[Mb-civic] The fires in France - Boston Globe Editorial

[William Swiggard]

The fires in France

November 5, 2005

COMMENTING ON the 1973 Arab oil embargo, former French president Valery 
Giscard d'Estaing once observed that the West was paying the price for 
the 19th century, by which he meant the legacy of European colonialism. 
It is very difficult today for the French political class to acknowledge 
that France is paying the price for its treatment of people from its own 
colonial territories, but that is the veiled meaning of the violence 
perpetrated night after night by rampaging youths from the segregated 
slums ringing Paris and other French cities.

There are close to 2 million people, mostly immigrants and the children 
and grandchildren of immigrants, living in 300 agglomerations of 
high-rise housing projects. Wittingly or not, the French urban planners 
and politicians who created these overcrowded, stultifying ghettos were 
preparing the way for the criminal gangs, the Islamist radicalism, and 
the de facto apartheid that characterize these crucibles of anger and 
alienation.

The vapid posturing of leading French politicians such as Prime Minister 
Dominique de Villepin and Interior Minister Nicolas Sarkozy -- two 
conservative contenders to replace President Jacques Chirac if he 
declines to run for a third term -- illustrates how hard it is for the 
French political elite to confront a crisis that has been festering for 
decades. Sarkozy started out by talking tough and alleging, without 
evidence, that the riots had been organized; he didn't say by whom. De 
Villepin left local officials in riot-torn communities nonplussed when 
he declared that by the end of this month he would announce a plan for 
the ghetto dwellers of the ''banlieux" -- the overwhelmingly North 
African and black African slums on the outskirts of French urban areas.

Local officials say they need effective action from the government, not 
the umpteenth plan from high functionaries who would use the present 
crisis to advance their presidential ambitions.

To quell the immediate crisis, French police unions have requested 
curfews and asked for troops from the military to provide 
reinforcements. These police proposals reflect the gravity of the 
disorder, underlining how unprepared the French establishment has been 
to cope with riots that are taking on the qualities of a rebellion that 
could foreshadow a more political revolt of France's unassimilated, 
unaccepted minorities.

To cope with its postcolonial crisis, France will have to change its 
ways profoundly. It must not only open up to economic reforms that 
Chirac has denounced as the ultraliberal Anglo-Saxon model but will also 
have to recognize that populations confined in ghettos and victimized by 
discrimination cannot be expected to assimilate. France's republican 
values have been wanting not only in the rioters setting fires to cars, 
buses, and warehouses these nights.

http://www.boston.com/news/globe/editorial_opinion/editorials/articles/2005/11/05/the_fires_in_france/