Presse US: France, pays d'inégalité et d'exclusion

[Greg_FR]

La Belle France: A country of equality and exclusion

By Steven Komarow and Rick Hampson, USA TODAY

STAINS, France — Now that the worst rioting seems past, people in poor, North African immigrant enclaves like the one in this Paris suburb wonder what comes next.
Will the street violence that led French officials to declare a 12-day state of emergency mark the beginning of social change, as the U.S. urban race riots did four decades ago? Will it provoke a crackdown, as suggested by a government order Wednesday to deport foreigners convicted for their roles in the violence?
Or will there be some words, a few gestures, but no real change in a system that arguably protects French traditions and culture at the cost of opportunity for, and inclusion of, poor newcomers?
Violence persisted for a 14th night late Wednesday and early Thursday but appeared to be tapering off in Paris and most other localities. Still, four towns in Normandy announced curfews for minors. Nice, Cannes and 19 other towns in the Riviera region announced similar restrictions on minors; some bars in Nice were ordered closed from 10 p.m. to 5 a.m.
Far-right leader Jean-Marie Le Pen, in an interview with the Associated Press, said French nationals of immigrant backgrounds — not just foreigners — should be stripped of their citizenship and sent "back to their country of origin" if they committed crimes.
Azzedine Taibi, an assistant mayor in this town north of Paris, says the young people who rioted for three nights here, burning cars, "are asking for dignity. They don't want make-work jobs. They want real opportunities" — jobs, education, respect.
Without them, says Taibi, a 41-year-old French native of Algerian descent, "even if the violence calms down, it is going to come back and explode into something greater."
Marjorie Nakache, a Paris native who moved here 20 years ago to run the community playhouse, says the violence isn't over: "This is just the beginning. I work with people who don't even have socks, and live 10 people in two rooms," she says. On TV, she adds, they see government ministers with 6,000-square-foot apartments and who won't provide them with more education and work opportunities.
"One part of France doesn't give a damn about the other part of France," she says.
For generations, the French have prided themselves on a colorblind society that welcomes all. But the two weeks of nightly violence have prompted painful national introspection and called into question France's self image as a model of race relations.
Both like and unlike the USA
The same complaints that fueled the fires in inner city Detroit and Los Angeles in the '60s — unemployment, discrimination, despair — are behind the arson and rioting in suburban France. This crisis, however, is uniquely French. A nation that successfully integrated individual foreigners has failed to do the same with masses of them.
"France is fairly egalitarian — for Frenchmen. You have to be a Frenchman, or become one," says Robert Levine, a RAND Corp. scholar who has studied French and American immigration. He and other experts make three points to explain the inequality in a nation that for more than two centuries has championed égalité:
• Unlike America, France didn't experience mass immigration from overseas until after World War II, when large numbers of North Africans, many Muslims, began to arrive. Muslims account for 5% to 10% of France's 60.7 million people.
France excelled at treating outsiders — particularly artists and intellectuals — as equals. It was that way in the 1920s for black singer Josephine Baker. She started out in her native St. Louis babysitting for white families who warned her not to kiss the baby. In Paris, she got more than 1,000 offers of marriage and became Europe's most popular female entertainer.
• More than America, France expects immigrants, no matter their color or creed, to assimilate — to become French. America, which calls itself a melting pot, is really a soup; its immigrant groups have generally retained some of their original culture and affected their new homeland as much as they were affected by it.
Not so in France. In schools, the standard history curriculum begins with the words, "Nos ancêstres, les Gaulois" ("Our ancestors, the Gauls," the pre-national tribe) — no matter that many of the students' ancestors come from Algeria, Morocco and Tunisia.
"The attitude is that the people are French before they are anything else," says Nicolas de Boisgrollier, a Frenchman and visiting fellow at the Brookings Institution's Center on the United States and Europe.
This helps explain why affirmative action — a policy prescription that could help move France's immigrants and their descendants into mainstream society — is even more controversial in France than in the USA: It cuts against the notion that France already embodies its ideal — a nation of legally indistinguishable individuals.

