The week Paris burned (original) (raw)

No one knows if the two boys saw the skull and crossbones as they frantically clambered up the two-metre yellow wall.

Even if they did, the warnings did not deter Bouna Traore, 15, and Ziad Benna, 17, from going into the electricity substation in the Paris suburb of Clichy-sous-Bois. According to a friend, the boys had panicked when they saw other black youths running from police and, worrying they could be mistaken for those being pursued, looked for somewhere to hide.

Bouna and Ziad died when 20,000 volts of electricity found them instead. Two families were left devastated and France exploded into urban rioting such as it has not seen for a decade.

By last night, the ninth of unrest and protest, there had been 258 arrests, a dozen men and women had been injured and more than 2,100 vehicles burnt. The suburbs of Paris are ablaze and the fever has spread uncontrollably to Lyon, Strasbourg and Rouen - political mismanagement fuelling the rage of the most impoverished of France's citizens and belying its claim to be a modern, racially integrated society.

More broadly, from Britain to Italy, the riots have raised urgent questions about multiculturalism and why successive models of integration over 30 years have gone wrong. The continent has woken up to its inability - frightening in the age of radical Islam - to embrace the destinies of thousands of youngsters estranged from the societies their parents entered into.

The past week has also shown that many of the 14- to 25-year-olds now rioting, as distinct from those who took to the streets a decade ago, are not crying out for jobs, training or integration. Amid unemployment rates of 20-30 per cent on the housing estates and racism outside, they have given up. Crime, especially drug dealing and petty theft, has become a means of survival.

Whether Bouna and Ziad were simply playing or being pursued by the police will be decided in court. But it will be too late for the rumour-mill of the Parisian ghettos, where word spreads faster than the wind that whips between the tower blocks.

Two Thursdays ago, within two hours of Clichy-sous-Bois plunging into a power blackout as a result of the boys' electrocution, 100 young men had begun throwing stones at police and fire officers.

Cars were torched and buildings smashed. Riot police moved in, firing rubber bullets and tear gas. Fighting escalated. The rioters grew in number to 400. Last Sunday word spread that a tear-gas canister of the kind used by the police had been thrown on to the doorstep of the Bilal mosque.

When calm returned on Monday, after 63 cars had been burnt and 53 people arrested, the police could not claim credit. Spirits had been calmed thanks to the intervention of a handful of young men from the mosque, known as les grands-frères, who stood between the rioters and the police, shouting 'Allahu akbar!' - 'God is great'.

Khalid El-Quandili, a former world kick-boxing champion, who in the past few days has been acting as a mediator in Clichy-sous-Bois, says that few have any authority over the young men, who are mainly of North African origin and 'more or less practising Muslims'.

'The fathers have the least authority of all,' he adds. 'They sometimes have no work and live on benefits, or have a very traditional outlook so are out of phase with France. The mothers can be a powerful influence, but they are hamstrung by the very macho culture that prevails on the estates.

'Schoolteachers in these zones are very often young and inexperienced. The grands-frères play a role, but they are self-appointed peacekeepers, which is dangerous.'

Many - but far from all - of the rioters have been children of North African immigrants. France is home to Europe's largest Muslim population and a third of its estimated six million people of Algerian, Moroccan and Tunisian origin live in the ghettos.

But also among those arrested last week were children of French parents and grandparents and the offspring of sub-Saharan immigrants. What they all have in common is their alienation from mainstream society and, often, an Islamic upbringing.

For years, French integration policies have been based around the republican tenet of secularism. On the basis that France should be indivisible and able to assimilate all its components by officially erasing their particularities, the government does not allow official statistics to be broken down by ethnicity and religion.

But because of the nature of its post-colonial immigration, France finds itself with more Muslims than it had reckoned with. In the age of Islamic militancy, that is a worrying trend - especially since so many of the Muslims are stuck in the ghettos.

Christophe Bertossian, an immigration specialist at the French Institute for International Relations, believes it is time for a rethink: 'Part of the problem is the French approach to integration, based on the concept that everyone is equal. The idea that we are equal is fiction. Ethnic minorities keep being told they do not exist.'

