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Rioting in France – Muslims to be ousted??Can Muslims and Christians or if not Christians, Westerners co-exist? It is not PC to ask – but should we not consider this question? Why was India partitioned? In all honesty – are we not kidding ourselves to believe that Islam does not seek world dominance?• Aljazeera --Unemployment and prejudice fuel riots • Aljazeera -- Riots subside across France • Aljazeera -- The corrosive division in France I consider some recent western reports taken from 'This Week' of the trouble in France then compare their summary with those from 'Aljazeera' -- who is right? Or is there not a right? For nearly two weeks, nightly riots have raged across France 's deprived suburban neighbourhoods. The clashes began on Friday 27 October, when two teenagers, Zyed Benna and Bouna Traore, died in the Paris suburb of Clichy-sous-Bois. In what locals say was an attempt to hide from the police, they were electrocuted after climbing into an electricity sub-station. As news of the deaths spread, it triggered violent protests from the area's largely Arab and African immigrant communities. Copycat rioting then erupted all over north-east Paris . Last week Nicolas Sarkozy, the French interior minister, denounced the rioters as "scum", and said they should be steam-cleaned from the streets. This only appeared to inflame the situation. Violence has now spread to 274 towns and cities; nearly 6,000 vehicles have been burnt out, along with schools, shops and churches, and more than 1,500 people arrested. On Monday, a 61-year-old man was beaten to death in Paris as he tried to put out a fire. President Chirac has declared a state of emergency, giving regional prefects the power to impose curfews and put people under house arrest. What the editorials said The underlying causes of this unprecedented outbreak of violence are "obvious enough", said The Times. These suburbs are grim, graffiti-rid den ghettos. Jobs are scarce, discrimination is widespread, and unemployment can be as high as 40%. "Drugs are rife and young men grow up prey to criminal gang culture and religious extremism." Heavy-handed policing of the estates is also to blame, said The Independent. And Nicolas Sarkozy's tough talk -presumably a sop to right-wing opinion ahead of his presidential campaign for 2007 - has only made things worse. This is a national disaster, said Le Monde (Paris]. In full view of the world, "a country which regards itself as the birthplace of human rights, and the home of a generous social model, is proving unable to ensure decent living conditions for young French people" - or to deal with the consequences. There's far too much tolerance for these "barbarians", said Le Figaro ( Paris). Many appear to regard the events of the* last two weeks as a form of justified political protest - as though people have a perfect right to rampage through our streets, burning cars and stoning police. True, many young North Africans are poor and disadvantaged, but this kind of mindless violence is absolutely inexcusable. What the commentators said "This fire has been been building for decades," said Jonathan Freedland in The Guardian. France has always dumped its immigrant workers in the sink estates outside its elegant cities, "out of sight of the white folks", while remaining in denial about its racial problems. Quite literally so: the French state is colour-blind; it does not legally acknowledge the principle of ethnic identity. "If human beings were free of prejudice, this republican ideal would work beautifully. Because we are not, it allows racism a free hand." A recent study found that a man with a traditional French name applying for 100 jobs will get 75 interviews, whereas a man with the same qualifications but an Algerian name will get just 14. No wonder so many immigrants are unemployed, and angry. Ironically, the only mainstream politician who has attempted to tackle this problem is Nicolas Sarkozy, said John Thornhill in the FT. He proposed introducing affirmative action for ethnic minorities, but received no support, either from his own party or from the Left. The danger now is that voters will turn to politicians offering "extreme solutions", particularly the hard-line nationalist Jean-Marie Le Pen. This is not just a crisis on the streets; it's "a crisis of a whole political class". Economics may be partly to blame, said Hamish McRae in The Independent. The heavily taxed and regulated French job market encourages companies to hire as few people as possible, and to replace low-skilled workers with technology wherever possible. This drives up unemployment, and means that many unskilled citizens never get into the workforce at all. " France needs more bad jobs" — something the deregulated British service sector is rather good at providing. This has little to do with the French model of integration and its failures, said Olivier Roy in The New York Times. France has a huge Muslim population living outside the blighted 'banlieues', which in no way identifies with the rioters. The real causes of the riots are found in ghettos right across the West: poverty, alienation, the breakdown of parental control. "We are witnessing the temporary rising up of one small part of a Western underclass culture." What Next? In the Seventies and Eighties, industrial relations caused great tensions in Western societies. "Race relations threaten to become a similarly potent battlefront in the first part of the 21st century," says Trevor Phillips in The Observer. In Britain, the idea of multiculturalism moved centre-stage after the July bombings. Across the Atlantic , the flooding of New Orleans exposed the "ghettoisation and neglect" of African-Americans and badly damaged George Bush. And now in France, with Europe's largest ethnic minority population, comes this conflagration, which threatens to make or break its leaders. Western governments now need to act fast; we in Britain can't sit around "celebrating our imagined happy diversity". Curfews
