Tilted Forum Project Discussion Community - View Single Post

roachboy · 11-07-2005, 03:34 PM

here are a few of the many articles out there that link the riots to the longer-term problems created by french urban policy, which i was talking about in the previous post. i dont see how you can even start to get a coherent view of these riots without taking this into account:

Quote:

In Paris suburbs, anger won't cool
By Katrin Bennhold International Herald Tribune

FRIDAY, NOVEMBER 4, 2005

CLICHY-SOUS-BOIS, France Talk to people outside the Bilal mosque in this rundown suburb north of Paris and they will tell you what has gone wrong: why rioters for the past week have confronted the police in overnight bursts of anger in the streets, torching cars, hurling rocks and even firing bullets in the worst civil disobedience in France in more than a decade.

Beyond the poverty and despair of life in the shoddy immigrant communities ringing the shining French capital, local Muslims say, there is no one left with any sway over the rioting youths. Parents, the police and the government have all lost touch, they say.

On Thursday, after rioters disregarded an appeal for calm by President Jacques Chirac, firing bullets at the police for the first time as the rioting spread for a seventh consecutive night, the government held emergency meetings throughout the day. But despite Prime Minister Dominique de Villepin's vow that "law and order will have the last word," the police were bracing for more violence as night fell.

In Clichy-sous-Bois on Thursday afternoon, outside the entrance of the Bilal mosque - a converted warehouse where a tear-gas grenade landed on Sunday, stoking fury against the police - celebrations of the end of the monthlong Ramadan fast were overshadowed by the widening disturbances.

Opinions about the riots among people gathered at the mosque differed, but everyone from the deputy imam to local council workers and men leaving the midday prayer agreed that the trouble has been compounded by a vacuum of moral authority.

"If you want authority over these kids you need their respect - but all the normal channels of authority lost their respect a long time ago," said Ali Aouad, 42, who has lived in this northeastern town for two decades. "They feel neglected by the government, and the police just provoke them."

Even the government's minister of equal opportunity, Azouz Begag, who himself grew up in an immigrant household outside Lyon, carries no authority here, residents said.

"Where has he been? He is representative of nothing and nobody," said a young man of Algerian descent, who identified himself only as H2B. "He has done nothing for us and now he is trying to compensate by criticizing Sarkozy," the French interior minister, "but it's too late."

The crisis has penetrated the top level of the French government, where Nicolas Sarkozy and Villepin, the two most senior ministers, are sparring over how to deal with the violence and have both come under fire for failing to bring the violence under control.

The trouble erupted in Clichy-sous-Bois on Oct. 27 after two teenagers, apparently thinking they were being pursued by the police, fled and were electrocuted when they hid in an electrical transformer. The disturbances have since spread to at least 20 neighboring towns.

In the early hours of Thursday, rioters torched 315 cars, burned a car dealership and a local supermarket, and attacked two commuter trains, the police said. Nine people were wounded.

But as appeals for calm by the government fell on deaf ears and a heavy police presence across the northern suburbs only appeared to provoke more violence, a number of local organizations seem to have quietly taken on the task of cooling tempers.

Abderamane Bouhout, president of the cultural organization that manages Bilal mosque, mobilized small groups of young believers during recent rioting to go between the rioters and the police and urge the disaffected youths to express their anger in nonviolent ways.

Aouad, who witnessed one such intervention on Monday night not far from the mosque, said it was impressively effective. "It worked," he said. "They went right between the two sides and a lot of the kids listened to them. The damage the next day was a lot less serious than the previous nights."

At the local city hall, Lamya Monkachi says the role of religious personalities along with that of young locals recruited from the suburbs to mediate for the city authorities has been key to reducing the violence in Clichy-sous-Bois in the past two days, even as it intensified in other suburbs. "What helped us here in Clichy to calm nerves was that we work a lot with people who know the local youths and speak their language," she said.

There are eight Muslim organizations in Clichy alone that have been mobilized to participate in starting a dialogue with the rioters. In addition, a group of youths, working closely with city hall, have formed an association in response to the riots last week called Beyond Words. Their representatives - young North African men dressed in white T-shirts with the names of the two dead teenagers printed on the back and the words "Dead for Nothing" on the front - have campaigned for peaceful dialogue.

But, says Marilou Jampolsky of SOS Racisme, a non-governmental organization fighting discrimination, the current government has made such informal mediation efforts more difficult by cutting back public funding for them.

"The number of neighborhood organizations that organize sports, help with school work and just generally check up on these kids has significantly declined since this government came to power" in 2002, she said. SOS Racisme, which also has local branches in suburbs, has lost half its money, she said.

One of the most prominent young mediators is Samir Mihi, 28, who has become an informal spokesman for the various groups that have stepped in to calm the violence and mediated between the rioters and the government.

According to Mihi, who grew up in Clichy, the key ingredient for restoring peace in this and other suburbs is to build relationships with the local youths and give them the feeling that their concerns are being heard.

"If they listen to us it is because we give them what they most want: respect," said Mihi, who organizes sports activities for teenagers at city hall. "If you respect them, they respect you."