El-Quandili argues that integration policies have been undermined by the very people who created them: 'Twenty years ago we had a wave of policies aimed at supporting neighbourhood associations. But these groups were, in time, co-opted by politicians and lost their credibility. Other associations had their funding cut.'

The Muslim upper hand is clear at Aulnay-sous-Bois, which has a population of about 90,000 and was the scene of some of the worst rioting in the past week. Here, 41 per cent of the population is under 25. Amid the four- and five-storey buildings that have in recent years replaced the tower blocks of the 1970s, dozens of cars and lorries were burnt or damaged, as was a police station, a fire station, a school, an old people's home and a car salesroom.

On the Rue du 8 Mai, leading into the Mille-Mille estate, hairdresser Agnès Fréchon, 36, waits anxiously for electricity to be restored to her salon. The Crédit Lyonnais branch next door was rammed with a car in the night, then burnt, along with a kebab shop in the parade.

'If you look at the shops that have been burnt down, you can tell that the Muslim grands-fréres have had their say,' she adds.

'The halal butcher has not been touched, neither has the pizzeria, owned by a Moroccan. I try to stay neutral - after all, I cut everyone's hair - and I get the impression that, if my shop has been damaged, it is by accident because it's next door to the bank.'

Her customers, a steady stream of whom turn up during the afternoon to re-book their appointments, agree that the rioters probably wanted their mothers to be able to continue to go to the hairdresser.

Sonia Mabrouk, a 45-year-old secretary with two children, says she regularly confronts young troublemakers on the estate when they have set fire to dustbins or cut off the electricity in her building.

'For them, vandalism is something to do in the evenings. The vandalism has simply taken a new turn in the last few days because they feel provoked by [Interior Minister] Nicolas Sarkozy's comments about "louts". They are blaming everything on Sarkozy, but the problem is much bigger.'

Mrs Mabrouk, who is of Algerian descent, has lived on the estate for 34 years. 'There has been a malaise on this estate for the past 15 years,' she says. 'I do not think the trouble will stop until Sarkozy resigns. But even if he goes, the underlying problems will remain.'

Yesterday the right-wing mayor of Aulnay-sous-Bois, Gérard Gaudron, led a silent march of 600 residents between the destroyed fire station and the burnt-out pensioners' day centre in Mille-Mille. 'This march is neither a provocation nor a demonstration of force, but a republican response to acts of delinquency,' he said.

Gaudron, who proudly boasts of Aulnay's capacity to attract business - a Citroën plant, l'Oréal and a range of hypermarkets of warehouse stores along the motorway leading to Charles de Gaulle airport - is perceived by many as a Sarkozyist. The Interior Minister's rivalry with Prime Minister Dominique de Villepin has probably worsened the spate of riots.

Not only do suburban youths loathe Sarkozy's rhetoric about them, but in the past week they have seen evidence that the Interior and Prime Ministers are obsessed only with their own ambitions to be become the next President.

It became so intense during the past week that both politicians cancelled foreign trips to position themselves at the centre of the riots issue. On several occasions, Sarkozy made comments about the Clichy-sous-Bois deaths that were, at worst, ill-informed and at best sought to blindly defend the police.

Yet in a country where 28,000 cars have been burnt on housing estates this year alone, Sarkozy's gamble for the intolerant right-wing vote could still pay off. In today's Le Monde, the Interior Minister is unrepentant in a personal opinion piece titled 'Our strategy is the right one'.

Last week, on the day Bouna and Ziad were killed, Jean-Claude Irvoas, 51, got out of his car in Epinay-sur-Seine to take a photograph. As his wife and daughter sat in the car, Irvoas was attacked by three men, said to be Arabs from a nearby housing estate, and savagely beaten. He died in hospital later that evening. While speaking of the perpetrators, Sarkozy speaks to France's 'victims' - and they don't live in Clichy-sous-Bois or Aulnay-sous-Bois.

If in the past the 'louts' were forgotten, it looks like they could now be used as pawns by France's politicians.