have been imposed in areas hit by unrest
Urban violence has dropped for the third straight night in France after
the government adopted emergency powers, but a controversy has erupted
over plans to expel foreigners caught rioting. Two weeks of unrest in
poor suburbs around France have badly rattled the conservative
government and prompted Prime Minister Dominique
de Villepin to invoke
a 50-year-old law allowing local government officials to impose curfews
and other restrictions. The move coincided with a sharp fall in petrol
bomb attacks on cars, buses, public buildings and police by youths
angered by racism, unemployment and harsh treatment by police.Many French people welcomed the government's tough response but Villepin also faced accusations of over-reacting by reviving a measure dating from Algeria's war of independence against its colonial master France. "It's calm. It's subsiding," said a spokesman for the Seine-et-Marne department east of Paris on Thursday. The state's top regional officials, or prefects, for the Nice (south), Orleans (centre), Evreux (Normandy), Rouen and Amiens (north) areas were the only officials to impose limited curfews. "There are encouraging signs but there is no reduction in police presence," an Interior Ministry spokesman said. Arrests On Wednesday night, youths torched 482 vehicles compared with 617 the previous night, and police said they had arrested 203 people, down from 280, according to Interior Ministry figures. The poor suburbs of Paris where the riots erupted on 27 October were largely quiet and none of the prefects there took advantage of their new emergency powers to impose curfews. On Wednesday night, 482 vehicles were torched. Triggered by the deaths of two youths of African-origin who were accidentally electrocuted while apparently fleeing police, the rioting also gave vent to festering frustrations among poor white youths and French-born citizens of African and Arab origin over a sense of exclusion from mainstream society. Interior Minister Nicolas Sarkozy, accused by opponents of stoking passions with his strong attacks on troublemakers, caused a new controversy by telling parliament that about 120 foreigners convicted of participating in the unrest would be expelled, even if they had residence permits. "What we're seeing is the restoration of 'double jeopardy'," Pierre Henry, president of the Terre d'asile association that works with immigrants, told the daily Le Figaro. Sarkozy won plaudits from pro-immigrant groups three years ago when he abolished 'double jeopardy', a policy under which convicted foreigners are expelled after serving their sentence. Grassroots funding In an effort to end the unrest, Villepin pledged on Monday to restore some 100 million euros ($117 million) in funding for grassroots associations working in tough neighbourhoods, and improve prospects in education, the labour market and housing. De Villepin pledged $117 million for grass roots associations. But left-wing critics say he went too far by invoking emergency powers for 38 cities and suburban areas including Marseille, Strasbourg, Lyon and the capital Paris . "Most elected officials on the ground appear to have been more embarrassed than relieved," the left-leaning newspaper Liberation said in an editorial. "They fear this measure will further stir things up, or believe it to be either an over-reaction or totally useless." The measure has, nevertheless, won 73% support from the public, according to a poll in Le Parisien. Fears Fears that riots might erupt in other European countries have helped push down the value of the euro and damaged France's image abroad, though Finance Minister Thierry Breton said the economy had been unscathed. "This has had no impact on the nation's economy at the macro-economic level," Breton said on Europe 1 radio. Opposition Socialists have voiced only muted criticism of the emergency measures, which they used in the mid-1980s. The sudden explosion of violence has also added a new twist to the rivalry between Villepin and Sarkozy, possible candidates to lead the right in the 2007 presidential election. Villepin led Sarkozy in a new opinion poll published by Paris Match. Just as Hurricane Katrina has exposed the ugliness of America's segregation system, the ghettoes, racism, misery and poverty that lurk beneath the thin surface of economic prosperity and social harmony, the recent riots in Paris have laid bare the darker side of the 'city of lights'. Paris, the capital which had once mesmerised generations of artists, intellectuals and politicians from around the world, looks today like a city of ghosts, violence, social alienation and economic marginalisation. Watching the TV scenes of wretchedness, anger and rioting I had to remind myself that this was France, not some poverty ridden, war-stricken third world country. The violent riots that have convulsed Paris' 'banlieues' for over a week are not a passing event, or the isolated acts of gangs of delinquent youths, dismissed by the hawkish French Interior Minister Nicholas Sarkozy as "rabble", "scum", "yobs" and "louts", who need to be "cleaned up". These disturbances are a vivid symptom of the profound crisis at the heart of the French social and cultural system, a crisis that has been accumulating for decades, growing like a snowball with the passing of every day in the bleak enclaves of Paris' immigrant suburbs. The clashes began when two terrified teenagers, Bouna Traore, 15, and Ziad Benna, 17, desperately clambered the 2m wall of the electricity station on the rundown estate of Clichy-sous-Bois to hide from the police. Bouna and Ziad died promptly, electrocuted by 20,000 volts of electricity and France erupted into urban rioting such as it has not seen for decades. "The
explanation of the recent events in France is simple: the French
were silly enough to believe that they could keep so many poor
immigrants in the outskirts of their big cities ."