One reason politicians fail to make themselves heard in the suburbs is that successive governments have failed to tackle disproportionately high unemployment and crime rates in the suburban housing projects, leaving youth with few opportunities. That feeling of exclusion is exacerbated by a lack of political representatives of North African origin and other role models, Mihi said.

The lack of moral authority is perhaps most flagrant with the police, locals said, because the interaction between officers and residents is often reduced to frequent and random identity checks that are perceived to be humiliating in the mainly North African communities in the suburbs.

At the local market, Muhammad, 24, who declined to give his last name, said such checks sometimes happen even outside his own apartment. He recounted how the police stopped him as he was walking home the night before.

"They grabbed me and touched my hood to see if it was hot or sweaty," he said, describing what he called a regular practice. "If you're caught with a sweaty hood, it means you've been running and that you have probably committed a crime."

Meanwhile, the parents of the teenagers in question lack authority because poverty has often made family life more difficult, says Jampolsky. Neither do they share the quest for identity so prevalent among the younger generation.

source: http://www.iht.com/articles/2005/11/...ess/france.php

Quote:

France's city policy in tatters
By Henri Astier
BBC News website

As rioting by disaffected youths has spread across France, officials have been accused of long-term neglect of the country's impoverished suburbs.

But over the past three decades, French governments of all colours have implemented an array of initiatives aimed at tackling widely documented problems.

The first plan for the suburbs, focusing on better housing, was launched in 1977.

After rioting near Lyon in 1981, the new Socialist government pioneered a large-scale "policy for the city" aimed at ending social exclusion.

In the 1980s, hundreds of billions of francs were spent on regenerating housing estates, as well as extra funding for schools and youth associations in the suburbs.

The next decade saw no let-up in government activity. In 1996, tax-free zones were set up, providing incentives for companies to create jobs in the suburbs.

Last year, Social Affairs Minister Jean-Louis Borloo initiated a Plan for Social Cohesion aimed at tackling unemployment, discrimination and housing problems.

What went wrong?

The problem, it seems, is not one of neglect - but one of ineffectual action.

We have the same inequalities as in the mid-1980s
Sebastian Roche
Sociologist

According to many French analysts, the worst wave of urban violence for many decades is a damning indictment of government initiatives.

"If you do not accept that these policies have failed, what would it take to recognise failure?" sociologist Sebastian Roche said in an interview with the BBC News website.

The law and order situation in the suburbs, he says, is much worse than it was two decades ago - even when there is no rioting.

Neither has the economic plight of local youths improved: "We have the same inequalities as in the mid-1980s."

As Mr Roche sees it, one reason for the failure is that urban policies have focused too much on "urban regeneration".

In the late 1990s, for instance, the then Socialist-led government launched initiatives like 50 Great City Projects and 30 Urban Renewal Operations.

Since 2002, the centre-right government has continued with this approach, demolishing high-rise blocks with gusto and investing heavily in new buildings.

The bricks-and-mortar approach is all very well, Mr Roche says, but the underlying causes of the crisis, such as bad schools, have not seriously been dealt with.

Patronage

Another problem, he says, is that the money has been not been focused on the worst areas.

GOVERNMENT ACTIVITY
1977: First plan for the suburbs
1981: "Policy for the city" initiated
1988: National Council for Cities, Inter-ministerial Commission for Cities of Urban Social Development set up
1989: High Council for Integration set up
1990: "Ministry for the City" created
1996: Tax-free zones in the suburbs
2004: Plan for Social Cohesion

Instead, it has been spread too thinly and used for patronage purposes.

"What typically happens is that mayors of big cities go to the minister and ask: 'What about me?'" Mr Roche says.

Francis Goddard, a professor at the University of Marne-La-Vallee, argues that that the current centre-right government has made problems worse by putting a halt to the neighbourhood policing launched by the previous administration.

"They have neglected grass-roots work," he told the BBC News website.

Mr Roche agrees, saying that trust between residents in the suburbs and the authorities has broken down as a result.

"French police are too remote," he says. "People in poor suburbs fear them."

But some analysts argue that the problems faced by the suburbs are so severe that it is unfair to criticise France's long-standing "policy for the city".

"If we had not had this policy in place, maybe the riots would have happened 15 years ago," says Fabien Jobard, a sociologist with the National Council for Scientific Research (CNRS).

Structural problems

Furthermore, the crisis of the suburbs may reflect structural problems in France rather than misguided action by any individual government.

Mr Roche points out that to improve education, you must allow local schools to choose their teachers and set higher wages.

But this is unthinkable in the country's heavily centralised education system.

France is also characterised by a high degree of social protection and many labour-market rigidities.

This helps those already in work but prevents the creation of low-skill, entry-level jobs.

The result is 25% unemployment among the young - and zero job prospects for the poorly-educated youths of the ghetto

source: http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/europe/4415018.stm

unlike the above, which tries to outline a complex analysis, it seem that far right coverage prefers the reinforcement of racism amongst its readership to anything even beginning to approach a coherent description. if such "coverage" is your thing, then fine, but dont pretend that there is anything going on in it beyond the reinforcement of a racist disposition.