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' banlieus
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.
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"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...
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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 banlieus (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.
The opinions expressed here are the author's and
do not necessarily reflect the editorial position or have the
endorsement of Aljazeera.