Print this page Just 20 minutes from Paris, it's war Emma-Kate Symons meets locals at the flashpoint of Clichy-sous-Bois, Paris 05nov05 "THIS is a war." It is late in the evening marking the end of Ramadan when 13-year-old Souhail, a French Muslim of Moroccan origin, makes his bellicose declaration. On a residential street crowded with onlookers, we are trying to shield ourselves from the blaze and foul smell of another car set alight in the outer Paris suburb of Clichy-sous-Bois. Nearby BeurgerKing Muslim is doing a brisk trade in Halal fast food and mothers wearing headscarves are pushing young children around in strollers. But tonight the poor, North African immigrant neighbourhood is also crawling with hundreds of police officers brandishing guns, batons and teargas canisters and there are fire trucks and sirens blaring. Clichy-sous-Bois is only 20 minutes' drive from the storybook centre of the capital beloved by tourists and immortalised in film and song as the City of Light; the grand French republican ideal of beauty and equality for all. But the northeastern Paris suburb may as well be another country. This is the flashpoint satellite town, rife with unemployment and overshadowed by a huge, rundown, council housing estate where France's worst race rioting in years began a week ago. The violence that spread across Paris's troubled outer suburbs was sparked by the deaths of two teenaged boys electrocuted as they took refuge in a substation, believing they were being chased by police. A local mosque was later attacked with teargas canisters yet Souhail says he has no fear. "This is a war between the police and the young people and it is the police's fault," he says. "The police and (Interior Minister Nicolas) Sarkozy, because he uses words like 'scum' to describe us. "There are too many police here. They go after the young people all the time." A man walks past, muttering that Mr Sarkozy is a racist. "There are problems to be solved but not by provocation, not by such inflammatory words," he says. "These are racist words. "The police treat young people like scum. But they are in despair -- they have nothing." Just behind us, Claude, a 63-year-old retiree who looks like he has stepped out of a stereotypical French film about Gallic bourgeois life, is furious. He turns his hose on the journalists and teenagers gathered near the blaze until we run up the street. "Where are their parents?" Claude asks later. "There are children as young as 12 -- at midnight, they are still in the streets. Their families must take responsibility. There should be a curfew." Unlike Souhail, Claude applauds Mr Sarkozy's tough-talking stance towards the gang violence that is engulfing Paris's poor immigrant suburbs. "Sarkozy bravo! He says everything out loud that people are thinking. I am scared for my grandchildren." A police officer says the young people roaming the streets in small gangs are not afraid of anything. "They have no fear and nothing to lose," he said. "They believe the state offers them nothing. "Last night, people were firing live rounds from windows of apartments. They are like snipers ... I think they actually want to kill someone like a police officer or firefighter." Earlier in the day at Bobigny, a bustling suburb at the end of the Paris Metro line not normally known for gang violence, the people were on edge. On Wednesday evening a gang of about 40 youths burst into the local shopping centre, next door to the police station, armed with baseball bats. They broke shopfront windows and hit sales assistants before making off with cash. It was only 6.30pm and the invasion "panicked" customers, according to the shopping centre's director, Alex Mussawy. "This is not normal for Bobigny. We are almost in Paris. We are on the Metro line. This is the sort of thing that you hear about from the other more troubled suburbs." Abdel Maleck, a 37-year-old father of two girls, is a second-generation Frenchman whose parents, like so many thousands of their countrymen, emigrated from Algeria in the 1950s. They came from the former French colony to rebuild France and stem an acute labour shortage. Maleck says his parents were law-abiding people who worked hard and demanded their children behave well. "Today it is so different," he said. "The young people -- they are so rude, there are drug problems and they have no respect. But they have nothing to live for -- there are no jobs. The only answer to this violence is jobs for everyone." Maleck's anxieties about France's record high unemployment -- it is sitting at just less than 10per cent and can be as high as 50per cent among young people in the urban ghettoes -- are echoed by a group of teenaged boys milling about near the local McDonald's. A 16-year-old asks me if I am with the police before launching into a sarcastic tirade against the Interior Minister. "Oh, such a great man. He does so much for us young people. We love him," he says with a cynical smile. His friend prefers to return to the unemployment problem. "I have a friend, he has a baccalaureate (high school diploma) and he works at that McDonald's. Is that fair, is that what France should be about?"
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