France's black anger

Martin Walker:

It still smells of smoke along the Rue Henri-Barbusse in the French suburb of Aubervilliers, but the skeletons of burned-out cars are cold now and look oddly like randomly parked pieces of modern sculpture in the shadow of the giant Quatre-Chemins housing estate that saw some of the worst riots in the two-week spasm of riots that swept France.

The sullen faces that gaze on the handiwork of the local rioters and sneer at the vans of the riot police are black rather than brown: Africans from Mali and Martinique rather than Arabs from Algeria and Morocco.

Dressed in expensive sneakers and track suits with designer logos, with the white wires of iPod headphones snaking from their ears, they look neither poor nor much intimidated by the police patrols that now dominate their quarter. The young blacks refuse to talk to white reporters, turning silently away to spit and talk among themselves.

"You (expletives) wouldn't dare show your faces round here if it wasn't for the (expletive) cops," says one, using the slang term "keufs" for the police.

He may be right. Taxi drivers will not come here. Black adults seem cowed by the gangs of their own young people, glancing at them nervously if they stop to talk.

"We still have to live here when this is all over," muttered Bakil Anelka, who came to France eight years ago from Ivory Coast and works as a cleaner for the Metro. "The police will not stay here forever, but the gangs will still be here, back in charge of this district. As soon as I can, I'm moving. I don't want my kids to grow up here."

One of the striking features of the two weeks of rage that swept France is that so many of the rioters are black rather than Arab, though North Africans from Algeria and Morocco and Tunisia make up more than two-thirds of the estimated 6 million immigrants, their families included, in France.

Another important element is that in places where the rioters were "beurs," as the French Arabs call themselves, Islam and religion seemed to play only a minor role. A tear gas bomb fired into the mosque of Clichy-sous-Bois on the first day of the riots infuriated local Muslims, but there have been no Islamic slogans and no taunts against the French as Christians. They are identified instead, by young blacks and beurs alike, as the Gaulois, the Gauls, a taunting reference to the way French primary schools traditionally begin their history lessons with the phrase "Our ancestors, the Gauls..."

Local Islamic leaders who tried to calm the young mobs have been routinely ignored, as have the fatwas issued by the leading Imams saying rioting and attacks on innocent people are against Islam.

"It was the people from this congregation who called for calm when the tear gas grenade was fired into our mosque," Abdel-Rahman Boubout, the mosque director, told United Press International. "This is not about religion, I think. It is about race and discrimination and unemployment and the police, not about Islam."

That is also the view of Olivier Roy, director of studies at the Advanced School of Social Science Studies and one of the Europe's leading academic experts on Islam. For Roy, the French riots have been "a revolt of an underclass, not the precursor of a clash of religions and civilizations."

The riots might have been easier to control if they had been Islamic in origin, Roy suggests, because then the French authorities might have been able to calm matters by appealing to and working with local religious leaders. As it is, they try to enlist the cooperation of local community leaders, in places where Roy says "there is no community.

"Traditional parental control has disappeared, along with the traditional family. Many Muslim households are headed by a single parent. Elders, imams, teachers and social workers have lost control," Roy argues.

Experts who work with France's black community point to a different kind of family breakdown. Sonia Imloul of Respect 93, a non-governmental organization, says one of the biggest problems is polygamy, and cites the example of one family she knows with one father, four wives and thirty children, all living in the same standard 4-room apartment of French public housing.

"The kids sleep in shifts, and when others are asleep, they are on the streets because there is nowhere else to go," she says, adding the new curfew imposed under the government's state of emergency regulations is simply adding to the pressure.

For the native-born French, or the Gauls, the crash-course they have received in the press and TV over the past two weeks in the sociology of this black and brown underclass is producing as much anger as understanding. Radio call-in shows denounce reports of such polygamous families with so many children drawing large payments from the Social Security system. Off-duty policemen and their wives seem to be frequent callers to such shows, and claim the young blacks are not as poor as they look, and make healthy incomes from drug-dealing and petty crime.

It is not easy to quantify the impact or the importance of these reports, which seem to dominate much of talk radio. But the prospect of a white backlash is clear enough in the opinion polls and their strong support for minister of the interior, Nicolas Sarkozy, and his tough measures, which now include deportation for rioters, even those in France legally.

Meanwhile in Aubervilliers, the afternoon draws on, and the police come by to tell white reporters and TV crews that it is time to leave.

"I don't want to be here after dark, either," says one officer from the CRS riot police. "But I have no choice. It's my duty -- and I'm getting really tired after two weeks of this shit."

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