Police are moving in at least platoon strength, under the cover of armored vehicles; their weaponry has also changed: instead of rubber batons, gas guns and stun guns have appeared. There are rumors that if this continues, the police will be issued combat weapons. In the night, shots ring out and sirens wail. So what is happening in Paris?
Poor Districts
The northern Parisian suburb of Clichy (its full name is Clichy-sous-Bois) is familiar to many tourists with a middle-low income: there are dozens of small hotels here that accept clients with modest means who want to spend a few days in Paris but are intimidated by the biting prices of the French capital. The local surroundings somewhat resemble our typical urban new-build districts: standard prefab high-rises are interspersed with streets of old, even dilapidated houses. Clichy is connected to the city center by the metro, Line 3, whose terminus, Mare de Clichy, is right on the central square. Once it was one of the bedroom communities of the so-called Greater Paris—workers and office employees lived here, whose income, though steady, did not allow them to consider themselves 'wealthy bourgeois.'
This situation began to change back in the 70s, when France hospitably opened its doors to political refugees from its former African colonies. Thousands arrived in those years, and over the following decades tens of thousands 'followed.' During the days of prosperity and well-being, the French were only happy to have cheap labor, but by the end of the 80s everything had changed: unemployment began to rise—first slowly, then like an avalanche. Worse, unskilled labor (and most immigrants, alas, cannot boast of any particular qualifications) was needed almost nowhere. French farmers had become accustomed to using foreign workers from Croatia as seasonal laborers; construction sites are staffed by Polish crews; and for immigrants from the Maghreb countries, work is found only in small shops doing auxiliary tasks and in small factories as 'shock workers' who do the carrying.
However, immigration legislation did not change for decades, and Africans kept coming and coming to France in search of a better life. Specifically to France, because French is the native language of Algerians and Moroccans, natives of Chad and Burkina Faso. They arrived, settled in the cheap districts of big cities, where low rents allowed them to somehow survive. The French state, in its generosity, allocated social assistance to them and their families, and then conveniently forgot about them. The most active of the newcomers opened their own small shops and took up trade; some found work, but these were an absolute minority.
Follow the American Example?
Their children, who grew up in France, or sometimes were even born there, went to schools 'for the poor' and lived on the same social welfare. Now this generation has grown up—in its own closed little world, where adults speak a broken mixture of Arabic and French, where the chief entertainment is a television showing a different, beautiful life that they have no money for and no hope of earning... Somewhere out there, beyond this little world, other people live, the French—they are rich, they do not like blacks, and they have fraudulently taken possession of everything that rightfully belongs to them, the unfortunate and oppressed... Classic conditions of Harlem—a closed space with its own laws, with drugs and youth gangs, wall-to-wall brawls and lawlessness.
America is familiar with such phenomena. Whether it knows how to fight the cause is another question. However, American police have learned to fight the consequences. For their French colleagues, the events now taking place are a real shock. As the guardians of order themselves admit, they feel as if the action of a bad Hollywood action movie is unfolding around them. Theoretically, there is nothing surprising in this—the number of 'abandoned' children of immigrants was bound to reach a critical point someday. The French authorities simply overlooked that moment. As a result, Paris is almost under martial law, with patrols and raids everywhere. And the riot is spreading—from Clichy, bands of rampaging marauders have spread to Hauts-de-Seine, Seine-et-Marne, and Val-d'Oise; the poorest district of Greater Paris, Saint-Denis, has flared up; thousands of bandits are already participating in the disorders, the number of wounded is in the hundreds, and the material damage from robberies and pogroms is impossible to calculate, because nothing has ended yet...
The formal pretext for all these events was the death of two teenagers whom a police patrol attempted to detain: the young drug dealers, fleeing arrest, could think of nothing better than to jump over the fence of a transformer substation directly onto exposed wires. Their friends swore to 'avenge the cops'—and off it went. However, if anyone should think to ask the rioters whether they know anything about this incident, one cannot count on a coherent verbal answer. Perhaps only a blow from a baseball bat to the teeth. As the unforgettable Porthos said: 'I fight because I fight!' By the way, this immortal aphorism, if we believe Dumas, he uttered right in Saint-Denis. He hardly thought that he would find so many black followers.
And it is unlikely that President Jacques Chirac and Prime Minister Dominique de Villepin, vying with each other to call on the rioting marauders to calm down, will get through to them. And even if they do, it is unlikely that the 'children of the basements,' who speak broken French, will understand their grammatically flawless verbal constructions. Their language is the language of sticks and baseball bats, the language of knives and pistols. The disease has passed its latent stage and entered the acute phase. And who is the surgeon who will dare to operate?
Boris ALTNER.
IA Rosbalt