Doug Ireland: Why Is France Burning?
[Doug Ireland, a longtime radical journalist and media critic, runs the blog DIRELAND.]
... If France's population of immigrant origin -- mostly Arab, some black -- is today quite large (more than 10% of the total population), it is because there was a government and industrial policy during the post-World War II boom years of reconstruction and economic expansion which the French call "les trentes glorieuses" -- the 30 glorious years -- to recruit from France's foreign colonies laborers and factory and menial workers for jobs which there were no Frenchmen to fill. These immigrant workers were desperately needed to allow the French economy to expand due to the shortage of male manpower caused by two World Wars, which killed many Frenchmen, and slashed the native French birth-rates too. Moreover, these immigrant workers were considered passive and unlikely to strike (unlike the highly political French working class and its Communist-led unions.) This government-and- industry-sponsored influx of Arab workers (many of whom saved up to bring their families to France from North
Africa) was reinforced following Algerian independence by the Harkis.
The Harkis (whose story is movingly told by Dalila Kerchouche in her Destins de Harkis) were the native Algerians who fought for and worked with France during the post-war anti-colonial struggles for independence
-- and who for their trouble were horribly treated by France. Some 100,000 Harkis were killed by the Algerian FLN (National Liberation Front) after the French shamelessly abandoned them to a lethal fate when the French occupying army evacuated itself and the French colonists from Algeria. Moreover, those Harki families who were saved, often at the initiative of individual military commanders who refused to obey orders not to evacuate them, once in France were parked in unspeakable, filthy, crowded concentration camps for many long years and never benefited from any government aid -- a nice reward for their sacrifices for France, of which they were, after all, legally citizens. Their ghettoized children and grandchildren, naturally, harbor certain resentments.
France's other immigrant workers were warehoused in huge, high-rise low-income housing ghettos -- known as "cités" (Americans would say "the projects") -- specially built for them, and deliberately placed out of sight in the suburbs around most of France's major urban agglomerations, so that their darker-skinned inhabitants wouldn't pollute the center cities of Paris, Lyon, Toulouse, Lille, Nice and the others of white France's urban centers today encircled by flames.
Often there was only just enough public transport provided to take these uneducated working class Arabs and blacks directly to their jobs in the burgeoning factories of the "peripherique" -- the suburban peripheries that encircled Paris and its smaller sisters -- but little or none linking the ghettos to the urban centers.
Now 30, 40, and 50 years old, these high-rise human warehouses in the isolated suburbs are today run-down, dilapidated, sinister places, with broken elevators that remain unrepaired, heating systems left dysfunctional in winter, dirt and dog-shit in the hallways, broken windows, and few commercial amenities
-- shopping for basic necessities is often quite limited and difficult, while entertainment and recreational facilities for youth are truncated and totally inadequate when they're not non-existent. Both apartments and schools are over-crowded (birth control is a cultural taboo in the Muslim culture the immigrants brought with them and transmitted to their children, and even for their male grandchildren of today -- who've adopted hip-hop culture and created their own French-language rap music of extraordinary vitality (which often embodies stinging social and political content) -- condoms are a no-no because of Arab machismo, contributing to rising AIDS rates in the ghettos.
