France:
Eleven days of rioting across France
Establishment’s cultivated image of ‘equality for all’ goes up
in flames
Days of riots across France have profoundly shaken the French
establishment and the political elite. An outpouring of unstoppable rage
has crisscrossed France for eleven days in a row, in the course of which
cars, police stations and banks were set on fire in poor districts in
cities and towns.
Karl Debbaut, CWI
Last weekend, Jacques Chirac, the French President, called for the
restoration of public order. His call, like other appeals from the
political establishment, seems to have had no calming effect,
whatsoever. Since 27 October, 34 police men have been injured, almost
4700 vehicles destroyed and 1,200 people arrested.
Teenagers killed
The French and international media have paid a lot of attention to
the developments in France. Unfortunately, most of these outlets play a
role, conscious or unconscious, in obscuring the facts that initiated
the outbreak of violence.
There is conclusive evidence that the police are directly responsible
for the deaths of two teenagers in Clichy-sous-Bois. The police hunted
down three teenagers when they ran away from a police identity check on
the night of 27 October. In a desperate bid to escape the police, the
three teenagers, Muttin, Bouna and Zyed, climbed over the wall of an
electricity sub-station. Two of them, Bouna Traore and Zyed Benna, got
stuck in the generator. Only Muttin got out, but suffering severe burns
on one side of his body. Later that evening, when he and other locals
went back to the power station, they found the other two teenagers dead.
Police checks are a daily occurance in the poorest districts of the
greater French cities, and are part of an ongoing campaign of
intimidation, often accompanied with racism, by the special police
forces, the CRS. Ali Meziane, a local councillor in Clichy-sous-Bois,
recently commented on the three teenagers deaths, "You have to ask
the question, why the police hunted them down, driving them into a wall.
And the police never contacted EDF [the electricity company] to inform
them of what had happened".
On the morning after the death of the two youths, the French Interior
Minister, Nicolas Sarkozy, a rival of the present Prime Minister
Villepin in the race to become the candidate for the right wing in the
2007 presidential elections, declared that the teenagers were fleeing
because they were involved in a burglary and that the police could not
be held responsible. Even when it became clear that the three youths had
nothing to do with a burglary the Interior Minister refused to withdraw
his comments.
The deaths sparked a day of rioting in Clichy, which was followed by
several more days of violence in the area. When the CRS the riot police
went into another borough of Clichy, on Sunday 30 October, they succeed
in starting violence in an area previously untouched by the riots. The
CRS fired tear gas canisters in the direction of the mosque, when
prayers were taking place, and one of the canisters exploded inside the
mosque.
Poverty, repression and racism
Over the past week, riots spread from the outskirts of Paris to other
cities, such as Lille, Evreux, Rouen, Strasbourg, Rennes, Nantes,
Toulouse, Marseille, Cannes and Nice. In total, 300 cities have been hit
by rioting. These different areas all have poorer boroughs like
Clichy-sous-Bois. These are modern-day ghettos, where half of the
inhabitants are under 20 years old, unemployment is above 40%, and
identity checks and police harassment occur daily. These are places in
which the poorest ‘subjects of the Republic’ are crowded into
ghettos and suffer unemployment, racism, poverty, and dependence on
government grants and family benefits. The authorities try to hold the
residents of these areas in check by the strong arm of the police.
While big companies in France, as elsewhere in Europe, have announced
record profits over the last few years, the working people and poor of
France have paid for it with greater work ‘flexibility’, cuts in
public services and more unemployment. Official unemployment stands at
over 10%, youth unemployment (under 25 years) stands at 23%, and for
French-born young people of Arab descent the figure is at least 27%. Is
it any wonder one of the rioters in Aulnay-sous-Bois recently said to
journalists, "Jobs? There are a few at the airport and at the
Citroën plant, but it’s not even worth trying if your name is
Mohammed or Abdelaoui"
Protesters’ demands
Generally speaking, the young people involved in the riots have not
expressed a clear set of political demands. That does not mean that
there the riots have no political character. From the beginning of the
street fighting, one of the most common sentiments made in all the
cities affected is that the arch-right wing Interior Minister, Nicolas
Sarkozy, must immediately resign. Sarkozy is the most verbal
representative of the neo-liberal right wing in France. He likes to
grandstand on ‘law and order’. His comments over the last days
included calling the rioters "vermin" and "scum",
blaming the violence on "agent provocateurs", and claiming the
riots are organised by "drug barons", or "Islamist
radicals". Two days before the riots started, on October 25,
Sarkozy called for "crime ridden neighbourhoods to be cleaned out
with Kärcher" – a high powered industrial hose – and described
youths who protested against his visit to the Parisian suburb of
Argenteuil as "gangrene" and "rabble". Sarkozy tries
to promote the image that a coming together of ‘out of control youth’,
‘criminal elements’ and ‘Islamists’ have taken over the poorest
suburbs.
