France's fiery urban unrest has now reached the heart of Paris. The 10 nights of violence have now moved from the rural poor to include the urban neighborhoods of wealth. This latest assault in a West European capital which is heavily guarded is an alarming turn and most unnerving for the French and those outside their border with similar powder-keg immigration problems. What apparently began as an isolated incident on the outskirts of Paris — the accidental electrocution of two Muslim teenagers — has now spread across France with no sign that it is coming to an end.
The violence has forced the French to confront long-simmering anger in poor suburbs ringing the big cities which are mainly populated by immigrants and their French-born families, often from Muslim North Africa. These are the zones of high unemployment, discrimination and despair, fertile terrain for crime of all sorts of extremists and frustrated youths.
For all their frightening dimensions the riots have not taken on the qualities of a full-scale rebellion. But because of the sheer speed by which the riots are spreading and the inability of the authorities to halt them, there is a sense that a revolution of sorts is in the making. At the very least, in order to cope with its unassimilated, unaccepted minorities, France must recognize that populations confined in ghettos and victimized by discrimination are live cinder boxes waiting to explode. Some already have.
Racial discrimination is supposedly banned in France. But one would not think so judging by the official statistics. Unemployment among people of French origin is 9.2 percent. Among those of foreign origin, the figure is 14 percent. It comes as no surprise that the many towns in suburban Paris that have been hit worst by the riots are marked by high unemployment (more than double the national average), widespread poverty, a younger population, unchecked crime, violence and, until recently, minimal police presence. Nor should it come as a surprise that these towns of second- and third-generation immigrant poor, crammed into high-rise public housing and politically disenfranchised — there is no black or Arab TV presenters, and all MPs from mainland France are white — are the origin of so much unrest and upheaval.
There are five million Muslims in France, the largest Islamic population in Western Europe, but they are by all accounts the least cared for. Now they and their grievances have come to the fore and the test facing French authorities is huge. Officials say they are determined to stop the unrest, employing either the carrot or the stick, but nobody seems to know how or when the fighting will stop. The rioting not only continues, but is reaching a new intensity, in part because these are not organized criminal gangs behind the violence who can be rounded up and locked up relatively easy. This is a spontaneous outburst for recognition, following decades of simmering, by those living on society’s margins.
And People who have been ignored for decades do not cool down overnight.
