8 days of rioting in France, likely to continue

[2-0-Sixx]

Nightly riots and clashes in the Paris suburbs, between the police and youth mainly of North African and African descent, are entering their second week. A thousand police officers were deployed Wednesday night in Seine-Saint-Denis, northwest of Paris, and half of the department’s 40 towns were affected by violence. Shots have been fired at police officers, and one official spokesman described events as a descent into civil war.

The conflicts have provoked a severe crisis for the French government. Prime Minister Dominique de Villepin has cancelled a scheduled visit to Canada, and Minister of the Interior Nicolas Sarkozy has pulled out of a visit to Afghanisan and Pakistan. Emergency meetings of the government of de Villepin and President Jacques Chirac have been held to discuss the situation.

The rioting began on the evening of October 27 after two youth were electrocuted when they climbed onto an electrical transformer while fleeing from the police. The deaths of the boys, in the northern suburb of Clichy-sous-Bois, sparked confrontations between youth and 400 to 500 riot police dispatched by Sarkozy.

Violent protests and clashes with armed riot police have continued every night since and have spread to other working class suburbs.

The eruptions are the product of desperate poverty, mass unemployment and a vicious, openly racist law-and-order campaign spearheaded by Sarkozy, who has been considered the main rival to Chirac within the Gaullist Union for a Popular Party (UMP) and the leading contender to replace him in the next presidential election. Sarkozy has sent armed police into the immigrant slums and used terms such as “scum” and “gangrene” to describe their inhabitants.

On Wednesday, a council of ministers meeting was held, as well as a meeting of Gaullist deputies to the National Assembly. A question session was held in the National Assembly, at which Socialist Party and Communist Party deputies criticised Sarkozy, who sat mute. The deputies blamed him for instigating a social explosion through his law-and-order policies and provocative statements. De Villepin answered for him, trying to present a united government front. However, it was widely reported that deputies at the closed Gaullist meeting had heatedly attacked Sarkozy.

At the council of ministers, Chirac asked for a plan for urban renovation to be accelerated. He relieved Sarkozy of his responsibility for the preparation of the plan to prevent delinquency and entrusted it to de Villepin, who thereupon announced that he would be working for “equal opportunities” and “a plan of action” for youth employment in Seine-Saint-Denis, the department where Clichy and many other such communities are concentrated and the scene of a dozen outbreaks since October 27. De Villepin is Sarkozy’s most likely rival for the presidency in 2007.

 

[2-0-Sixx]

The provocative language used by Sarkozy against the youth on suburban housing estates has been part of his attempt to mobilise a right-wing and racist movement under his leadership and that of the UMP. He hoped that this would not only secure his succession as president, but also provide popular support for the attacks on the working class required to break its resistance to the destruction of the welfare state and labour rights.

Since the beginning of the present government’s term of office in 2002, Sarkozy has led a drive to diminish the rights of defendants and extend police powers. He set up special brigades of police to send into troubled estates.

This has gone hand in hand with media campaigns demonising the immigrant youth and whipping up anti-Muslim sentiment, at the centre of which was legislation outlawing the wearing of the Muslim headscarf in state schools—a measure passed in 2004 with the support of virtually the entire political establishment, including the Socialist Party.

More than 20 years of austerity policies and accelerating attacks on workers’ living standards and rights by successive governments—those headed by the official “left” parties as well as those of the right wing—have stretched social tensions to the breaking point.

The chronic national 10 percent unemployment rate rises to well over 50 percent on many Parisian estates. The Gaullist government’s policy of encouraging job insecurity and short-term work contracts has been made more unbearable by savage cuts in benefits for the unemployed. Rises in gas and petrol prices have further increased the economic pressure on these communities.

The mass reaction on the night of the tragedy on the Chêne-Pointu estate has spilled over into many other estates in the Paris suburbs, in recent days involving small groups of youth burning vehicles and rubbish bins, attacking firemen attempting to extinguish the fires, and constantly clashing with the police.

