Newsday.com: Muslims fight isolation in France

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# Muslims fight isolation in France
BY JANINE DIGIOVANNI SPECIAL CORRESPONDENT November 8, 2005 PARIS -- The two teenagers, Zyed Benna and Bouna Traore, were polite young men who liked to play soccer. Their families were of African origin, one from Mauritania, the other from Tunisia. They grew up in a sprawling public housing project in Clichy-sous-Bois, a bleak northern Paris suburb, and they died on Oct. 27 by accidental electrocution while fleeing a police identification check. Police checks are a common occurrence for young Muslims in the French underclass. In life, Zyed, 17, and Bouna, 15, were average kids, just two of France's 5 million Muslims, the largest Muslim community in Western Europe. In death, they have inspired the country's worst civil strife in 40 years, leading some police officials to speak of a "civil war." After 12 nights of unrest, no leader has emerged to articulate demands and there is no established pattern to the violence. Anger and frustration seem to erupt in spontaneous combustion that recalls the American race riots of the late 1960s. More than 30 policemen have been injured and 1,400 cars torched. Urban unrest has already spread throughout the country, and incidents were reported yesterday in Germany and Belgium. The spreading disorder has sharply damaged the prestige of embattled President Jacques Chirac, who seemed to abdicate responsibility for public safety to controversial Interior Minister Nicolas Sarkozy. Chirac's center-right government has already lost ground with French voters over corruption scandals, while Muslims dislike him for ushering in the law that banned headscarves and other religious symbols from schools in 2004. Breaking more than 10 days of silence, Chirac said Sunday he was "determined" to halt the violence, but his vague and flowery statement was not universally convincing. To many French people, the president has done too little, too late. Sarkozy, who is in charge of the national police, offended many Muslims at the start of the unrest when he dismissed the rioters as "scum" who pollute the suburbs. "For many of the rioters, that comment was an invitation to hate the government more," said Samiha, 24, who is of Moroccan origin and grew up in the suburbs. The young people who are rioting are the second and third generation of immigrants who came to France seeking jobs and played down their religious beliefs to blend in. Their children, growing up in an increasingly polarized world, are questioning the secular society that they feel isolates them. They cannot find jobs - unemployment tops 60 percent in some suburbs - or afford to move out of their housing projects. They resent the discrimination against anyone with a Muslim name. French laws strictly separating church and state have been in the constitution since 1905. But many Muslims feel the headscarf law violates civil liberties. In many ways, young French Muslims feel trapped between two societies - France and their countries of origin - and accepted in neither. Many complain not just of discrimination, but of total isolation from French society. "In Britain and America, Muslims are free to be who they choose," said Yusuf, 24, a second-generation Algerian from the suburbs who works in a Paris disco. "Here, we have to pretend to be French but we are not really French. We do not have a true identity." Dounia Bouzar, who was the only woman on the official body representing Muslims in France, the French Council of Muslim Religion, said those taking to the streets are the first generation to consider the problem of identity. "We are in the process of defining who we are," she said. "This definition is still being written, and at the moment we are prisoners of the French definition." Copyright 2005 Newsday Inc.