Europe Features
Ghetto rioting, France's recurring nightmare
By DPA
Nov 27, 2007, 12:10 GMT

Villiers-le-Bel, France - The elderly man was clearly afraid, looking anxiously over his shoulder and down the street despite the presence of about a dozen police cars and dozens of riot police officers.

It was early evening and he was heading home, a baguette under his arm, along with many other equally nervous residents of the Paris suburb of Villiers-le-Bel.

'This is a war,' he warned, 'and it's going to last a long time. It's always the same scum doing it.'

The 'scum' to which the man referred, using the same term employed by President Nicolas Sarkozy two years ago, are the minority youths who have rioted for two consecutive nights in at least six suburbs north of Paris.

The rioting, in which more than 100 police officers have been injured, some 100 vehicles set on fire and a dozen buildings torched or otherwise damaged, was sparked by the deaths on Sunday of two minority teenagers killed when the off-road motorcycle on which they were riding was struck by a police car in Villiers-le-Bel.

To the people in this city north of the French capital and many other inhabitants of French urban suburbs, the scenario is becoming a recurring nightmare.

Almost exactly two years ago, minority youths living in poor suburban ghettoes throughout France rioted for three weeks after two teenagers were electrocuted while hiding from police in another Paris suburb.

That violence touched more than 300 communities, and nearly 10,000 cars and several hundred buildings were set on fire. It ended after the government under Sarkozy's predecessor, Jacques Chirac, imposed a state of emergency.

The riots of 2005 were followed by a spate of promises by politicians, and by debates and publications about what caused the violence and what must be done to prevent it in the future. For months, the plight of the poor minority youths living in France's suburban ghettoes was everyone's concern.

Sarkozy, then interior minister and already thinking of the presidency, called for a programme of affirmative action - that is, giving preference to disadvantaged minority youths in education and employment.

Such a programme, Sarkozy said, would 'create a hierarchy of priorities' and funnel more aid to poor neighbourhoods and families.

'And if by this we will touch many children or grandchildren of immigrants, that is only normal,' he said.

Two years on, and the 'children and grandchildren of immigrants' are in the streets again, attacking police with paving stones, Molotov cocktails and, in one case, a high-calibre rifle.

In fact, nothing has changed, despite the promises of millions of euros of aid to the dead-end neighbourhoods where the unemployment rate is three to five times that of the national average, and even higher among the young.

During his campaign for the presidency, Sarkozy made only one visit to a poor suburb, and that was under heavy guard by some three dozen riot police. And, because it is very unpopular with the French, he stopped talking about affirmative action.

But he was not the only one to have forgotten the ghettoes of France. The country seems to have erased the nightly scenes of burning automobiles and stone-throwing hooded youths from its collective memory: the books vanished from the bookstore shelves, the sociologists disappeared from TV talk shows and the French people resumed looking after their own concerns: purchasing power, job security.

'With the extinction of the flames, a veil appeared to descend over our cities and, two years later, not only have things not changed, but they have got worse,' the mayors of three suburbs touched by the rioting wrote in a stirring opinion piece published Tuesday in the daily Le Monde.

'The time for diagnosis, analysis and compassion is over,' they wrote. 'It is time to act, and act quickly.'

Perhaps the new violence will refocus Sarkozy's attentions on France's ghettoes.

When the riots broke out Sunday, he was in China, where he harvested business deals worth some 30 billion euros (44.6 billion dollars).

That is good for French business, and is certainly good for Sarkozy, but it will do little to appease the country's disadvantaged minorities.

And Sarkozy's foreign policy triumph will be short-lived if he returns to a country that is again in flames.