Paris is Burning: Racism and Repression Explode in Week of Uprisingsvarious imcers 05 Nov 2005 09:56 GMT
Africans living and working in Paris have been pushed into ghettoized suburbs of Paris (banlieue), where the state has withdrawn education, health, and other services, while increasing police presence, checkpoints, raids on sans-papiers and levels of oppression in general. This week the suburbs have exploded.
The trigger came on Thursday, October 27th, 2005, as a group of 10 highschool kids were playing soccer in the Paris suburb of Clichy-sous-Bois. When police arrived to do ID checks, the kids ran away and hid, because some of them had no ID. Three of the children hid in an electrical transformer building of EDF and were electrocuted. Two of them, Ziad Benn (17) and Banou Traoré (15), died; the third, Metin (21), was severely injured.
On Saturday morning, 1000 joined in a march organised by religious associations and mosques in Clichy-sous-Bois. Representatives of the Muslim community appealed for calm and marchers wore T-shirts saying mort pour rien ("dead for nothing"). The mayor of Clichy, Claude Dilain, called for an enquiry into the deaths of the two boys. All eyes were on Interior Minister Nicolas Sarkozy. The response? As people were gathering in the mosques for the Night of Destiny, the most sacred night in the month of Ramadan, a night people usually spent at the mosque, the empty streets of the Cité du Chêne Pointu filled with about 400 CRS militant riot police and gendarmes, blocking off the neighborhood. Yet very few people allowed themselves to be provoked into breaking the sanctity of this night, despite racist insults from the police.
On Sunday, however, provocation turned into outrage as the
women's prayer room at de Bousquets mosque was teargassed by police. As people stumbled out gasping for air, the policemen called the women "whores", "bitches" and other insults.
[ Reports from Paris IMC (fr): one | two | three | four ] [ Eyewitness account in English: UK IMC kersplebedeb ]
Ever since that night, Clichy-sous-Bois has been burning, with the insurrection spreading on Monday to Seine-Saint-Denis and on Tuesday night (November 1st) to nine other Parisian suburbs. A week after the death of the two boys, the uprising is spreading throughout France -- to Dijon, Bouches-du-Rhone and Rouen.
In a press conference held on Monday, community-based activists named the causes of the continuing unrest: "Clichy is one of the poorest municipalities in France and community groups have less and less money to work with." Things are tense as the press conference draws to a close: young people share their stories, women explain what they experienced and saw first hand. A common theme in all these accounts is anger at the police, who are carrying out more and more foolish – and often illegal – "muscular" interventions, and at the authorities in the ministry who are not condemning the gas attack against the mosque.
There was a consensus that, in order to calm things down, the police should leave the area... instead, Minister Sarkozy has announced a "zero tolerance" policy, labelling the suburban youth as "scum" and vowing to "clean out" troubled suburbs. Sarkozy's position has divided the cabinet, with Prime Minister de Villepin apparently rebuking Mr Sarkozy.
http://www.indymedia.org/en/2005/11/827280.shtmlhttp://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2005_Paris_suburb_riotsParis_riots_satellite
Departments affected by (mostly sporadic) riots as of 5 November.
Immediate causeOn Thursday October 27, 2005, a group of 10 high school children were playing soccer in the Paris suburb of Clichy-sous-Bois. When Police arrived to conduct immigration-ID checks, the children ran away to hide. Three teenagers, thinking they were being chased by the police, climbed a wall to hide in a power substation[9] [10]. Two of the teenagers, Ziad Benna (17) and Banou Traoré (15), were electrocuted by a transformer in the electrical relay substation. The third man, Metin (21), was severely injured. He claims to have no memory of the incident [11].
There is controversy over whether or not the teens were actually chased. The local prosecutor, François Molins, has said they believed so, but the police were actually after other suspects attempting to avoid an identity check [12]. Molins and the French Interior Minister Nicolas Sarkozy maintain that the dead teenagers had not been "physically pursued" by the police. This is disputed by some: The Australian reports that "Despite denials by police officials and Mr. Sarkozy and Mr. de Villepin, friends of the boys said they were being pursued by police after a false accusation of burglary and that they 'feared interrogation'" [13]. However, there are no neutral eyewitness reports that contradict the official version of the facts. An investigation is still under way.
Then, Sunday night, a tear gas canister of the type used by French police was fired into the Mosque de Bousquets[14]. At the time it was full of Muslims who were spending the night praying to celebrate Laylat al-Qadr, the holiest night in Ramadan. As people left the mosque, choking on tear gas, they were allegedly met by insults from police officers, and told to leave the area [15]. Police are reported to have been provoking citizens in other districts with racial slurs. [16]
Meanwhile, the Minister of the Interior Nicolas Sarkozy, who heads the national police and is widely believed to be a candidate in the French Presidential election, vowed that he would get rid of "scum" and "riffraff"[17][18]. Previously, the 20th of June 2005, he had said he would clean the suburbs with a Kärcher (in other words, he essentially said the suburbs should be hosed down and the undesirables washed away with high-pressure water), which might have played a role in the exasperation of the rioters. After Sarkozy made these statements the parents of the dead youths refused a planned meeting with the hardline conservative minister [19], choosing instead to meet with Prime Minister of France Dominique de Villepin.
The teenagers deaths, the tear gasing at the mosque, and statements by police seem to have ignited pre-existing tensions. Protesters told the Associated Press the unrest was an expression of frustration with high unemployment (reaching 50% in some neighborhoods) [20] and police harassment in the areas. One protester said, "People are joining together to say we've had enough," and continued, "We live in ghettos. Everyone lives in fear." [21][22] The rioters' suburbs are also home to a large North African immigrant population, adding ethnic and religious tensions which many believe contribute further to such frustrations. Adding to the religious tensions, an incendiary device was tossed at the wall of a synagogue Pierrefitte. It remains to be seen whether this will elicit a response from the French Jewish community, many of whose members fear to wear Jewish symbols for fear of attack by Muslim youth [23]. For further discussion on the background of the conflicts, see below.
Underlying causes The neutrality of this section is disputed. Please view the article's talk page.
History of violence in affected areas
Seine-Saint-Denis has had one of the highest violent crime rates of all French départements. Interior Minister Nicolas Sarkozy said in an October 2005 interview with Le Monde that vandalism and violent crime (including hate crimes) are a matter of daily life in suburbs all over France, and claimed that so far this year 9000 police cars had been stoned, and 20 to 40 cars were torched each night.[79]. The Gendarmerie Nationale reported 2,432 vehicles torched and 12,362 incidents of urban violence in 2004.[80]. In October 2001, a synagogue in Clichy-sous-Bois was attacked with a Molotov cocktail and the same synagogue was attacked again in August 2002 [81] The French newspaper Le Figaro reports that on October 27, 2005 a 56 year old white man was beaten to death by a group of youths in Epinay, in front of his wife and daughter. [82]
The Union nationale des syndicats autonomes (UNSA) des policiers, a police work union, has suggested that recent budget cuts in the "proximity police" ("police de proximité", police units in charge for preventing crime and tensions in the "cités") should be reversed. [83]
Poverty
According to The Guardian, "the unrest has highlighted tensions between wealthy big cities and their grim ghettoised banlieues, home to immigrants from the Maghreb and West Africa who have never been fully integrated into French society and have become an underclass for whom hopelessness and discrimination are normal." The BBC described "discontent among many French youths of North African origin" and discrimination against immigrants, highlighting that "the pressure group SOS Racisme regularly highlights cases of employers discarding applicants with foreign names."
Racial and religious tensions
Main article: Islam in France
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2005_Paris_suburb_riots#Racial_and_religious_tensio...
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