generalspeaking

 Suburbs of the Republic

"It felt like we were in a Western.  There was shooting all over ... the smell of burning rubber everywhere.  I went out when I heard people driving up to the farm at about midnight.  I thought they were local folk, but then I saw they had masks covering their faces ... they threw iron bars at the windows, which exploded."  Local village farmer, Amiens

 One of the issues that Nicolas Sarkozy campaigned on when he won the French election as president was a vow to ensure that the outbursts of violence that emanated with some regularity from the banlieues in Paris and elsewhere around the country where immigrants live in congested, squalid housing compounds where law and order is scarcely to be seen because gendarmes fear to tread there, would be tamped down.

It was a matter of pride for President Sarkozy that during his lively and tempestuous term in office there were no repeats of violent riots with Muslim youth running roughshod over authority figures, and treating areas of Paris to the spectacle of night after night of torched vehicles as an indelible symbol of their dissatisfaction.  He also stated that he would ensure that the conditions that led to this dysfunction would change for the better.

Rioters representing youth whose origins are largely Muslim: Algerians, Tunisians, Moroccans, Gabonese, Malians and Cameroonians, representing in large part the era of French colonialism, and whose present-day failed prospects in France of being met with equality and fraternity resulting in a 40% unemployment rate, and ongoing racism, have struck again, this time in Amiens.

Gangs of severely disaffected youth wrought destruction in a rampage of rage at the truncated reality of their lives and their future prospects.  A school and a sport centre were razed, along with a police station.  It's estimated there were about 100 rioters, with 150 police attempting to bring order.  The rioters burned garbage cans, along with dozens of cars.  They injured motorists from whom they stole vehicles.

"There have been regular incidents here but it has been years since we've known a night as violent as this with so much damage done.  The cost of repairing would run into millions."  Gilles Demailly, Amiens mayor, describing a "scene of desolation" in the northern quarter of his city.
"We found 12-millimetre cartridges, so they certainly used live bullets" reported one of the Synergie Officiers police union.  A day earlier a man was arrested for dangerous driving, and that was what provoked the riots.  Residents of the Amiens-Nord suburb were enraged by this occurring at the same time they were attending a wake for a 20-year-old local who died in a motorcycle accident.

Trying squaring that.  President Francois Hollande now has a taste of what results from the marginalization of immigrant youth living in rundown suburbs, chafing under a sense of racial discrimination, bubbling up into violence.  "France's future depends on its ability to reintegrate the suburbs into the national project" explained a political scientist, specializing in the Muslim world.

Gilles Kepel's report, Suburbs of the Republic, set out the reality that Islamic institutions and practices were steadily encroaching and displacing those of the French state.  The French state which has managed to produce failure to deliver on its promise of "equality", resulting in residents who do not view themselves as French.

Labels: France, Heritage, Human Fallibility, Human Relations, Immigration

posted by Pieface @ Wednesday, August 15, 2012