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Wednesday, November 09, 2005
EDITORIAL
The riots in France must concern us
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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