The first week in December will mark the 22nd anniversary of the Marche des Beurs (Beur means Arab in French slang). I was present to see the cortege of 100,000 arrive in Paris -- it was the Franco-Arab equivalent of Dr. Martin Luther King's 1963 March on Washington for Jobs and Justice The Marche des Beurs was organized from Lyon's horrific, enormous suburban high-rise ghetto, Les Minguettes, with the help of a charismatic left-wing French Catholic worker-priest, Father Christian Delorme, and its central theme was the demand to be recognized as French "comme les autres" -- like everyone else ... a demand, in sum, for complete integration. But for the mass of Franco-Arabs, little has changed since 1983 -- and the integrationist movement of "jeunes beurs" created around that march petered out in frustration and despair. In recent years, its place has been taken by Islamist fundamentalists operating through local mosques -- the mediatic symbol of this retreat into a separatist, communitarian-religious politics is the slick demagogue Tariq Ramadan, a philosophy professor who uses one cosmetically democratic discourse when he's speaking on French TV, and a fiery, hard-line fundamentalist discourse in the Arab-language cassettes of his speeches that sell like hotcakes to Franco-Arab ghetto youth. (Ramadan's double language has been meticulously documented by the Arab-speaking journalist Caroline Fourest in her book published last fall by Editions Grasset, "Frere Tariq: discourse, methode et strategie de Tariq Ramadan," extracts from which have been published in the weekly l'Express.) But the current rebellion has little to do with Islamic fundamentalism.
In 1990, Francois Mitterrand -- the Socialist President then -- described what life was like for jobless ghetto youths warehoused in the overcrowded "cités":
"What hope does a young person have who's been born in a quartier without a soul, who lives in an unspeakably ugly high-rise, surrounded by more ugliness, imprisoned by gray walls in a gray wasteland and condemned to a gray life, with all around a society that prefers to look away until it's time to get mad, time to FORBID."
Well, Mitterrand's perceptive and moving words remained just that -- words -- for his urban policy was an underfunded, unfocussed failure that only put a few band-aids on a metastasizing cancer -- and 15 years after Mitterrand's diagnosis, the hopelessness and alienation of these ghetto youths and their "gray lives" has only become deeper and more rancid still.
The response to the last ten days of violent youth rebellion by the conservative government has been inept and tone-deaf. For the first four days of the rebellion, Chirac and his Prime Minister, Dominique de Villepin decided to let the hyper-ambitious, megalomaniacal Interior Minister, Nicolas Sarkozy, lead the government's response to the youth's violence and arson. Chirac and Villepin detest Sarkozy, who has been openly campaigning to replace Chirac as president in
2007 (Villepin was made P.M. in the hopes that he could block Sarkozy for the right's presidential nomination), The President and his P.M. thought that "Sarko," as he's commonly referred to in France -- who won his widespread popularity as a hardline, law-and-order demagogue on the issue of domestic insecurity -- would be unable to stop the violence, and thus damage his presidential campaign.
But Sarkozy only poured verbal kerosene on the flames, dismissing the ghetto youth in the most insulting and racist terms and calling for a policy of repression.
"Sarko" made headlines with his declarations that he would "karcherise" the ghettos of "la racaille"-- words the U.S. press has utterly inadequately translated to mean "clean" the ghettos of "scum." But these two words have an infinitely harsher and insulting flavor in French. "Karcher" is the well-known brand name of a system of cleaning surfaces by super-high-pressure sand-blasting or water-blasting that very violently peals away the outer skin of encrusted dirt -- like pigeon-shit -- even at the risk of damaging what's underneath. To apply this term to young human beings and proffer it as a strategy is a verbally fascist insult and, as a policy proposed by an Interior Minister, is about as close as one can get to hollering "ethnic cleansing" without actually saying so. It implies raw police power and force used very aggressively, with little regard for human rights. I wonder how many Anglo-American correspondents get the inflammatory, terribly vicious flavor of the word in French? The translation of "karcherise" by "clean" just misses completely the inflammatory violence of what Sarko was really saying. And "racaille" is infinitely more pejorative than "scum" to French-speakers -- it has the flavor of characterizing an entire group of people as subhuman, inherently evil and criminal, worthless, and is, in other words, one of the most serious insults one could launch at the rebellious ghetto youth.
As the rebellion has spread beyond the Paris suburbs as far south as Marseilles and Nice and as far north as Lille, Sarkozy has been thundering that the spreading violence is centrally "organized." But on the telephone this morning from Paris, the dean of French investigative reporters -- Claude Angeli, editor of Le Canard Enchaine -- told me, "That's not true -- this isn't being organized by the Islamist fundamentalists, as Sarkozy is implying to scare people....
