It's Hard Not to Cheer on the Rioters

[Moses]

It's hard not to cheer on the rioters

La Haine, Mathieu Kassovitz's critically acclaimed 1995 film, detailed the aftermath of a riot on an impoverished Paris housing project. Kassovitz put this statement about this week's riots - and the reaction of France's minister of the interior - on his website yesterday

Thursday November 10, 2005
The Guardian


'Hate kindles hate' ... Vincent Cassel in 1995's La Haine
 
As much as I would like to distance myself from politics, it is difficult to remain distant in the face of the depravations of politicians. And when these depravations draw the hate of all youth, I have to restrain myself from encouraging the rioters.

Nicolas Sarkozy, who has appeared in the media like a starlet from American Idol and who for the past years has been showering us with details of his private life and political ambitions, cannot prevent himself from creating an event every time his ratings go down. This time, Sarkozy [who last week described the rioters as "scum"] has gone against everything the French republic stands for: the liberty, the equality and the fraternity of a people.



The minister of the interior, a future presidential candidate, holds ideas that not only reveal his inexperience of politics and human relations, but which also illuminate the purely demagogical and egocentric aspects of a puny, would-be Napoleon.

If the suburbs are exploding once again today, it is not due to being generally fed up with the conditions of life that entire generations of "immigrants" must fight with every day. These burning cars are [in direct response to] the lack of respect the minister of the interior has shown towards their community.

Sarkozy does not like this community. He wants to get rid of these "punks" with high-pressure water hoses and he shouts it out loud and clear right in the middle of a "hot" neighbourhood at 11 in the evening.

The response is in the streets. "Zero tolerance" works both ways. It is intolerable that a politician should allow himself to upset a situation made tense by years of ignorance and injustice, and openly threaten an entire segment of the French population.

By acting like a warmonger, he has opened a breach that I hope will engulf him. Hate has kindled hate for centuries and yet Sarkozy still thinks that repression is the only way to prevent rebellion. History has proved to us that a lack of openness and philosophy between different communities engenders hate and confrontation. Sound and fury are the only means for many communities to make themselves heard.

Sarkozy wants to become the president of our republic and nobody will get in his way, as he dramatically puts it. If this man does not fail at least once in his initiatives to win the presidency of this country, nothing indeed will get in his way, and his desire for absolute power will finally be fulfilled.

Does history repeat itself? Yes. It always has done. A desire for power and the egocentricity of those who think they hold the truth has always created dictators. Sarkozy is certainly a little Napoleon, and I do not know if he has the potential of a real one, but it will be impossible to say tomorrow that we didn't know.

· This is an edited version of Kassovitz's statement.

· See www.mathieukassovitz.com

[Moses]

Sun, Nov. 13, 2005

The Roots of Rage
In France, these despairing young men know they are pariahs. Now they are fighting back.
TOM HUNDLEY
Chicago Tribune

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, not a delinquent, and if the interior minister considers all young men in the neighborhood to be racaille, I can understand the anger," said Michel Wierviorka, a sociologist who has written a book on political violence.

Police officers, 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 dreary 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 (pronounced see-tays), but most of these have left. In recent years, large numbers of black African immigrants have moved in.

Bondy is fairly typical of these communities. Its 48,000 inhabitants 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 here 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: Liberté, égalité, fraternité.

It means that all French citizens are considered equally French. There are no distinctions for race, religion or ethnicity.

"The problem is that the institutions in charge of this idea don't translate it into reality," said Wierviorka, the sociologist. "The republic has promised a lot, but it has given them nothing."

Like the worst urban school systems in the United States, 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."

Dimly lit communal stairwells in the housing projects 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 every day. 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 such encounters with the police.

"Always, they approach you from a position of superiority. They are the accusers; we are the guilty."

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 Oct. 27 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 allow local authorities to impose curfews, but the unrest continued.

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.

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 last week Prime Minister 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 the government spent much of the last three years eliminating. But many think the solution will have to go deeper.

"Liberté, égalité, fraternité" 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."

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.

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.
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