[Greg_FR]

Ironically, the possibility of a French version of affirmative action has been advanced by get-tough Interior Minister Nicolas Sarkozy, blamed for inflaming passions by referring to rioters as "scum."
• More than America's, France's economic policies are designed to protect and preserve its culture and way of life: limited working hours; generous social welfare benefits; legal impediments to firing workers; sheltered industries and farmers and restrictions on entrepreneurs and competition. These policies have contributed to economic stagnation and made life harder for those without jobs or businesses. In some immigrant neighborhoods, joblessness runs as high as 40%, French President Jacques Chirac said Monday.
The Muslim immigrants and their French-born children and grandchildren live largely in housing projects in suburbs like Stains. They are a people apart — Muslims in a nation that was resolutely Christian and now is resolutely secular. French is not their first language nor their favored cuisine. In a nation united by its love of wine, many abstain from alcohol.
There are cracks in the cultural isolation. Arab and North African music has influenced the French pop mainstream. And almost everyone in France is crazy about soccer: The French team that won the World Cup in 1998 and united the country was a model of diversity. But melodies and goals may not be enough. "What you need are jobs," says de Boisgrollier.
On Tuesday, Prime Minister Dominique de Villepin announced a $35 billion plan to provide jobs, scholarships and other opportunities to those in the riot zones. He also said an agency for "social cohesion" would be created to address joblessness and discrimination.
The rioting, which has gone on two weeks, lost strength Wednesday. Car burnings fell by nearly half. Nonetheless, looters and vandals defied the state of emergency with attacks on superstores in northern France and a warehouse in the south.
The emergency decree empowers officials to put troublemakers under house arrest, ban or limit the movement of people and vehicles, confiscate weapons and close public spaces where gangs gather. It also paved the way for local curfews.
The emergency was invoked under a security law that dates to France's post World War II colonial war in Algeria, the ancestral home of some of the rioting immigrants.
'A sense of shame and surprise'
The trouble started Oct. 27 when two teenagers of Mauritanian and Tunisian descent were electrocuted while hiding from police in a power substation in a Paris suburb. Rioting soon spread to metropolitan areas across the nation.
"A sense of shame and surprise ... seems to be permeating" France, says Robin Niblett, director of the Europe program at the Center for Strategic and International Studies in Washington. "All the things that used to be thrown in America's face have really brought home to folks (in Europe) the real cost of the lack of integration of immigrant populations."
Americans have a more serious concern — that the French neighborhoods producing arsonists and vandals may in the future breed terrorists. "Islamic radicalism isn't just something that is emerging in the refugee camps in Lebanon," says Niblett. "What the U.S. does need to be worried about ... is the extent to which some individuals might be radicalized by this small taste of violence."
Levine, the RAND analyst, says his study of Los Angeles 35 years after the Watts race riots of 1965 showed that the violence focused attention on the problem "and started a process of change."
Levine says he's not optimistic the French riots will have a similarly beneficial affect. "There will be a lot of words about change and some changes," he says. But because of the nation's attachment to the traditions of La Belle France, "it will revert back to the way it was."
His skepticism was echoed by Malki Mohand, 18, a student of Algerian descent who lives in Stains: "The government has said so many things, and there's been so little action, it's hard to expect change."

[Greg_FR]