Read entire article at Direland
... If France's population of immigrant origin -- mostly Arab, some black -- is today quite large (more than 10% of the total population), it is because there was a government and industrial policy during the post-World War II boom years of reconstruction and economic expansion which the French call "les trentes glorieuses" -- the 30 glorious years -- to recruit from France's foreign colonies laborers and factory and menial workers for jobs which there were no Frenchmen to fill. These immigrant workers were desperately needed to allow the French economy to expand due to the shortage of male manpower caused by two World Wars, which killed many Frenchmen, and slashed the native French birth-rates too. Moreover, these immigrant workers were considered passive and unlikely to strike (unlike the highly political French working class and its Communist-led unions.) This government-and- industry-sponsored influx of Arab workers (many of whom saved up to bring their families to France from North
Africa) was reinforced following Algerian independence by the Harkis.
The Harkis (whose story is movingly told by Dalila Kerchouche in her Destins de Harkis) were the native Algerians who fought for and worked with France during the post-war anti-colonial struggles for independence
-- and who for their trouble were horribly treated by France. Some 100,000 Harkis were killed by the Algerian FLN (National Liberation Front) after the French shamelessly abandoned them to a lethal fate when the French occupying army evacuated itself and the French colonists from Algeria. Moreover, those Harki families who were saved, often at the initiative of individual military commanders who refused to obey orders not to evacuate them, once in France were parked in unspeakable, filthy, crowded concentration camps for many long years and never benefited from any government aid -- a nice reward for their sacrifices for France, of which they were, after all, legally citizens. Their ghettoized children and grandchildren, naturally, harbor certain resentments.
France's other immigrant workers were warehoused in huge, high-rise low-income housing ghettos -- known as "cités" (Americans would say "the projects") -- specially built for them, and deliberately placed out of sight in the suburbs around most of France's major urban agglomerations, so that their darker-skinned inhabitants wouldn't pollute the center cities of Paris, Lyon, Toulouse, Lille, Nice and the others of white France's urban centers today encircled by flames.
Often there was only just enough public transport provided to take these uneducated working class Arabs and blacks directly to their jobs in the burgeoning factories of the "peripherique" -- the suburban peripheries that encircled Paris and its smaller sisters -- but little or none linking the ghettos to the urban centers.
Now 30, 40, and 50 years old, these high-rise human warehouses in the isolated suburbs are today run-down, dilapidated, sinister places, with broken elevators that remain unrepaired, heating systems left dysfunctional in winter, dirt and dog-shit in the hallways, broken windows, and few commercial amenities
-- shopping for basic necessities is often quite limited and difficult, while entertainment and recreational facilities for youth are truncated and totally inadequate when they're not non-existent. Both apartments and schools are over-crowded (birth control is a cultural taboo in the Muslim culture the immigrants brought with them and transmitted to their children, and even for their male grandchildren of today -- who've adopted hip-hop culture and created their own French-language rap music of extraordinary vitality (which often embodies stinging social and political content) -- condoms are a no-no because of Arab machismo, contributing to rising AIDS rates in the ghettos.
The first week in December will mark the 22nd anniversary of the Marche des Beurs (Beur means Arab in French slang). I was present to see the cortege of 100,000 arrive in Paris -- it was the Franco-Arab equivalent of Dr. Martin Luther King's 1963 March on Washington for Jobs and Justice The Marche des Beurs was organized from Lyon's horrific, enormous suburban high-rise ghetto, Les Minguettes, with the help of a charismatic left-wing French Catholic worker-priest, Father Christian Delorme, and its central theme was the demand to be recognized as French "comme les autres" -- like everyone else ... a demand, in sum, for complete integration. But for the mass of Franco-Arabs, little has changed since 1983 -- and the integrationist movement of "jeunes beurs" created around that march petered out in frustration and despair. In recent years, its place has been taken by Islamist fundamentalists operating through local mosques -- the mediatic symbol of this retreat into a separatist, communitarian-religious politics is the slick demagogue Tariq Ramadan, a philosophy professor who uses one cosmetically democratic discourse when he's speaking on French TV, and a fiery, hard-line fundamentalist discourse in the Arab-language cassettes of his speeches that sell like hotcakes to Franco-Arab ghetto youth. (Ramadan's double language has been meticulously documented by the Arab-speaking journalist Caroline Fourest in her book published last fall by Editions Grasset, "Frere Tariq: discourse, methode et strategie de Tariq Ramadan," extracts from which have been published in the weekly l'Express.) But the current rebellion has little to do with Islamic fundamentalism.
