Mary Ridell writes the following on this week riots in the French Banlieue of Villiers-le-Bel:
Villiers-le-Bel, roads swept, bins emptied and order restored, looks as improbable a war zone as Sevenoaks. Nor do the clusters of boys now venturing back on to the streets resemble France's lost generation. They walk heads down, hoods up and most of them say, politely, they know nothing. 'Nous ne sommes pas d'ici,' is their catchphrase. 'We're not from round here.'
Today, France is asking itself many questions about belonging. What streak of estrangement or malice makes boys as young as 11 shoot policemen and burn classrooms? What lies beneath the skin of this ordinary town? A young man who has lived here all his life gives me his answer. It is, he says, 'une ambiance de haine'
Hatred is where it all began. The 1995 film, La Haine, with its themes of racism, violence and disaffected youth in a riot-torn Paris suburb, has been played out many times for real. In 2005, the riots sparked by the deaths of two teenagers fleeing police engulfed France. The latest outbreak, though more contained, confirms a pattern of growing insurrection. No French or British politician should ignore Villiers-le-Bel.
Fading flowers mark the spot where Moushin and Larami, aged 15 and 16, died. A piece of cardboard bears the words 'On vous aime' (we love you). The tragedy was inflamed by resentment that the crash, its cause still unknown, was being written off as a road traffic accident by police. As Interior Minister, Sarkozy disbanded neighbourhood policing in favour of a more heavy-handed system, including riot squads. There is, one young man tells me, a mutual loathing between youths and officers seen as agents of state oppression. 'La police, c'est l'etat,' he says.
There are other explanations for what's gone wrong: the creaky train line to the outside world, for example; the fact that the area's 5,000 inhabitants in 1955 have now risen to 27,000 today. Many of them are North Africans and the victims of the anti-immigrant policies that Sarkozy has belatedly modulated.
So far, so predictable. But there are also factors to shake the beliefs of liberal Britain. Villiers-le-Bel has schools that look large and modern compared with British counterparts starved of the funding they need to cater for an influx of migrant children. The Martin Luther King College, an edifice of steel and glass, appears far more prosperous than any London sixth-form centre. Sarkozy, for all his flaws, has invested something in a lost generation, but he has not bought them hope or work. People here are twice as poor as in central Paris; up to one in three is unemployed.
I haven’t written anything on the “riots” of Villiers-le-Bel because I didn’t have anything original to say. I didn’t want just to bash Sarko and to argue that it is his fault when it isn’t and when the problem is far too serious to demagogue it. Sarkozy took a firm stand against the rioters by decrying what he called “Voyoucratie.” He is right to be firm with people who burn and injured because nothing can excuse violence not even social discontent. The problem is that toughness is not enough because the problem isn’t just one of law and order, but also one of citizenship and social cohesion. It is hard to make that point because any explanation other than the one that French banlieues are filled with scum is regarded as proof of an attempt to justify the unjustifiable when it is merely an attempt to explain it and to go beyond the passion and the resentment to find solutions. I have always said that Sarkozy reminded of Giuliani because he believes that France is New York, that it is in need of tough love and it needs a superhero to fight crime, economic slowdowns, and everything else. The problem is that France isn’t New York and that superheroes view any obstacle and social issues as an existential struggle between good and evil. As Sudhir Hazareesingh wrote in the Times Literary Supplement, Sarkozy loves and welcomes confrontation:
"Je les ai tous niqués” was Nicolas Sarkozy’s quip on becoming mayor of the smart Parisian suburban town of Neuilly at the age of twenty-eight, against the express wishes of the Gaullist party hierarchy. A desire to “screw them all” has since become the trademark of this hyperactive, pugnacious, and tormented politician: first as Édouard Balladur’s henchman between 1993 and 1995, when he deployed all means to promote his mentor’s (unsuccessful) bid for the Presidency – including threatening to investigate the tax returns of politically unsympathetic journalists, bullying his ministerial colleagues, and spreading rumours about Madame Chirac’s financial dealings; from 2002, as Minister of the Interior, when as “Speedy Sarko” he made the fight against crime and illegal immigration his priorities, memorably describing the rioters of late 2005 as “racaille” (scum), and vowing to clean up their neighbourhoods “au kärcher” (with high-pressure hoses); and finally, in the run-up to the Presidential elections of 2007, when he likened his own party leader Jacques Chirac to the Bourbon monarch Louis XVI, flapping helplessly in Versailles as his people clamoured for reform. In her brilliantly evocative L’Aube le soir ou la nuit, written after following Sarkozy on the Presidential campaign trail for a year, the novelist Yasmina Reza summed up the candidate as “un amoureux de l’adversité”.
Over the years, France has tried to solve the problem by throwing money at the problem, using toughness or simply placating, the banlieusards, the inhabitants of those banlieues with fruitless compassion. It hasn’t work. The mistake was in my opinion the assumption that the problem could be solved from the top down and without stitch up the link between the citizens and the rest of society by recruiting people in the field and trusting them to make the right decision.
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