Europe needs its immigrants

By Helena Cobban
CHARLOTTESVILLE, VA. – The race riots that have rocked France for the past two weeks have been violent and harmful - but noticeably disorganized. Their lack of clear organization may make it harder to find a way to end them. But it also offers the hope that smart action by the French authorities can calm the situation and hasten the launching of a deep new national dialogue over what it means to be "French" today.
The scale and duration of these riots show that this dialogue is needed now more than ever before. If it fails to occur, attitudes among the mainly immigrant youth who have rioted might soon harden, and extremist might organizations start to exercise more sway within France's long-marginalized banlieues (suburbs).
The vast majority of rioters are young men of North African or West African origin. Many are reportedly not just citizens of France but also members of the second or third generation of their families to live in Europe. But despite having grown up immersed in French culture, many continue to experience strong discrimination. They feel excluded from the social and economic mainstream. Though they receive relatively generous welfare benefits, unemployment among members of long-established immigrant communities is often three or four times the already high national average. Even French citizens with degrees from prestigious universities have trouble finding jobs if they look "too dark-skinned" or have "Muslim-sounding" names - and especially if they are women who choose to wear Muslim-style head scarves. Indeed, the French government has resolutely upheld recent legislation that forbids schoolgirls from wearing Muslim head coverings.
The government has enforced this law on the grounds of its strong commitment to "secularism." To be truly French, this law seems to say, you have to act in a totally secular manner in public places. It is not a position that encourages diversity or dialogue.
Many other European countries now also face the challenge of redefining their relationships to communities of citizens of non-European origin. Across Europe, sheer demographics has, for the past half-century, driven a large and sustained inflow of immigrants. Birthrates among the continent's "natives" have been falling for decades. In a number of European countries, the average number of births to each woman has fallen to 1.3. (The rate for "replacement" of population is 2.1. The US rate is 2.0.) Carrie Douglass, an anthropologist at Virginia's Mary Baldwin College, has noted that for large numbers of European young people, the version of "the good life" that they seek is no longer one that includes having children. Economic planners recognize that "native" Europeans need working-age immigrants to support these countries' rapidly aging "native" populations.
The emergence of large communities of citizens of non-European heritage has posed a distinct challenge to many European countries, and they have responded in very different ways. When I grew up in England in the 1950s, immigrants from Pakistan and the Caribbean were already a recognizable and constructive part of the local culture and economy. In 1981, when my son attended a preschool in West London, he was the only boy in his class not sporting a top-knot of hair secured with a Sikh-style kerchief. (But his little Sikh-British classmates all spoke far better "West London English" than he did.)
At some levels, Britain seems to have done a better job than France of managing cultural diversity. But Britain has also seen the emergence of a generation of citizens of South Asian or Caribbean origin who have felt it hard to know where or how to "fit in." Several British cities have seen race riots over recent years. In addition, some young British citizens, having gravitated to Al Qaeda, committed the deadly London transit bombings of July.
Germany has worked hard to build a good relationship with the long- established communities of Turkish-origin and other nonnative citizens who originally entered the country as guest workers - but it ended up as an unwitting host to several key cells of Al Qaeda organizers. Culturally liberal Spain hosted the immigrant individuals who killed 191 people in the July 2004 train bombings in Madrid. And in the liberal Netherlands last year, a violent Islamist of Moroccan descent - born in West Amsterdam - killed filmmaker Theo van Gogh.

[Greg_FR]

These are not easy issues to address. In Europe, as throughout much of US history, members of native-born populations often fear the arrival and integration of newcomers; yet, in all these cases, the interdependence between the "natives" and the newcomers is real. So far - though there have been many quite unwarranted episodes of antiimmigrant violence - thankfully few voices in Europe have called for "kicking the newcomers out." But so far, too, no country in Europe has done a satisfactory job of "welcoming the newcomers in."
In France, the challenge is particularly urgent. Even while the authorities plan how to restore order, they should also be planning the searching nationwide dialogue that needs to follow.

[Milcham]

Pour une fois je trouve qu'ils ont été objectifs et realistes

[nwidiya]

Envoyé par Milcham Pour une fois je trouve qu'ils ont été objectifs et realistes

et quand ils disent muslims riots tu les trouves objectifs et realistes?

ps: aandek collégue je rigole!

[Milcham]

Là non bien sur quoi que nous en avons pas mal des riots muslim chez nous aussi

[nwidiya]

Envoyé par Milcham Là non bien sur quoi que nous en avons pas mal des riots muslim chez nous aussi

walahela!


en tout cas j'ai vu ça au zapping! et que les ztazni se rejouissaient de ce ki se passe en france et il a meme rajouté que c'est ce que la france a recolté quand elle s'est opposé à la guerre en irak!

pfffffffffffffffffffffffffffff portnawak

[Milcham]

Envoyé par nwidiya walahela! en tout cas j'ai vu ça au zapping! et que les ztazni se rejouissaient de ce ki se passe en france et il a meme rajouté que c'est ce que la france a recolté quand elle s'est opposé à la guerre en irak! pfffffffffffffffffffffffffffff portnawak

Les Us sont un pays qui s auto détruira tout seul et ils ont pas besoin de nous pour cela
la France avancera et reglera ses problèmes
mais eux leur problèmes ne font que commencer

[lola13]

Envoyé par Milcham Pour une fois je trouve qu'ils ont été objectifs et realistes

Comparer ce qui se passe actuellement dans les banlieues françaises à la situation des noirs aux US dans les 60's, je ne trouve pas ça vraiment réaliste...
Et puis, ça fait un bail que nos livres d'histoire ne commencent plus par "nos ancêtres les gaulois"... et heureusement !