[Mb-civic] France Beefs Up Response to Riots - Washington Post

[William Swiggard]

France Beefs Up Response to Riots
Plan Includes Curfews, More Police Officers

By Molly Moore
Washington Post Foreign Service
Tuesday, November 8, 2005; Page A01

PARIS, Nov. 7 -- In a television address to the nation Monday night, 
France's prime minister, Dominique de Villepin, announced his 
government's new plan to curb riots that have spread to 300 French towns 
and cities in the last 12 days: 1,500 additional police officers on the 
streets, local curfews, parental intervention and more educational 
opportunities for students in affected suburbs.

Even as Villepin spoke, another night of violence broke out, as young 
men in the southern city of Toulouse set fire to a city bus and threw 
rocks at police officers. In the Paris suburbs, where the unrest began, 
rioters set fire to a junior high school and a hospital.

Confronted by the most dramatic social uprising since 1968, the 
government of France remains largely helpless against gangs of angry 
youths. The response is being crafted by a lame-duck president and an 
interior minister and a prime minister who are slugging it out to 
replace him.

While many French leaders depict the rioters as simple criminals, 
political and social analysts and many French citizens see the fires 
that are burning across the country as reflecting a growing identity 
crisis in a nation where social policies have not kept up with rapidly 
changing profiles in religion, race and ethnicity.

"France is in a social and economic crisis," said Michelle Rosso, a 
43-year-old music teacher from the town of Bagnolet in the northern 
suburbs of Paris, where the unrest has been most intense. "It's similar 
to the U.S. civil rights movement in the '60s. The integration policies 
of this country clearly do not work."

Most of the rioters are the French-born children of immigrants from Arab 
and African countries. A large percentage are Muslim. Their parents' 
generation was invited to France as laborers who were expected to return 
home but didn't. The new generation is coming of age in the midst of 
France's worst economic slump in years and during a time when many in 
the country, which is culturally Christian but officially secular, are 
increasingly fearful of the growth of Islam inside its borders.

At present, the country has an estimated 6 million Muslims, most of 
African descent. The fear of losing France's traditional white European 
identity fueled French voters' rejection of the proposed European Union 
constitution last summer and has heightened French opposition to 
admitting Muslim Turkey into the E.U.

"The government hasn't really realized we're facing a major political 
crisis," said Patrick Lozes, a political activist and president of the 
Circle for the Promotion of Diversity in France. "The French social 
model is exploding."

In a country that has prided itself on its egalitarian social system, 
Lozes said, "black people and Arab people are not really considered to 
be from this country. They are considered an inferior group."

"People are shouting they want to be equal," said Christophe Bertossi, 
an immigration specialist at the French Institute for International 
Relations. "And the government is treating them as if they were 
criminals or terrorists."

Sunday night and Monday morning brought a new peak of violence, with an 
estimated 1,400 vehicles torched in Paris and other French cities. 
Several cars were burned in Brussels, where the E.U. is headquartered, 
and half a dozen in Berlin, raising concerns in other European capitals 
that the violence is spreading to their territory.

On Monday, a 61-year-old man died of injuries sustained last week when 
he was attacked while trying to extinguish a fire in trash bin. He was 
the first fatality since two Muslim teenagers were electrocuted in a 
power substation while trying to evade a police checkpoint on Oct. 27. 
That incident touched off the rioting.

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http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2005/11/07/AR2005110700295.html?referrer=email
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