In 1990, Francois Mitterrand -- the Socialist President then -- described what life was like for jobless ghetto youths warehoused in the overcrowded "cités":
"What hope does a young person have who's been born in a quartier without a soul, who lives in an unspeakably ugly high-rise, surrounded by more ugliness, imprisoned by gray walls in a gray wasteland and condemned to a gray life, with all around a society that prefers to look away until it's time to get mad, time to FORBID."
Well, Mitterrand's perceptive and moving words remained just that -- words -- for his urban policy was an underfunded, unfocussed failure that only put a few band-aids on a metastasizing cancer -- and 15 years after Mitterrand's diagnosis, the hopelessness and alienation of these ghetto youths and their "gray lives" has only become deeper and more rancid still.
The response to the last ten days of violent youth rebellion by the conservative government has been inept and tone-deaf. For the first four days of the rebellion, Chirac and his Prime Minister, Dominique de Villepin decided to let the hyper-ambitious, megalomaniacal Interior Minister, Nicolas Sarkozy, lead the government's response to the youth's violence and arson. Chirac and Villepin detest Sarkozy, who has been openly campaigning to replace Chirac as president in
2007 (Villepin was made P.M. in the hopes that he could block Sarkozy for the right's presidential nomination), The President and his P.M. thought that "Sarko," as he's commonly referred to in France -- who won his widespread popularity as a hardline, law-and-order demagogue on the issue of domestic insecurity -- would be unable to stop the violence, and thus damage his presidential campaign.
But Sarkozy only poured verbal kerosene on the flames, dismissing the ghetto youth in the most insulting and racist terms and calling for a policy of repression.
"Sarko" made headlines with his declarations that he would "karcherise" the ghettos of "la racaille"-- words the U.S. press has utterly inadequately translated to mean "clean" the ghettos of "scum." But these two words have an infinitely harsher and insulting flavor in French. "Karcher" is the well-known brand name of a system of cleaning surfaces by super-high-pressure sand-blasting or water-blasting that very violently peals away the outer skin of encrusted dirt -- like pigeon-shit -- even at the risk of damaging what's underneath. To apply this term to young human beings and proffer it as a strategy is a verbally fascist insult and, as a policy proposed by an Interior Minister, is about as close as one can get to hollering "ethnic cleansing" without actually saying so. It implies raw police power and force used very aggressively, with little regard for human rights. I wonder how many Anglo-American correspondents get the inflammatory, terribly vicious flavor of the word in French? The translation of "karcherise" by "clean" just misses completely the inflammatory violence of what Sarko was really saying. And "racaille" is infinitely more pejorative than "scum" to French-speakers -- it has the flavor of characterizing an entire group of people as subhuman, inherently evil and criminal, worthless, and is, in other words, one of the most serious insults one could launch at the rebellious ghetto youth.
As the rebellion has spread beyond the Paris suburbs as far south as Marseilles and Nice and as far north as Lille, Sarkozy has been thundering that the spreading violence is centrally "organized." But on the telephone this morning from Paris, the dean of French investigative reporters -- Claude Angeli, editor of Le Canard Enchaine -- told me, "That's not true -- this isn't being organized by the Islamist fundamentalists, as Sarkozy is implying to scare people....