csua.org/u/dz4 -> news.yahoo.com/s/usatoday/20051110/ts_usatoday/labellefranceacountryofequalityandexclusion
USA TODAY La Belle France: A country of equality and exclusion By Steven Komarow and Rick Hampson, USA TODAY Thu Nov 10, 7:26 AM ET Now that the worst rioting seems past, people in poor, North African immi grant enclaves like the one in this Paris suburb wonder what comes next.
click here Will the street violence that led French officials to declare a 12-day st ate of emergency mark the beginning of social change, as the US urban race riots did four decades ago?
Rioting in France) 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 syst em that arguably protects French traditions and culture at the cost of o pportunity 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 min ors; some bars in Nice were ordered closed from 10 pm to 5 am Far-right leader Jean-Marie Le Pen, in an interview with the Associated P ress, said French nationals of immigrant backgrounds - not just foreigne rs - should be stripped of their citizenship and sent "back to their cou ntry 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 want real opportuniti es" - 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 c ommunity playhouse, says the violence isn't over: "This is just the begi nning. 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 e ducation 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 societ y that welcomes all. But the two weeks of nightly violence have prompted painful national introspection and called into question France's self i mage 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 A ngeles in the '60s - unemployment, discrimination, despair - are behind the arson and rioting in suburban France. A nation that successfully integrated individual foreigners has failed to do the same with masses of them. You have to be a Frenchman , or become one," says Robert Levine, a RAND Corp. scholar who has studi ed French and American immigration. He and other experts make three poin ts to explain the inequality in a nation that for more than two centurie s has championed galit: Unlike America, France didn't experience mass immigration from overseas until after World War II, when large numbers of North Africans, many Mu slims, began to arrive. France excelled at treating outsiders - particularly artists and intellec tuals - as equals. It was that way in the 1920s for black singer Josephi ne Baker. Louis babysitting for white families who warned her not to kiss the baby. In Paris, she got more tha n 1,000 offers of marriage and became Europe's most popular female enter tainer. More than America, France expects immigrants, no matter their color or creed, to assimilate - to become French. America, which calls itself a m elting pot, is really a soup; its immigrant groups have generally retain ed some of their original culture and affected their new homeland as muc h as they were affected by it. In schools, the standard history curriculum begins with the words, "Nos ancstres, les Gaulois" ("Our ancestors, the Gauls," th e pre-national tribe) - no matter that many of the students' ancestors c ome 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 co uld 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. Ironically, the possibility of a French version of affirmative action has been advanced by get-tough Interior Minister Nicolas Sarkozy, blamed fo r 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; shelter ed industries and farmers and restrictions on entrepreneurs and competit ion. These policies have contributed to economic stagnation and made lif e harder for those without jobs or businesses.
The Muslim immigrants and their French-born children and grandchildren li ve largely in housing projects in suburbs like Stains. They are a people apart - Muslims in a nation that was resolutely Christian and now is re solutely secular. French is not their first language nor their favored c uisine. In a nation united by its love of wine, many abstain from alcoho l 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 an d united the country was a model of diversity. On Tuesday, Prime Minister Dominique de Villepin announced a $35 billion plan to provide jobs, scholarships and other opportunities to those in t he riot zones. He also said an agency for "social cohesion" would be cre ated to address joblessness and discrimination. The rioting, which has gone on two weeks, lost strength Wednesday. 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 wea pons and close public spaces where gangs gather. The emergency was invoked under a security law that dates to France's pos t World War II colonial war in Algeria, the ancestral home of some of th e rioting immigrants. Rioting soon spread to metropolitan areas across t he nation. seems to be permeating" France, says R obin Niblett, director of the Europe program at the Center for Strategic and International Studies in Washington. "All the things that used to b e 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 pro ducing arsonists and vandals may in the future breed terrorists. "Islami c radicalism isn't just something that is emerging in the refugee camps in Lebanon," says Niblett. 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 th e 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 be neficial affect. "There will be a lot of words about change and some cha nges," 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 desc ent who lives in Stains: "The government has said so many things, and th ere's been so little action, it's hard to expect change."
|
http://csua.com/feed/