After 12 nights of rioting in the suburbs of Paris and many other French towns and cities, the premier Dominique de Villepin and president Jaques Chirac have resorted to further repression. They have invoked a law (3 April 1955) passed during the Algerian War of Liberation giving the prefects the right to declare a state of emergency in their regions, involving curfews, closing of places of entertainment and draconian penalties for breaches of it.
The “riots” are in fact a youth uprising with few recent parallels in mainland Europe. Britain has seen its urban riots under Thatcher, Major and Blair too but they were not such a nationwide phenomenon. In France the running battles with the police, the torching of cars, shops and public buildings are beginning to stand comparison with the uprisings of the ghettoes of the United States in the 1960s and 1980s.
They also come against the background of the 4 October one day general strike and day of action by called by all the main French unions, and a rash of strikes against closures and privatisation. Neighbouring Belgium too has seen two general strikes in October, and Italy has witnessed a widespread youth upheaval against education reform. It seems that mainland Europe is having a hot autumn of resistance to neoliberal “reform” and to the deep social deprivation it has given rise to. This is also leading to spontaneous resistance to the “iron fist” policing, deployed to enforce the “hidden hand” of the market.
The youth uprising has long term roots: poverty, inequality, mass unemployment, added to police racism and repression. France’s structural unemployment rate of 10 per cent is not evenly spread either socially or geographically. It rises to 25 per cent amongst youth and from 30 to 50 per cent on the run down estates in the Parisian suburbs. Here it coincides with the fact that these estates have become neglected ghettoes for citizens of Arab and African origins. Most are not “immigrants” at all in the accepted sense Their parents and grandparents came to France to work in the years of the post-war boom. The long decades of economic retreat, job losses, declining social services have left them, above all the young, in a condition the French call précarité, an insecure hand to mouth existence.
Young people find it difficult or impossible to find a job, and suspect, rightly, that an Arab or African name or face dooms their application from the start. They are constantly stopped by the police and made to produce their papers, taking lots of vile racist abuse in the process. This certainly drives some to crime, others to low level vandalism. Now, finally it has driven the youth to a fullscale revolt.
The bourgeois press – even the most liberal – presents it as mindless violence, simple criminality, lumpenproletarian rage. This is a vile lie. If the rising has deep social roots, it also has an immediate provocation, and this centres on the actions and words of Nicolas Sarkozy the sinister Minister of the Interior. Having lit the fire he is now claiming that it is the product of an Islamist conspiracy, and talked darkly of al Qa’ida connections.
In an informative article – Why is France is Burning? by Doug Ireland – carried on Znet, which nails these lies, Claude Angeli, editor of Le Canard Enchainé, is quoted:
“That’s not true – this isn’t being organised by the Islamist fundamentalists, as Sarkozy is implying to scare people. Sure, kids in neighborhoods are using their cellphones and text messages to warn each other where the cops are coming so they can move and pick other targets for their arson. But the rebellion is spreading because the youth have a sense of solidarity that comes from watching television – they imitate what they’re seeing, and they sense themselves targeted by Sarkozy’s inflammatory rhetoric. The rebellion is spreading spontaneously – driven especially by racist police conduct that is the daily lot of these youths. It’s incredible the level of police racism – they’re arrested or controlled and have their papers checked because they have dark skins, and the police are verbally brutal, calling them ’bougnoules’ [a racist insult, something like the American “towel-heads", only worse] and telling them, ’Lower your eyes! Lower your eyes!’ as if they had no right to look a policeman in the face.”
Instead of liberty, equality and fraternity, the French Republic has given the ten per cent of its people of Arab and Black African origin– plus a large number of “French” working class youth too – précarité, inequality and racism. The insulting ban on the wearing of Islamic headscarves in schools was meant to underline the forcible character of the “republican” demand for integration. This says we will integrate you – not by freeing you from racist discrimination, not by integrating you into the workforce, not by providing you with the social services that encourage solidarity amongst ordinary citizens but forcibly, by the threats of the headmaster, the bureaucrat and the policeman. No wonder such integration is failing. It will fail more and more.
But the spark that lit this prairie fire of resistance did not come from Islamists or criminal gangs but from none other than Sarkozy, himself.
