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EYE ON EUROPE |
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 Paris firemen try to control a blazing car fire during rioting there this month. |
Chirac’s France searches
for a way out of crisis
By MICHAEL JOHNSON
of TheColumnists.com
When I moved to sleepy, out-of-the-way Bordeaux a few weeks ago I sensed something ugly beneath the surface of this elegant city. The center is shamelessly wealthy and bourgeois but some poorer neighborhoods on the periphery are plastered with the most outlandish grafitti I have seen anywhere in the world. Not just an occasional hooligan’s monogram but layers and layers of angry spray-paint, in ever brighter colors and ever bigger letters. Schools and police stations seem to be the main targets but any plain surface will do.
Some of the local communities have created brigades of grafitti-cleaners. Just call city hall and they will scrub it off or paint over it.
These government-organized cleaners serve as a useful metaphor for the painting over of the underside of French society, the young people who are currently sowing panic among the middle class in France by fire-bombing parked cars. It is not civil war but it is deadly serious.
This country likes to think of itself as color-blind, meaning official tolerance of racial and cultural varieties in a more humanistic and more effective way than in other countries such as the United States. In reality what France has tried to do is ignore the minorities, pretending that they are all French, with their rights and duties toward the nation.
The resulting isolation has created a climate of hidden discrimination without recourse for those who are excluded. The concept of minority interest groups has not taken root here. In effect, the false absorption policy has diluted their voice to a whisper, leaving violent protest as their only option.
The French are stunned and outraged. One far-right political party distributes leaflets and posters saying “France: Love it or leave it.”
We now witness the worst eruption of frustration and violence since the 1968 student riots that brought France to a standstill for three weeks. France is not at a standstill yet this time but the nightly torching of cars, schools and some Christian churches is in its third week and police have counted more than 2,000 cars destroyed.
Early in this cycle of unrest, two Muslim boys were accidentally electrocuted when they hid from police in an electrical substation, triggering more resentment among the disenfranchised. One immigrant from Mali predicted to journalists that the rioting will continue “until two policemen are dead”.
Most of the rioters are the descendants of immigrants from North Africa and black Africa. Many are mere boys in their early teens and their dominant ideology is radical Islam. These people are huddled in low-income housing and forced to do the jobs the French won’t touch--street sweeping, garbage collection and other menial tasks at or below the minimum wage. And these are the lucky ones. Unemployment and poverty leave thousands of them without hope of working their way into a better life.
To be sure, France has a proud culture of street demonstrations as a political way forward and the French are accustomed to it. Paris is paralyzed frequently my marching doctors, civil servants, the unemployed, and now even the middle class protesting the protesters. I once had to duck into a fine restaurant to escape the choking teargas wafting across Paris. I still recall the wonderful asparagus soufflé I slurped as labor unions scuffled outside with police. The street was littered with teargas canisters when I emerged a couple of hours later.
French political leaders have been slow off the mark to deal with the issues, perhaps because there is a growing awareness that a tougher clampdown by the army, for example, would solve nothing. Only after 12 nights of rising violence did Prime Minister Dominique de Villepin take to the evening television news to declare in haughty tones that these events were “unacceptable, inadmissible”. It seemed a very tame lecture considering the explosive situation. His words were ignored as more violence spread.
At the highest level, the reasonable, cerebral Villepin competes with his tough-talking Interior Minister Nicolas Sarkozy for influence over the course of events. Both stand to gain or lose important personal ground from the crisis as both are viewed as candidates to succeed Jacques Chirac in the 2007 presidential elections.
While Villepin wags his finger, Sarkozy
snarls that we are dealing with “riffraff and scum”,
and brute force is the solution. His raw approach is the more
popular among the people. The man who emerges as the one capable
of restoring order is likely to win support for the future presidency.
Europeans in neighboring countries are wondering whether the
French troubles are a taste of what awaits them as their own
impoverished minorities from Africa take the cue and begin to
assert themselves. Belgium and Holland are already seeing smaller
degrees of violence.
On a larger theme, the French experience is a lesson in the ultimate consequence of colonialism. France has proven itself unable to absorb populations that are desperately seeking a place in the developed world but finding barriers to entry in the countries that once ruled them. They can live here but they cannot take part in real life.
And finally, on an even larger theme, is
this the result of the movement of peoples from south to north
as predicted by commentators for the past 20 years? Life at home
has become hopeless for millions of them. They seem to be saying
life in the north is worth a try. At least their frustrations
are finally being taken seriously.
©2005 by Michael Johnson. The illustration is an artist's
impression of a picture from a TV news report. This column was
first posted Nov. 14, 2005.
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