Erik,
Russia
More comments... Furious youths hurled stones at the police, set light to hundreds of cars and buildings. The mayhem soon swept from the dark suburbs of Paris to become a nationwide crisis. With Bouna and Ziad's deaths the violent tensions seething in the depths of French society spilled over across its loathsome racial barriers beyond its poor immigrant estates into the spotlight. I remember once asking a group of young men of Arab descent, whose families have been living in France for decades, whether they felt French. All answered in the negative. "I do not belong here" one of them said. "There is nothing for me. There are jobs. But if your name is Muhammad, Ali, or Rashid, don't even bother to apply. The most I can hope for is a job at the local McDonald's." Another added bitterly: "I was born here, and so was my father. How many generations would it take for me to be considered French?" Sons of immigrants The rioters setting nursery schools ad shops ablaze are French by birth, language, education and culture. Yet France still refuses to acknowledge them as its own, still refers to them as immigrants and sons of immigrants. The majority are incarcerated in poor housing estates, where unemployment figures are three times the national average. Those who defy the odds and succeed in gaining a university qualification are five times more likely to end up in unemployment than their white counterparts ( 26.5% compared with 5%). Most are trapped in a hopeless downward spiral of joblessness, racial discrimination, and clashes with the police. What the inner cities are to the United States , the banlieues (suburbs) are to France. France 's "beurs", the sons and grandsons of its former colonials have no sense of belonging to the French nation, not because they are intrinsically unpatriotic, or naturally hostile to France, but because this land where they, their fathers, sometimes even grandfathers, were born and brought up continues to deny them a dignified existence, or a sense of respect and recognition. No one makes more noise about integration than France does. But the gap between France's rhetoric of equality, and abstract citizenship and its policies of systematic discrimination and hostility to its ethnic minorities could not be greater. Social marginalisation Beyond Paris' official discourse, the reality on the ground, inside the fenced-off rings of wretchedness and misery that border its affluence, is one of chilling social marginalisation, destitution and profound feelings of forced otherness, and exclusion. With more than 20% of those born in France having immigrant parents or grandparents, France is a land of immigrants. Yet France does not perceive itself as a multicultural country. Its national identity is founded on the demand for unconditional assimilation into so-called "republican" and "French" values. Prompted by the myth of cultural and racial uniformity, France insists on keeping its immigrants invisible and turning a blind eye to the endemic racism of its socio- political system. Instead of confronting its spiralling crises with a measure of moral and political responsibility, the French government continues to resort to repression and the greater policisation of the poverty-ridden, rundown suburbs, further stigmatising its African and Arab communities and turning them into a scapegoat for its failures and troubles. Colonial history The corrosive division in France's heart between "indigenous" and "foreigners" is no doubt an extension of the dichotomy of the "inside" and the "outside", which has governed modern colonial French history. The dividing walls between the metropolis and its colonies have now migrated to the heart of France itself, between the bleak ghettoes where yesterday's colonials, today's "immigrants", are confined and the forbidden white centres of power and prosperity. Today, the French slogans of integration and equal citizenship ring hollow. They have been buried deep beneath the boots of policemen, the smoke of burnt cars and rubble of ruined buildings. Of the Revolution's lofty slogans of "egalite, liberte et fraternite" France's colonial victims saw nothing but war fleets, military occupation, economic exploitation and a long trail of blood, suffering and destruction. Their impoverished descendants hear the promises of equality and integration and see nothing but a bottomless pit of voicelessness, weakness and alienation. What we are witnessing today is the fall of the Jacobin Republican model, with its noisy slogans and radical dogmatism. A model that could not defend itself against crises in the French motherland is neither inspiring nor worthy of emulation, in Europe or elsewhere. Soumaya Ghannoushi is a
researcher in the history of ideas at the
School of Oriental & African Studies, University of London.
Taken from Aljazeera Thursday 10 November 2005 . A selection of comments sent to us in response to Soumaya Ghannoushi's article The corrosive division in France. This
is just a defensive article for the Muslim world. What about the
illiteracy among the French Muslims (and Muslims in general)? What
about the lack of integration into the main society (which also applies
to Muslims in other parts of the world)? Yes, it was perfectly right
for the French government to introduce the removal of religious scarves
in the schools - better late than never. Hope the future generations of
Muslims will learn to live in peace through this experience.