In the early autumn Sarkozy launched, with great publicity, a law and order campaign, targeted at the suburban estates. This was his answer to their manifest social problems rather than any attempt to counter mass unemployment and deprivation. Chirac and “socialist” Lionel Jospin before him have been slashing various social programs in the name of “reform”. Since 2003, there have been, according to the daily Le Monde, cuts of 20 per cent per annum in subsidies for neighborhood groups that work with youths, cuts in youth job training and in tax credits for hiring youth, cuts in education and literacy programs, cuts too in neighborhood policing. This latter is regarded as a big part of the solution for all social liberals. Of course a police force that knows “its” community may be less blatantly racist to them, in part in the hope of getting more information about petty crime, but it will never solve the social problems of these areas.
But Sarkozy will have none of such “soft” solutions. On a trip to Toulouse, he even told the neighborhood police: “You’re job is not to be playing soccer with these kids, your job is to arrest them!” His solution is to treat these estates like an occupied country and send in the notorious paramilitary CRS (Compagnies Republicaines de Securité), and their delightfully named SWAT teams. He combines budget cuts for social provisions with soaring expenditure on repression. That is neoliberalism in action against the “enemy within”.
On 25 October Sarko – as he is called by the youth – visited the Paris suburb of Argenteuil to see how his law and order onslaught was going down. In fact his whole campaign is designed to attract support for his presidential ambitions for the 2007 election, by playing the racist card. Unsurprisingly he was pelted by angry crowds. In reply he said that such neighbourhoods needed to be “karcherised “(after a brand of sand blasting) “ to get rid of such “scum” (racaille). The police duly obliged. On 27 October, two teenagers Zyed Benna (17) and Bouna Traore (15) were electrocuted after being chased into an electricity sub-station in the Paris suburb of Clichy-sous-Bois.
This led to the first serious night of fighting with the police and setting fire to vehicles. This was no rash of criminal acts but an uprising against Sarko and his racist police force. The uprising swept across the Seine-Saint-Denis region, and Sarkozy’s response was to declare “zero tolerance” and send major police reinforcements to Clichy-sous-Bois. On 1 November, rioting spread out of Seine-Saint-Denis to three other regions in the Paris area. On 3 November, the uprising spread well beyond the Paris region to Dijon and parts of the south and west.
In many cases the spark was in fact the actions of Sarko’s police, treating these areas as territory to be re-occupied. The anti-racist site Les mots sont importants (words are important) reports how the police acted on the Chêne-Pointu housing estate, in Clichy-sous-Bois, the home of the two youths electrocuted in the EDF substation.
Antoine Germa, a geography and history teacher, reports that on 30 October, the day of the silent march in commemoration of Zyad Benna and Bouna Traore, organised by the local mosque, “everything seemed calm throughout the day and the forces of the law kept out of sight”.
But then: “On Saturday night, at the end of the Ramadan fast, at about 6:30pm, 400 CRS and gendarmes came… in cohorts like the Roman legions, at a run, visors down, shields on their arms and rubber and plastic bullet guns in their hands, they went through each street against an invisible enemy. At this time, everyone is eating and nobody is outside. Why this demonstration of force when the streets were particularly calm? ‘Police provocation,’ reply as one the local people.”
The only problem they faced was that they totally underestimated the anger of the youth and the numbers willing to fight back. Naturally they had resort to a conspiracy theory. Islamist preachers of hate were turning the minds of the young. This too is a pack of lies.
Olivier Roy, one of the most intelligent writers on political Islam, has scornfully rejected Sarkozy’s claims that this is an Islamist uprising. Though many youth are from Muslim backgrounds, many are not. “These guys are building a new idea of themselves based on American street culture. It’s a youth riot – they are protesting against the fact that they are supposed to be full French citizens and they are not.”
No what we are certainly witnessing is an uprising similar in kind to the fightbacks in Britain and the United States – a fightback by impoverished working class youth, many unemployed, those who suffer regular racist abuse and police harassment. It has been provoked by Sarkozy but he has got more than he bargained for. Of course the almost total absence of political and trade union organisation amongst the suburban youth – not their fault but that of the big bureaucratic forces of the reformist Labour movement – means that the present movement has formulated no demands – other than the resignation of Sarkozy – and not been able to consider its tactics. The task of revolutionaries faced with spontaneous upheavals is not to arrogantly upbraid them for this lack of strategy or for some self-defeating actions (e.g. burning down schools in their own district). But it is their duty to argue for a way forward both to the youth and to the working class movement.
