Is Paris burning?
This write-up is not about 'Is Paris burning?' - the best-selling book by Larry Collins and Dominique Lapierre - but riots that had put the north Paris suburbs burning for two consecutive nights after the deaths of two Muslim immigrant youth, Moushin and Larimi, aged 15 and 16, in the north Paris suburb town of Villiers-le-Bel around 5 p.m. on Sunday, November 25. The youths were riding on a motorbike that was hit by a police car and were left for dead. Residents of these suburban towns live in ghettos, which were built in the 1950s in imitation of Soviet social housing of Stalin era. People live in crammed conditions, sometimes several generations in a tiny apartment. Insults, criticism of Islamic practices, arbitrary arrests, and violence by police against immigrant youth and anyone who looks foreign are common in France. Le Nouvel Observateur, in its November 26 article on the subject, also posted a video of Sarkozy criticizing Islamic practices, such as the slaughter of sheep during the festival of Eid. Sarkozy roughly comments: "One does not slaughter a sheep in one's bathtub." The riots were sparked by the deaths of two teenagers in Villiers-le-Bel, in a collision between their motorbike and a police car. According to testimony of residents, the policemen fled the scene, leaving the two youngsters to die. The General Inspectorate of the National Police (IGPN) issued a report largely clearing the police of responsibility, but the report itself was found to be in contradiction with a video of the accident and the accounts given by Villiers-le-Bel's inhabitants. Rioters set ablaze at least 60 cars, as well as a police station, library and car dealership in Villiers-le-Bel, police said. The clashes had spread across six towns by Monday night, they said. The accident and the ensuing violence revived memories of the deadly wave of riots in 2005 following the deaths of Bouna, 15, and Zayed, 17, of Muslim background who were electrocuted while fleeing from the police in the suburb of Clichy-sous-Bois. There are some 4.5 million immigrants in France, according to estimates in mid-2006, with up to an additional half-million illegal migrants. There is no official number of people of Arab or African origin in France as laws ban census based on ethnic or religious grounds. The 15 and 16-year-old boys killed in the Sunday evening wreck were both sons of African immigrants, police said. They died when their motorbike hit a patrol car in the town of Villiers-le-Bel, police said. The angry protesters have thronged the crash site, demanding the "truth" about the accident. "The truth should emerge or we will take the law in our own hands," some of them warned the police. Omar Sehhouli, the brother of one of the two victims, accused the police of ramming the motorbike and of failing to assist the injured teenagers. "This is a failure to assist a person in danger... it is a 100-percent (police) blunder. They know it, and that's why they did not stay at the scene," he told France Info radio. Sehhouli told AFP the rioting "was not violence but an expression of rage," saying he wanted the police officers "responsible" for the accident to be brought to justice. The basic details of the collision are not in dispute. According to the daily Le Monde, "the motorbike skidded for over twenty meters," while "the police car's front was smashed and the bumpers torn off; the windshield caved in deeply." The policemen promptly fled the scene on foot. Marie-Thérère Givry, the Pontoise district prosecutor, said that the policemen left the area and did not begin investigations until that night because of "the danger that their presence in that area would have posed." She did not explain her comment further, but it is clear that they feared being caught by enraged inhabitants. Belgium's RTL television interviewed one inhabitant who said: "A lady [...] came down to help them, she's a nurse. She gave them first aid. When the neighborhood kids arrived, she said, 'It's over, they're dead.' She was all alone, the cops were gone." There are substantial suspicions that the incident was deliberate. According to reporters for the daily Libération, "Media use of the term 'involuntary homicide' was particularly infuriating [to residents of the area], many of whom are convinced that the collision was deliberately provoked by the police squad." Libération added: "There was apparently tension between one of the victims and police. Larami's father affirmed today to other inhabitants that a policeman had threatened his son last week. He described a verbal exchange with a policeman who told his son that 'You'll have to deal with us.'" Several media outlets, including Libération and Le Nouvel Observateur, have recently carried articles paraphrasing apparently vulgar anti-Muslim rants by Sarkozy in diplomatic negotiations with other European heads of state. Libération journalist Jean Quatremer wrote on November 19 that Nicolas Sarkozy "gave a real anti-Muslim diatribe before his guests. According to my sources, the head of state [i.e. Sarkozy] launched into a confused, twenty-minute speech [...] against the overly large number of Muslims present in Europe." He mentioned that Sarkozy repeatedly spoke of a "clash of civilizations" between Islam and Europe. Opposition politicians wasted no time in blaming the government of President Nicolas Sarkozy for the renewed rioting. Sarkozy, when serving as interior minister during that wave of unrest, provoked controversy by referring to the rioters as "scum" -- language that served only to inflame the vandalism. The use of language reminiscent of French colonialism's struggle against the masses of Algiers in the 1950s is no accident. The policy of forming large-scale police authorities capable of rapidly mobilizing large numbers of cops for police raids in poor neighborhoodsa policy championed by Sarkozy as Interior Minister in 2003has helped transform the relations between inhabitants and police into a constant, low-level war that erupts every time the police kills someone, unintentionally or otherwise. Every time a major mass struggle has been called off in recent yearse.g. in 2003 against then-Prime Minister Jean-Pierre Raffarin's pension cuts and in 2006 against Dominique de Villepin's First Job Contract reformsthe government has sought to appeal to racist or religious prejudices against Muslims and immigrants, who make up a large portion of the population in poorer suburbs. In 2003, Raffarin prepared a bill that banned Islamic headscarves in French public buildings. In 2006, the Villepin government passed a tough anti-immigrant bill shortly after the end of the First Job Contract demonstrations. The eruptions are the product of desperate poverty, mass unemployment and a vicious, openly racist law-and-order campaign. A recent UN report warned that France's ethnic minorities were trapped in social and economic "ghettos" because of an "insidious racism" tolerated by French politicians. The author is a columnist and researcher.
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