Giving French Minorities a Reason to Trust

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ED GORDON, host:

Pockets of vandalism and arson continued to flare up on the 14th continuous night of civil unrest in France. Riots across the country have put a spotlight on immigrant groups who feel alienated from French society. Though the violence has dissipated since authorities declared a state of emergency, commentator Siddhartha Mitter says such extraordinary measures may end up adding fuel to the fire of discontent.

SIDDHARTHA MITTER:

By declaring a state of emergency, French officials may have quelled the violence and arson that spread for two weeks across poor immigrant-heavy suburbs of Paris and other cities. Authorities had imposed curfews in some towns, and police have been given expanded powers of search and arrest. The nighttime destruction may now be subsiding. That will be good news for residents who were seeing their cars, buses, stores, schools, even day-care centers destroyed by their own youth. This has been nihilistic violence borne of frustration. It began in the town of Clichy-sous-Bois when two teen-agers, who may or may not have been running from police, took shelter in a power shed and died from electrocution. The rioting that followed was quickly echoed in Cite(ph) housing projects elsewhere.

The government seemed paralyzed. After Interior Minister Nicolas Sarcozy, who runs the police, called the rioters `scum who should be vacuum-cleaned,' the prime minister, Dominique de Villepin, who is Sarcozy's political rival, left him to twist in the wind, rather than rush to mend the damage. President Chirac remained silent for 11 days. To make things worse, the emergency law now in effect is one that was passed and first used during the Algerian war in the 1950s. You couldn't come up with a better way to express fear and contempt of ghetto youth, many of whom have roots in Algeria and other former French colonies. Why this lack of understanding? Chronic unemployment, overcrowded housing blocks, decades of insufficient attention to the political empowerment of immigrants and people of color are all part of the problem.

Located outside city centers, the ghettos have been easy to ignore. They have seen the rise of a youth identity made of hustle, defiance and despair and set to a hip-hop beat. Let's be clear. This unrest is not about Islam. The American media has been using the shorthand of `Muslim rioters.' Many black and North African immigrants come from Muslim cultures, but many others do not. And imams and worshipers have joined other responsible adults in setting up neighborhood watches and trying to mediate between the youth and police. Had there been a movement behind the unrest, an ideology, a set of demands, perhaps France would have done better addressing it. French political culture is intellectual in nature and handles argument well. But there is no movement here, just the self-destructive expression of pent-up frustration and anger, raw discontent still in search of a purpose. The emergency powers, which are to stay in effect till November 20th, may well end this wave of violence, but giving France's working-class youth of color a reason to trust the system has only grown harder.

GORDON: Siddhartha Mitter is a Boston-based independent writer on politics and culture.

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