The government fears that the Paris riots could spark broader upheavals all over France. Not only the towns in the Seine-Saint-Denis department have been affected, but also estates in the Val d’Oise and the Yvelines deparments of greater Paris.

Tensions were heightened still further when a tear gas canister was fired into a mosque on October 31. The following night, 1,250 cars were reported burned and at least one primary school was trashed.

Already, the Ousse des Bois estate in Pau, a thousand kilometres away near the Spanish border, has seen three continuous nights of clashes between youth and the police.

Despite the concern expressed within ruling circles, there is unanimity on the need for ever-greater repression to deal with the unrest. Minister for Social Cohesion Jean-Louis Borloo said the government had to react “firmly,” while UMP deputy Jacques Myard complained that the government had been weak because it had “accepted, step-by-step, that every night youths burn cars, destroy business and so on. Those guys will use the pretext of everything to riot, to demonstrate, to destroy.”

While making a show of criticising Sarkozy’s excesses and calling for the beefing up of social services cut by the government, all of the currents of the Socialist Party, the Greens and the Communist Party have called for the police to suppress the rioting.

Dominique Strauss Khan of the Socialist Party, a former minister in Lionel Jospin’s Plural Left government (1997-2002) and contender for the party’s nomination for the 2007 presidential election, stated on Europe 1 radio, “I utterly condemn the incidents at Clichy-sous-Bois. When it comes to law and order, an extremely firm attitude is required...repression and prevention should be employed.”

The Socialist Party and the Communist Party have presided over many of these municipalities for decades and maintained the peace for the French ruling class, while conditions have eroded. They are complicit in the austerity policies and the police build-up that underlie the explosion of anger among oppressed and impoverished youth that is now shaking France.

 

[L Mac-a-docious]

Fuck...sounds like that movie "La Haine" coming to life. Hopefully that cat Sarkozy is defeated in '07, sounds like an extremist.

 

[ColdBlooded]

spread beyond just the paris area now

 

[Cheaptimes]

you think 8 days of rioting would get more press....

 

[eastbayrider510]

^^^^thats real....i guess when the werld does nothing but make jokes bout your country they could care less about your problems,.....its fucked up

 

[D-Rose]

Wow, I didn't even know the situation was race related. Whenever I saw it on the news its been called "police vs 'French youth'". Plus those news clips have only been like 20 seconds long

 

[Raphas]

The situation is very worrying. It is somehow a race issue because most people living in the ghetto are blacks and arabs, but it's not that much race related cause it's more discrimination against where your from compared to your origin.
Kids livin there don't have shit to do but sell that shit or fuck around, now they have a game to play every night to show they're tougher than the next city or the police. That's one big problem.
The other problem is Sarkozy, while he is NOT an extermist, he's tougher and want to "clean up hoodlums", but he wouldn't be consider a hardliner at all in the States. He basically wants to shut down traffic in the ghetto. He's in a tough position right now. Rioters want to see him resign, and I think that would really help.
Another thing is that 1/2 of the 1200 ppl arrested (so far) are youths so you basically let them go after a night at the police station. Not to mention most parents don't have any control over their kids.
How you supposed to respond to kids as young as 12 shootin and throwin rocks at cops ?

Shit is bad right now and spreadin...and it was bound to happen.

 

[TROLL]

they dont have like a juvenile hall in paris??

 

[Raphas]

they do have juvenile halls but you only go there if you're one serious bad kid. You don't go to jail just because you threw a rock or set fire.

 

[2-0-Sixx]

Obviously wide spread riots have to do with a whole lot more than just a few troubled teenagers.

:::
:::

After 11 days of clashes between youth and police
French government and opposition back intensified repression

By Stephane Hugues
7 November 2005

The anger and frustration of the most oppressed sections of youth that erupted in the form of violent clashes with police in the Paris area last week has now spread to the whole of France. The riots erupted a week ago after police chased youth into an electricity transformer station in Clichy-sous-Bois where two of the youth were electrocuted to death and a third was very seriously injured.

This incident acted as a spark igniting a veritable tinder box of social tensions that have been building up over many years through the neo-liberal policies of successive Left and Right governments.

