THE PLANK NOVEMBER 28, 2007
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The stream of news about the three days of riots that have overtaken the suburbs of Paris is unsettling. In echoes of the 3-week urban war of 2005, the pot is still boiling, and this fight may not yet have reached its climax. The mainly black and Muslim rioters are still aggrieved about the perennial barriers of race, class and religion that govern their lives in France. Like the first uprising, the death of two local youths sparked the violence. But this time it's worse--130 police officers have been injured already, and rioters have armed themselves not just with mob chaos but with shotguns. Ironically, the rioters are engaging in the country's most esteemed tradition--armed protest. But unlike before, voices have emerged from behind the flames with a clear complaint. For their friends and neighbors, the two boys, killed by a police car this weekend, are emblematic of the wider social injustice felt outside the metropole. Le Monde reports a kid my age saying: "We want the truth. Since Sunday, it's been the cops' word against everyone. [Laramy and Mouhsin] are the victims and people are making them into thieves and criminals." To me the story of the 2005 riots has always read as one of class-based lack of recourse against government inattention: a tantrum in its purest form. Granted, the protesters' weapons-gathering is still more organized than their dispute, but this time, the galling violence is just the beginning. It’s the same explosion of anger fueled by impotence--the grievance that has not abated, even as President Sarkozy has extended an arm to minorities in his Cabinet and proposed a "Marshall Plan" for ghettoes. In trying to engage the rioters in a permanent solution, France's leaders should offer real means of political recourse to these neglected French subjects, and take note of the adage: once bitten, twice shy.--Dayo Olopade
6 comments
I think you're giving the rioters a bit too much credit. It's by no means clear that the incident which sparked this round of violence was any more the fault of the police than the incident in 2005, and the rioters aren't just attacking the police, they're also burning down preschools (in their own neighborhoods; clever, that) and beating up innocent bus drivers. In other words, not exactly MLK. I don't care how legitimate their grievance is, it doesn't make this sort of behaviour any less thuggish.
- Ivanova
November 28, 2007 at 12:30pm
Guys that picture is HUGE! Do you test posts at all? Hit the preview button sometimes. It really works.
- bsdespain
November 28, 2007 at 12:32pm
The Wall Street Journal makes an interesting point indicating that Sarkozy's policies have worsened the situation in France:
-- While he was interior minister, between 2002 and 2003, Mr. Sarkozy halted a plan introduced by his Socialist predecessor to allocate more resources to local police so they could be involved in social outreach activities. He said police had to focus on re-establishing law and order. "Organizing rugby games -- that's good, but it's not the prime role of the police," Mr. Sarkozy said at the time.
-- But with the rioting in Villiers-le-Bel, the recurrent debate over the lack of police presence in poor suburbs is resurfacing. Some French politicians, including members of Mr. Sarkozy's ruling UMP party, said the use of riot squads has created a vicious, violent cycle.
-- Hughes Portelli, a UMP senator and the mayor of Ermont, a suburb near Villiers-le-Bel where seven cars were torched between Sunday and Tuesday, said he needed more, well-trained police "who know the area and do not leave at 6 p.m."
-- "When there are tensions in a neighborhood, I am often left calling the antiriot police," he said in a telephone interview. "Some do a good job at restoring calm, but quite often we know that it will spell more difficulties."
http://tinyurl.com/2tl8nz ($)
- ndmackenzie
November 28, 2007 at 2:22pm
The only effective solution to this problem is an economic one, which Sarko alone among the French elite has the sense and determination to actually deliver: labor flexibility, specifically the right of small employers to hire at will. This more than any other factor is responsible for the astronomically high French unemployment rate for young _beur_ and _noir_ kids. Villepin wimped out on this; Chirac was too stupid to understand the need for it; the Socialists' ideological blinders prevent them from even contemplating it.
When this right is secured, French youth unemployment will fall by half overnight, and a large % of these poor kids will redirect their energies away from Grand Torch Auto toward working and pulling down a paycheck each week.
And a large portion of the hundreds of 000s of educated young French expats in London will be tempted to come home to France by all the employment opportunities that will open up.
- teplukhin2you
November 28, 2007 at 2:36pm
Where are the calls for gun control?
- epackard-02
November 28, 2007 at 4:09pm
Good post! Pleasantly surprised to see this kind of take on TNR.
- jobeek2
November 28, 2007 at 5:38pm