a vacated apartment.

Yet the view from the balconies of the long, high building captures the complexity of life here: a dusty area below that once was a soccer field, the train tracks that lead into Paris, the Eiffel Tower and Montmartre in the distance.

Instead of being renovated, the building is scheduled to be demolished in a few years, just as the buildings with names like Renoir and Debussy have been in recent years. The urban renewal project ambitiously aims to relocate residents into smaller, more intimate buildings. The apartments will be smaller and more expensive.

The Barre Balzac is perhaps best known for a recent tragedy. It was in front of the building that a killing in June triggered a chain of events that led to the country's recent urban unrest.

An 11-year-old named Sidi-Ahmed Hammache was accidentally shot and killed in a feud between two different ethnic groups as he washed his father's car.

Guns are rarely used to settle scores in France and the tragedy shocked the country.

The interior minister, Nicolas Sarkozy, a presidential hopeful for 2007, rushed to the scene, trailed by television cameras. He vowed to "clean" the housing projects of La Courneuve with a "Karcher," the brand name of a high-powered hose used to wash off graffiti.

To the townspeople, the words smacked of racism. Even those who fully embraced the goal of cracking down on crime were enraged. After two youths of African origin were accidentally electrocuted while hiding from the police on Oct. 27, the waves of car-burning began.

Looping and his friends stayed on the sidelines. But one of those swept up in the violence in La Courneuve was an Algerian-born 17-year-old high school student named Yacine.

He had never been in trouble before. But when he and a friend found themselves in front of a group of anti-riot police, they succumbed to a temptation to throw stones at them.

"We yelled at them and called them things like 'sons of bitches,'" he said. "The police beat us. They called us 'dirty Arabs.' They said, 'Go back to your country.' We yelled back, 'Dirty French.'"

Police officers handcuffed them and charged them with incitement to riot. Yacine went to the hospital, where a doctor bandaged his face and wrote him a note excusing him from school for a week. He and his parents did not protest. They would have needed a lawyer and they would lose anyway, he says.

Interviewed days later, with his nose still swollen, his left cheek gashed and bandaged, Yacine was angry.

"Before this, I would have never thought that I could get into a fight with the police," he said. "Now, if I'm asked to beat a Frenchman, I would do it. I don't feel French."

Looping knows the feeling. If he is in trouble, he says, he does not turn to the police for help, but to the "older brothers" in the neighborhood. "They can settle the problem 10 times faster than the police," he said.

The police, he added, often stop him and his friends, check their identity papers and empty their pockets looking for drugs. Three years ago he was arrested when officers mistakenly thought he was part of a group insulting them.

"Sure, they hit me, that's routine for them," he said. Rather than fight the charge, his mother paid the $300 fine.

Playing pool one evening at Le Pasteur, Looping and three of his friends offered their analysis of the unrest that rocked France.

"This is not an Islamic revolution, make sure you understand that," Looping said.

"It's a juvenile revolution!" declared Josselin, 22, who is half-French, half-Vietnamese and works in a marble factory.

Neighborhood Muslim leaders have campaigned hard to make it clear that the urban unrest had nothing to do with Islam, radical or otherwise, and that many of the country's rioters came from Catholic or animist backgrounds.

Soon after the violence started, for example, the powerful Union of Islamic Organizations in France, which runs the biggest mosque in the Paris area - it is on the edge of La Courneuve - issued a fatwa. It forbade "every Muslim seeking satisfaction and divine grace" from taking part any act of violence.

Police investigators are quick to point out that there is no link between the recent riots and radical Islam. Asked by the newspaper Le Monde recently about such a link, Pascal Mailhos, director general of the Renseignements Generaux, the police intelligence agency, replied, "The participation of radical Islamists in the violence was nil."

Still, there is a widespread recognition, both here and throughout France, that humiliation and alienation can lead young people to embrace religious extremism and even terrorism. Connections with radical individuals and groups in nearby Arab countries are strong.

International Herald Tribune, SUNDAY, DECEMBER 11, 2005

As Youth Riots Spread Across France, Muslim Groups Attempt to Intervene

By Molly Moore

Washington Post Foreign Service
Saturday, November 5, 2005; Page A01

SEVRAN, France, Nov. 4 -- By dusk Friday, the streets of Sevran were deserted. Inside high-rise apartments and stone cottages here on the outskirts of Paris, residents waited for the explosions and sirens to begin.

"Last night I thought I was in Baghdad, not somewhere in France," said Nabila Chaibi, a 22-year-old sales clerk, her angular face swathed in a white head scarf. Her eyes displayed the fatigue of a sleepless night.

Sevran is at the epicenter of violence that has convulsed many of the poor immigrant areas in Paris's northern suburbs for nine days. After the sun set Friday night, the violence resumed, with youths setting fire to two buildings, including a bakery, and 10 cars in the northern community of Val d'Oise, police reported.

Night after night, youths armed with rocks, sticks and gasoline bombs have confronted police and set cars, businesses, government buildings and schools on fire. Police officers said Friday that approximately 1,260 vehicles had been torched in the Paris area in the past week, including 23 buses parked in a depot near Versailles.

