THE riots and burning of cars, schools and churches in the
impoverished sections of Paris and neighboring French cities have
become a nightmare for the French government.
After France’s twelfth night of urban violence, President Jacques Chirac on Tuesday called an
emergency Cabinet meeting to give regional authorities the power to
impose curfews and keep the destructive youth indoors.
The French do not take their liberties lightly.
Chirac had to invoke a 1955 law drafted to control violent marches
and demonstrations that the Algerians, who were demanding
independence from France, were holding on the streets of Paris and
in Algiers itself.
Analysts say France not had destruction of this
scale in Paris since the Commune disturbances in the 18th century
and in the left-wing strikes and marches in the fifties.
On Monday night alone, there were 330 arrests
and 1,173 vehicles burned. Twelve police officers were injured in
clashes.
How did it all begin? The more simplistic
explanation is to blame Interior Minister Nicolas Sarkozy who, on
October 19, declared “a war without mercy” on violence in the
Paris suburbs. His hard-line posture has made him a
hate-figure to angry impoverished youth.
On October 25, while visiting the Paris suburb
of Argenteuil, Sarkozy called the rebellious young people
“rabble” after they pelted him with stones and bottles.
Young men tell news reporters that they get so incensed when they
see his face on TV that they want to break the screen.
What united and mobilized the hopeless Muslim
youth was an incident that happened two days later, on October 27,
in the district of Clichy-sous-Bois. There, the police were
doing the usually humiliating identity check in the trouble-prone
districts on teenagers and suspicious persons. Two teenage
boys—one of Malian, the other of Tunisian, descent—fled from the
police and hid in an electric-power substation where they died of
electrocution. Right after that, Sarkozy’s “rabble”
became arsonists and insurgents.
But Sarkozy’s Javertian posture (Inspector
Javert is the tragic figure of the unflinching and, consequently,
un-Christian, law and order man in Victor Hugo’s Les Miserables)
cannot possibly be the only wellspring of all this hatred among
thousands of French youths.
The youthful fury is the same that inflamed
young African Americans to rise in rebellion in Watts. For
these young people—in the melodiously sounding places in the
impoverished northern, eastern and western suburbs of Paris and of
the other cities of France—are as drained of the joy of living, as
bereft of hope for a better tomorrow as many young blacks were in
Watts and are today in many of the USA’s inner cities.
Many of these French rebels setting fire to
cars, flower shops, schools and churches are alienated French
citizens. In the words of a young rebel, they “have the
wrong skin color, the wrong religion” so they have no jobs and no
future. They were born in France of parents who were
immigrants from former French colonies in Africa. Their only
joy is to copy the rebellious rapping and singing styles of
Americans blacks. Their impulse is to form gangs and to outdo
other gangs in destructiveness.
While street gangs in France—as everywhere
else in the world—are usually enemies, this time they have united
purely by instinct and intention. And the intention is to spit
at the face of the White establishment and perhaps even break its
neck.
We hope the French government finds the correct
formula to calm down the rebellious mainly Muslim youth. One
way is to give them jobs and education and full access to the
opportunities enjoyed by other French youths.
We Filipinos must not only feel a sense of
solidarity with the French people and their present anguish, we
should also worry that one of our biggest trading partners is being
rocked by violence. Our exports to France in 2004 totaled
US$185.36 million and our imports from it US$333.47 million.
Let us also hope and pray that this madness born
of the alienation of the poor and marginalized does not, like the
bird flu, jump from France to other countries in Europe. The
latest news is that copycats in Germany have begun burning cars in
Berlin. Frankfurt, an international financial center, is in
particular danger. Its population is now more than 50 percent
Turkish and Muslim from other countries—many of whom are like the
angry young Muslims of France’s poor and desperate.
Let this French experience also remind us of the
marginalization of our own Muslim, Aeta, Suban-on and Cordilleran
fellow Filipinos living in our inner cities. We must help make
them feel fully integrated with the bigger non-Muslim component of
our population. And we must be especially solicitous of
impoverished ethnic minorities, whether they are in crowded big-city
ghettos or back in their poor rural villages in Pampanga, Tarlac,
Mindoro and Mindanao.
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