To the youth, faced with occupation of their districts by SWAT squads we say –
• “Self defence is no offence” Organise the protection of your estates as well as you can: protect the old an vulnerable as well as yourselves and you will weld the working class communities together against the CRS intruders. Form disciplined defence organizations. Appeal for help to the left parties and militant unions.
• Assert your right to demonstrate, calling for the immediate withdrawal of the police from the estates, the instant dismissal of the hated Sarkozy, the release of the hundreds arrested during the uprising. Call for the workers movement and the left to organise a big solidarity demonstration with the youth protests and to link the social struggles against privatisation of EDF etc. with the issue of racism and youth unemployment.
• Demand instead of Chirac and de Villepin’s latest empty promises of reform, training and jobs, the deployment of all the resources needed to improve the estates, employing local youth and unemployed, on trade union rates and conditions, and under the residents’ own democratic control and planning. Demand too a massive programme of public works and the cessation of the attacks on the eight hour day so that the work time can be reduced with no loss of pay to absorb all the unemployed. “Where is the money?” the politicians and economists will cry. Make the rich pay! And if they “cannot” then declare their whole system, capitalism, bankrupt.
Youth across Europe and the world must declare their solidarity with their French comrades. Struggles like theirs, along with that of the Italian university and school students shows the need too for mass youth organisations in every country, united in a new revolutionary youth international.
As this newswire goes out, it is hard to predict how the uprising will develop. In and of themselves, riots on this scale can, and often do bring about reforms; indeed, this is the consciously acknowledged strategy of some of the youth. As one rioter said, “Cars make good barricades and they burn nicely, and the [TV] cameras like them. How else are we going to get our message across to Sarkozy? It is not as if people like us can just turn up at his office.”
Without union cards, access to the overwhelmingly white and middle class dominated Attac altermondialiste movement, or a socialist youth organisation, however, these reforms – improved housing, more low paid jobs and apprenticeships for 14 year olds have been mentioned by Chirac – will prove superficial, and be tied to new forms of social control. Already, pressure has been put on the Union of French Islamic Organisations to rein in the youth. It has duly obliged by issuing a fatwa, forbidding Muslims from attacking “private or public property,” and will now vie with the ultramoderate Dalil Boubakeur of the Muslim Council and Grand Mosque of Paris, as to who will become the official conduit for reforms and social control.
Despite the gloating of most British and some American liberal commentators, this Anglo-Saxon policy is not going to solve the problems of France’s alienated African and Arab youth, any more than it has solved the problems facing racial minorities in the UK or US.
Indeed, it has already been tried in France. As one activist on the estates told The Observer, “Twenty years ago we had a wave of policies aimed at supporting neighbourhood associations. But these groups were, in time, co-opted by politicians and lost their credibility. Other associations had their funding cut.”
This is precisely what has happened in the US since the 1960s and Britain since the 1980s. There may even have been a black mayor of New Orleans, but that didn’t help the African American masses, when Hurricane Katrina revealed their précarité.
For the uprising to achieve more than momentary reforms and career opportunities for a new layer of ”community leaders”, the French labour and altermondialiste – i.e. antiglobalisation – movements have to support the demands of the youth, stop hiding behind the empty rhetoric of French bourgeois republicanism, and take special measures to integrate the seven million African and Arab workers into their ranks.
• Unban the hijab! The FSU teachers union should launch a campaign of defiance, refusing to exclude Muslim girls for wearing the headscarf.
• CGT, organise the unemployed, and re-establish the militant tactics of Action Contre Chômage in the 1990s, taking the campaign into the suburban estates. Work or full pay!
• For the right of black and Arab workers to caucus independently within the unions and the social movements, so that they can discuss racism within the movement and develop demands to fight around. The unions must launch special campaigns to unionise those industries where black and Arab workers are concentrated.
• For the labour movement and black and Arab organisations to establish the real extent of racial oppression in jobs, education, housing, and so forth, and demand funds, real jobs and training – all under trade union and working class control – to combat racist discrimination and oppression.
• Launch a vigorous campaign for an all out general strike, linking the demand to stop the privatisation of the electricity monopoly, EDF, to the demands of the youth and the unemployed, and centring on the call, “Down with Sarkozy, de Villepin and Chirac!”