Some of these sentiments are echoed by the right wing press in
European countries like Britain. Jumping on the ‘war against terror’
bandwagon, the media use what is happened in France to further their
unending attempts to sponsor prejudice against Muslims and to promote
racism, by suggesting that what is taking place in France is in some way
connected with Al Qeada terrorism.
Class divisions
Although a very high number of people living in the poorest French
neighbourhoods are from Arab, African or Caribbean descent, this does
not mean events in France can be reduced to riots fuelled by ethnic or
religious divisions. Indeed, on the estates, amongst the disaffected
youth, there is a great feeling of unity against the police and the
political bosses of the police. These youth react against being treated
like second class citizens, being constant victims of state and every
day racism, and see no future for themselves.
The division between the ‘haves’ and the ‘have nots’ in
French society is very deep. When Gérard Gaudron, the right wing mayor
of Aulnay-sous-Bois, organised a local march to appeal for calm, he
succeeded in driving a wedge between the inhabitants of the more
affluent neighbourhoods and those who live in the poor boroughs, by
blaring out the ‘Marseillaise’, the French national anthem, through
speakers, at the start of the demonstration. The inhabitants of the
poorer neighbourhoods, among them many immigrants or people descended
from immigrants, regarded the mayor’s actions, correctly, as an
insult. "This sends [out] the message that all the rioters are
immigrants", said Ben Amar, a local resident, adding "Who has
built the metro, who has dug the channel tunnel? We did. For us, the
immigrants, those who are strange to us, are those in government".
One of the youth that took part in the riots in Aulnay-sous-Bois, in
the Parisian district of Seine-Saint-Denis, expressed the same opinions
to journalists when he was asked how he felt about being French. "I
am part of Mille-Mille [a housing estate in Aulnay] and
Seine-Saint-Denis, but I am not part of Sarkozy’s France, or even the
France of our local mayor whom we never see."
This points, on the one hand, to deepening of class divisions in
France society, while, on the other hand, to a cry of desperation, a
feeling of helplessness in the most downtrodden city areas, when faced
when the onslaught of neo-liberal attacks and cuts in education, social
provisions and public services.
The Chirac government is determined not to bend under the pressure of
recent workers’ industrial action, including strikes, but to push on
with its programme of cutting government spending, privatising public
services, and promoting ‘flexibility’ in the labour market.
Of course, to riot, to burn and to destroy what is left of local
infrastructure is not a solution. Local inhabitants in the poorest areas
are the first victims of the capitalist system and the policies of the
government and should not be made to suffer even more. The same goes for
the bus drivers and emergency services people, including ambulance staff
and the fire fighters, caught up in the rioting.
It is not by burning cars, shops or banks that Sarkozy and the
government’s policies will be stopped. Riots are acts of desperations
and destruction that hit working class areas the hardest and are
anything but an effective struggle against Sarkozy and neo-liberalism.
On the contrary, the riots are used by Sarkozy and the government to
increase repression, including curfews in some areas, and to try to
introduce more repressive legislation.
Working class people and youth need a collective and organised
political response to the policies of Sarkozy, to police repression and
discrimination, and to the main political parties, at both national and
local government levels. The UMP (President Chirac’s governing party)
led coalition government is carrying out the worst social devastation in
post WW2 France. These attacks on working conditions, living standards
and the welfare state were started by ‘Gauche Plurielle’ government
of the PS (Socialist Party), the PCF (Communist Party) and the Greens.
To halt this devastation, working people need to rely on their
collective strength and independent organisation.
The French working class has organised tremendous battles to try and
halt this brutal bosses’ offensive. However it is clear this battle
cannot be won on the industrial front alone. It also needs a political
response; the formation of a fighting party of the working class,
defending the interests of the poor and downtrodden against capitalism,
and which struggles for a democratic, socialist society.