[...]

One of the most common manifestations of the confrontations with police has been the burning of cars. In the nights of the previous week, Wednesday saw 150 cars burnt; Thursday: 500 with 80 arrests; Friday 900 cars with more than 200 arrests.

However, last Saturday night, nearly 1,300 cars went up in flames, not to mention numerous public buildings and commercial centers, while police arrested more than 260 youth.

The French press is now reporting incidents in virtually every area of the country.

[...]

As with the recent riots in Birmingham, England, and Århus, Denmark, and a year ago in Amsterdam, Holland, there has been a systematic campaign both in the French and foreign press to portray the spontaneous outbursts of these oppressed sections of youth as being exclusively a question of immigrants. References to black and Arab youth often with hints of links to terrorist organisations like Al Qaeda have abounded. However, youth of Arab, African and Caribbean origin in France are mainly second- or more likely third-generation immigrants and for all intents and purposes are French.

Furthermore, none of the press refers to the fact that the groups of youth in revolt also comprise not only Arab and black youth but also many poor white youth who share the same oppressed conditions of unemployment and police repression. It is not the youth that are racist, but French employers and the French state that systematically discriminate against Arab and black youth as well as against white youth living in the same depressed suburbs.

That the current revolt takes the backward form of burning and smashing cars and property in these youths’ own neighborhoods expresses the deep frustration and lack of perspective among these most vulnerable layers of the working class.

The Socialist Party (PS) and the French Communist Party (PCF) bear the principal responsibility for the complete alienation of these layers of the youth from society. Not only did past “Governments of the Left” introduce the neo-liberal policies now being continued and intensified by the present government of Prime Minister Dominique de Villepin and his deputy Nicolas Sarkozy, but, as the elected municipal officials in these suburbs, they have overseen the destruction of all the social services in these towns, leaving entire sections of workers and youth to their fate.

There are serious indications that the revolt of the youth in Clichy-sous-Bois was largely aggravated and provoked by the brutal intervention of the paramilitary CRS (Republican Security Companies), gendarmes and police two nights after the deaths of the two youths, Zyad Benna and Bouna Traore (see “Eyewitness to Paris riots charges police with deliberate provocation”).

Sarkozy, the interior minister and head of the police, has spent the last years beefing up police repression and has made a series of provocative visits to poor and oppressed quarters, engaging in hostile confrontations with youth in front of television cameras. Sarkozy has thus openly embraced the politics of anti-immigrant demagogy in an attempt to steal votes and members for his Union for a Popular Movement (UMP) party away from Jean-Marie Le Pen’s fascist National Front (FN) and Philippe De Villier’s extreme right-wing Movement for France (MPF).

Sarkozy initially came under attack from the Socialist Party and even members of his own party for having provoked the revolt of the youth by his law-and-order campaign of repression. However, as the full extent of the growing revolt has become apparent, there has been a closing of ranks not only within his own party—notably including Sarkozy’s arch-rival Prime Minister de Villepin and President Jacques Chirac—but also on the part of the Socialist Party.

[...]


In the course of last week, the French press cited both UMP and opposition politicians who distanced themselves somewhat from Sarkozy and emphasised that in addition to police interventions, some attention must be paid to the social roots of these riots. Now, only 11 days after the death of the two youth in Clichy-sous-Bois, such sentiments have largely vanished, and the government, with the support of the opposition, is preparing full-scale repression of the riots.

 

[Raphas]

See you guys probably don't know but youngsters been waitin for something like this to happen in France. Bad events in these areas are very often reported. Just a week before the riots in broad daylight a man was beaten down to death in front of his wife and daughter while he was taking pictures in Epinay.
The ghetto mentality in France is not very visible if you go to the center of the capital, but some of these kids been fuckin around for years I'm tellin you. And if their ghettos make it the news, they feel proud.
They respect nobody basically. Not parents not cops. Cops usually patrollin these neighborhoods ain't just your average cops they are the BAC, crime repression police, and best believe they talk serious shit and put serious action.
Situation got worst and worst and at one point all Paris needed was a firestarter