The worst unrest in France in recent years has paralyzed the government, setting senior officials bickering over how to curb the violence. President Jacques Chirac has not publicly addressed the country other than to issue a statement through his spokesman appealing for calm.

The attacks have underscored anger and frustration among immigrants and their French-born children who inhabit the country's largest and poorest slum areas. A large percentage of this population is Muslim, and Islamic neighborhood groups have been trying to dissuade young people from taking part in the rioting.

Thursday night into Friday morning, the violence spread to other parts of France for the first time. Attacks and fires were reported in Normandy on the northwest coast, Dijon in the central Burgundy region and Provence in the far south.

The attacks were triggered when two Muslim teenagers were electrocuted last week after they leapt into a power substation in an attempt to evade a police who had set up an identity checkpoint. Several dozen policemen and assailants have since been injured in street fighting, but no further deaths have been reported.

Still, some of the violence has been devastating. On Wednesday night, youths firebombed a bus here with the passengers inside. As the last passenger, a 56-year-old woman, descended the steps on crutches, an assailant splashed her with gasoline and another threw a flaming rag at her, according to residents and police reports. The driver put out the flames and rushed her to a hospital, where she was diagnosed with second- and third-degree burns.

"The last two nights, there was panic everywhere," said Bekkay Merzak, a leader of the Islamic organization in Sevran. "People didn't know what was happening outside their own buildings. When they left a car out, they didn't know what they would find in the morning."

The French government has deployed 1,300 riot police in the streets of troubled communities. It has dispatched firefighters from around the Paris region to relieve their suburban counterparts, exhausted from the nightly demands of chasing hundreds of blazes.

Some politicians and police unions have urged the government to declare a state of emergency or impose curfews on the communities that have been hit hardest.

The riots have not touched popular tourist sites in Paris. But the road and rail line that many foreign visitors use to travel between the city and Charles de Gaulle International Airport slice through the most troubled districts.

Two trains connecting Paris and the airport were attacked Thursday, prompting engineers to run only one in five trains on Friday, rail officials said. The U.S. Embassy warned travelers Friday against taking trains to the airport, calling conditions in the troubled areas "extremely violent."

 Almost every exit sign off the A1 highway to the airport identifies a town that has been the scene of nightly attacks.

Just off the highway, in Aulnay-sous-Bois, a businessman in a gray suit on Friday picked through the rubble of a Renault car dealership that is now a blackened hulk, its shattered showroom windows exposing the charred frames of latest-model automobiles.

The next exit pointed to Le Blanc-Mesnil, where 17-year-old Geraldine Marie-Reine stood gazing at the ruins of the community gymnasium where she played as a child. "It's a public place," said Marie-Reine, who was born in the West Indies. "It belongs to everybody."

She said some of the youths who burned the building were former classmates who had also played there as children. "I know them," she said. "Seeing it destroyed by other youths hurts."

She narrowed her eyes at two teenage boys who sauntered past. She nodded, silently mouthing the French word for "them."

Nearer the airport, black smoke mixed with low-hanging gray clouds as firefighters battled a blaze set 13 hours earlier at a warehouse filled with paint, flooring and wall materials.

In Sevran, about halfway between Paris and the airport, Muslim leaders have been meeting inside a former supermarket that is now the Grand Mosque of Sevran. There, they are plotting a strategy to curb the violence in a town of 47,000 people where a large percentage of the population is Muslim.

Bekkay Merzak, secretary general of the Sevran Muslim Cultural Association, said he feared the rioting was damaging the image of Muslims generally. The rampaging youths are "harming Islam and themselves," Merzak said. "They don't know their own religion."

Each day, Merzak dispatches a cadre of young volunteers door to door to plead the association's case: Young people, stay away from the violence; parents, keep your children in the house at night.

"I talk about how our religion condemns these acts," said Amin Benabderradname, 25, who had a thick black beard and wore an embroidered white cap on his shaved head. During his rounds on Wednesday, he said, he encountered several teenagers filling two large sacks with rocks for the coming night. Benabderradname said he persuaded them to surrender their weapons to him.

Many youths in Sevran and elsewhere have pursued a dangerous nightly game of hide-and-seek with police officers and firefighters. Police said the attackers' tactics began shifting Thursday night, with fewer incidents of large gangs confronting police and more incidents of small, fast-moving teams setting fires.

Sevran residents said the attackers would ignite one car, and then, before firefighters could douse the flames, move on to torch another vehicle several streets away. Their mobility leaves remnants of destruction scattered throughout the city.

Muslim leaders who have been talking with young rioters say that many are driven by anger at the government over the neglect of the housing projects, where unemployment and crime are rampant. A statement by Interior Minister Nicolas Sarkozy that rioters were "scum" particularly incensed many of them.

They are also frustrated at job and social discrimination against the neighborhoods' residents, many of whom were born in France to immigrant parents.

While many residents share the indignation of the young people, they are expressing increasing anger at what the rioters are doing. Many of the burned-out cars and businesses are owned by local people. The loss of government facilities lowers the quality of life.

"Fed up!" read the headline in Friday's suburban editions of the newspaper Le Parisien. Religious, business, civic and government leaders in several of the hardest-hit towns, including Sevran, are planning demonstrations this weekend to protest the violence and appeal to the youths to stop.

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