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## Roots of Paris strife run generations deep

By GRAEME SMITH

Saturday, November 12, 2005 Posted at 3:29 AM EST

From Saturday's Globe and Mail

CLICHY-SOUS-BOIS, FRANCE — The inferno that engulfed France started with a group of twelve teenagers who trespassed a little outside the normal boundaries for dark-skinned young men in the poor suburbs of Paris.

It was a clear, warm afternoon on Oct. 27, and the teenagers from Clichy-sous-bois didn't want to hang around their dreary apartment blocks, where the entranceways smell like urine and the yards are strewn with stinking diapers, rotting kitchen scraps and other garbage.

They ventured out beyond the weedy edges of their neighbourhood to a soccer field in the wealthier suburb of Livry-Gargan. This wasn't entirely unusual. From time to time, kids from Clichy would play on the well-groomed sports field without any problems.

What made this day different, they say, was the fateful decision to take shortcuts in the rush to get to the mosque for evening prayers.

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Three of the youths cut through a construction site. The other nine walked back through a public park, a small act of rebellion because they would normally take a longer route to skirt the flowerbeds and tidy homes of their middle-class neighbours.

Somebody called the police. Results of an initial police investigation, released last week, said officers were summoned to investigate a break-in at a construction site and they detained six youths without a chase.

Nobody in Clichy believes that version.

“It's simple: They're liars,” said Skari, 17, one of many youths who are deeply suspicious of outsiders and declined to give their full names.

Around Clichy, it's widely believed that the police who showed up that evening chased three teenagers into an electrical station where two died; that the original complaint to police wasn't about a break-in but rather about a pack of immigrants' children roaming a public park near sunset; and that the police knew the young men faced danger from high voltages but abandoned them to their fate.

Frustrated with the official story, a few young residents made their own crude investigation into the incident, even while other youths in Clichy were starting the riots that eventually spread across the country. While some threw bottles and rocks at helmeted police officers, others were making phone calls and shooting videotaped statements from witnesses.

Unedited footage of their work, obtained by The Globe and Mail, shows at least five witnesses supporting the residents' claims.

“This is the story that started the whole conflagration,” said Georges Gamthety, 30, a part-time graphic designer who organized the video project.

It's a story whose details will probably always be disputed, because of its place at the heart of the eruption in France. In the hours after Bouna Traore, 15, and Zyed Benna, 17, were electrocuted inside a power station, a dangerous alchemy occurred in the racial tensions that have existed for decades in Clichy.

After years of what residents describe as a “cold war” between the Arab and black African residents of this ghetto, the deaths of teenagers from both groups united them against an even more hated enemy: the police.

As the story spread, so did the riots. It resonated in hundreds of slums like Clichy, among thousands of young men like Mr. Traore and Mr. Benna, because it featured so many elements of their grinding reality: racism, poverty, conflict with authority and the daily humiliation of living next door to people who suffer none of these problems.

“Legally, I'm French,” said Limay Amboka, 30, who was five years old when his parents fled Congo. “But the French will never understand this.”

As Mr. Gamthety picked through video clips on his friend's computer, his face lit by the screen in a room where the lights don't work and the walls are covered with magazine pictures of basketball stars and naked women, he described his efforts to make people understand. He's been working with local television journalists, trying to supply them images to counterbalance what he describes as French media coverage heavily biased in favour of the police.

But understanding the problems in Clichy requires more than video clips, he says: “You must look back to the 1970s, when everybody arrived.”

Urbanization of Clichy started in 1955, as Paris expanded across farmland and villages. The 1970s saw an influx of immigrants, many from former French colonies. At the time, it was considered a progressive step to provide the new arrivals with low-rent housing en masse, in dozens of identical concrete towers.

“This was the best housing project in France,” Mr. Gamthety said, gesturing at the peeling linoleum and dirty walls. He was two years old when he arrived in France, the son of Congolese political refugees, and the building looked very different in those days.

The entranceway had an aquarium, plants and a fresh coat of paint every six months. Now it doesn't even have doors, the elevators never work and the only fresh paint on the bare concrete comes from the graffiti writers who editorialize on the walls. “Screw the police,” is the most common message, but others suggest that “[George W.] Bush will burn in Hell,” and “9/11 was just the beginning.”

Mr. Gamthety was part of the second generation. Unlike their parents, they weren't as grateful for a refuge from the troubles in their ancestral homes, and they were constantly confronted with a system that seemed designed, they say, to keep them trapped in Clichy.

With the Champs-Elysees twinkling only 20 kilometres away, all the luxuries of the Parisian boulevard remained out of reach. Employers, landlords and even young French girls shunned the youth from Clichy.

In 1993, education authorities suggested holding a graduation ceremony for students from the poor suburbs that would segregate them from other students in the area. The brewing resentment turned to open anger and Mr. Gamthety joined other young men running down the Champs-Elysees and breaking windows.

“We broke everything, up and down the Champs,” Mr. Gamthety said.

That riot didn't improve life for the young men, however. For several years it grew worse, as police stopped patrolling the neighbourhood for fear of confrontation. The economic misery grew worse, too, as young men struggled to lead adult lives while still living with their parents. Some turned to illegal peddling of marijuana, hashish, or stolen running shoes. Others shoplifted for food and clothing.

The lifestyle has its advantages: young men here regularly hop onto busses without paying and jump the turnstiles in the subway, knowing that ticket collectors are too intimidated to question them. They listen to rap music on pirate radio broadcasts available only in the suburbs.

But the sense of otherness is never far off.

One afternoon this week, Mr. Gamthety stood on a Paris street and tried to hail a taxi. Several cabs slowed, while the drivers ducked to peer through their windshields long enough to see his dark face, then sped away.

“It's the same everywhere,” said Ambroso Armendo, 37, who makes a living refilling toilet-paper dispensers. “You get treated like this at the discotheque, on the train, hotel clerks, everybody.”

This was the underlying source of the anger that erupted Oct. 27, residents say. Word spread quickly about the unofficial story: Three police cruisers pulled up to the group of nine boys on their way home from soccer. Officers jumped out with their guns drawn.

While they were being frisked, three teenagers broke from the group and ran away, followed by a police officer.

They ran down a small hill, to a concrete wall covered with colourful graffiti. A blue gasoline can stood among the weeds at the base of the wall, which they used to boost themselves over and into a small yard.

Inside the yard they found an electrical station, which looked just big enough to contain three teenagers. They apparently didn't know it contained live conductors carrying 20,000 volts of electricity.

Two of them died instantly; the third, Muttin Altun, 17, was badly injured.

“The police knew where those guys were,” said Martin, 15, one of the soccer players who later walked Mr. Gamthety through the scene while the video camera recorded his description. “We heard them say, ‘They went into the EDF,' ” he said, using the name for the French electricity company.

Those kinds of comments sparked immediate rage; within hours, youths were throwing rocks at buildings and setting fire to cars and shops.

The violence has subsided, but nobody in Clichy believes it cannot return.

“People here feel the riots were justified,” Mr. Gamthety said. “They refused to accept a hypocritical system. They stood up for themselves, and they're proud.”

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