John
, Canada
The explanation of the recent events in France is simple: the French were silly enough to believe that they could keep so many poor immigrants in the outskirts of their big cities. Erik
, Russia
Muslims
need to look in the mirror, and stop acting in a way that
brings hatred and disgust upon themselves and their religion. I have
seen too many terrorist acts in the last year, all perpetrated by
Muslims. No wonder French people do not hire them!
Mark
Wiseman, USA
Every country has problems. We have to ask ourselves, what country is better in handling this? I feel, America has a better system in dealing with problems you describe. Michael
Denton, Guam, USA
As a black
American, I watched the violence in France and asked myself,
where is France's Reverend Dr King? If he exists, why has he not
got more media support? Where are the Christians in
Catholic France who should be advocating for equality for all? Be
assured, were it not for determined activist Christians, blacks in the
United States would not be where we are today.
Dorcas Bethel
, USA
It is not the fault of the French, since the same scenario takes place all over Europe. Sons of poor Third World immigrants are alienated, both from their old-fashioned, dogmatic parents who never understood them, and the society that never gave them a chance. It is all utterly predictable, and utterly inevitable. That is why Third World immigration into Europe is a bad idea. Those rioters would be better off in a poor country that respects them, than in a rich country that does not. Klaus
Ammitzboll , Denmark
As a coloured person, I was
treated like a second-class citizen in
France during my travels regardless of my educational and professional
background.
Kamal
Hussain, UK
What is so wrong with a country insists that people living on its soil should share its values? Can a nation exist without this? You do not really analyse this question. For example, can my country be expected to accept people who do not respect its laws? Anthony
Baldwin, Australia
The
recent decision to impose curfew is certainly the worst of all
solutions. It will increase frustration. But why don't you suggest a
tentative approach?
Paul Girod,
Switzerland
Joblessness
among the poor continues to worsen in France
The anger and frustration of the youths wreaking havoc in France's blighted suburbs is directly linked to chronic unemployment and the discrimination many face in the job market, say racism groups and government agencies. Joblessness averaged 20.7% in France's poorest urban areas last year, double the national average, according to a survey of 200 cities and towns conducted for the employment and social cohesion ministry. But the picture is even bleaker for the young - for those aged 15 to 25, the figure is 36% for males and 40% for females. And despite a rally in national job figures this year, unemployment among the poor continues to worsen. Experts say the areas hardest hit by almost two weeks of unrest, which has spread from the capital to cities throughout the country, exhibit similar characteristics - a lack of businesses, large numbers of unemployed with few qualifications or skills, and the issue of skin colour. "Even those who have been through university find themselves unemployed or working in jobs below their qualifications " Samuel Thomas, SOS-Racisme vice-president: "When an accountant finds himself working as a shopkeeper it compounds the hopelessness of the young people coming up ." The Equality and Anti-Discrimination Authority, in its first month of operation in July, logged 400 complaints, half of them about job discrimination, said president Louis Schweitzer. "The first source of discrimination is origin," said Schweitzer, a former chief executive of automaker Renault. Failure With television news programmes showing nightly images of flaming cars and ranks of riot police in helmets and shields, commentators have agonised over France's apparent failure to absorb millions of immigrants from its former colonies. Experts say skin colour is still used to discriminate people. But Guillaume Merzi, of the Integration Council, insisted it would be going too far to say integration had failed entirely. "Several measures have been put in place, which will work over the medium- to long-term. They have to be pursued," he said. The measures are mainly directed at trying to force a wedge through the country's notoriously inflexible labour system, including contracts that cut through red tape-cutting for youngsters to encourage employers to hire more young people. Taxes and fees have been waived for companies setting up in deprived areas on the proviso that they hire at least one-third of their work forces locally. Anonymous CVs Many would like to see a labour law requiring anonymous CVs, which would make it harder for employers to weed out job seekers on the basis of ethnic origin. "It would allow each person to at least defend their application in an interview and to make recruiters aware of the absurdity of their prejudices," said SOS-Racisme. The group has appealed to employment offices to alert legal authorities about employers who choose only "blue-white-red" candidates, those of purely French stock. While anti-racism groups dismiss the diversity charters already drawn up by 200 French businesses as "decoys", some companies such as McDonald's have been credited with making progress in the fight against discrimination. The head of the French employers' federation, Laurence Parisot, has offered to negotiate with unions on the issue of employee diversity. See also earlier articles here on Islamic understanding of Christianity and Islamic intolerance
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