Nightly rioting continues in France

If you get your news from network television news, you may not have heard of this ongoing story. Rioting in the suburbs of Paris has continued for the seventh consecutive night:

AULNAY-SOUS-BOIS, France (AP) – France’s government faced mounting pressure Thursday as suburban unrest spread, with youths setting fire to a car dealership and public buses in battles with riot police, who reportedly came under gunfire.

Youths rampaged for a seventh straight night, undeterred by the presence of armed riot police. Acts ranging from clashing with police to torching vehicles were reported in at least 10 Paris-region towns.

The riots have highlighted the division between France’s big cities and their poor suburbs and frustrations simmering in housing projects to the north and northeast of Paris, heavily populated by North African and Muslim immigrants and their French-born children who struggle with high unemployment, crime and poverty.

Prime Minister Dominique de Villepin called a series of emergency meetings with government officials throughout the day Thursday, including one with Interior Minister Nicolas Sarkozy, who has been accused of inflaming the crisis with his tough talk and police tactics. Sarkozy has called troublemakers “scum” and vowed to “clean out” troubled suburbs.

(AP) French riot police officers, left, protect working firefighters in Paris suburb, Le Blanc-Mesnil,…
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Minister of Social Cohesion Jean-Louis Borloo said the government had to react “firmly” but added that France must also acknowledge its failure to have dealt with anger simmering in poor suburbs for decades.

“We cannot hide the truth: that for 30 years we have not done enough,” he told France-2 television.

In the tough northeastern suburb of Aulnay-sous-Bois, gangs of youths torched a Renault car dealership late Wednesday and incinerated at least a dozen cars, a supermarket and a local gymnasium.

In nearby La Courneuve, police said two live bullets were fired at them, France-Info radio reported. No officers were injured.

Bands of youths forced a team of France-2 television reporters out of their car in the suburb of Le Blanc Mesnil, then flipped the vehicle and set it on fire.

The unrest has laid bare France’s failure to fully integrate its millions of immigrants, many of whom are trapped in the poverty and grinding unemployment of low-cost, sometimes decrepit, suburban housing projects sometimes controlled by gangs dealing drugs and stolen goods – not police.

The rioting began Oct. 27 in the northeastern suburb of Clichy-sous-Bois after the accidental deaths of the two teenagers electrocuted when they hid in a power substation because they thought police were chasing them. Officials have said police were not pursuing the boys.

I didn’t hear the story mentioned on ABC News this morning at all.

Blogospheric commentary on this story (at least in English) has been sparse, as well. This morming ¡No Pasarán! notes a story from Le Figaro that claims that the rioters are coordinating their activities to some degree through blogs and quotes several pro-riot French bloggers. As you might expect, ¡No Pasarán!’s primary reaction is schadenfreude.

This morning Glenn published an email from an Australian writer currently in France. The emailer doesn’t believe the rioting is an intifada but is simply due to the high level of unemployment among these young Frenchmen, mainly of North African descent. That’s apparently been the position of the French press. One wonders whether he’s actually been to the areas involved.

UPDATE: French blog PaxaBlog notes that the police vs. the youths conflict isn’t the only one going on: the Sarkozy vs. Villepin political battle is also reflected.

Brussels Journal suggests that the rioting is beyond the capabilities of the police and the army should be brought in:

The riots in France have been going on for a week now. During the second night of street fighting in Clichy, police officers already warned that they are not up to the task Sarkozy has set them. “There’s a civil war underway,” one officer declared. “We can no longer withstand this situation on our own. My colleagues neither have the equipment nor the practical or theoretical training for street fighting.” If there is, indeed, a war going on, Sarkozy cannot win it with troops that are mere policemen and fire fighters. As Irwin Stelzer pointed out last July when discussing the British reaction to the London bombings: In a war, use the army, rather than police. The latter, however, is unlikely to happen. If the politicians bring in the army they are acknowledging what the policemen, the fire fighters and the ambulance drivers know but what the political and media establishment wants to hide from the people: that there is civil war brewing and that Europe is in for a long period of armed conflict. This is the last thing appeasing politicians want to do and so they have begun to criticise Sarkozy.

The appeasers are found not only in the opposition parties but also within Sarkozy’s own party, where Prime Minister Dominique de Villepin, who envies him his popularity, is eager to bring his rival down.

The prerequisite for ending a conflict is the will to do it.

UPDATE: Colt at Winds of Change has a relevant observation about the relationship between the riots in France (and Denmark) to Islam:

As in all riots, the grievances were quickly forgotten once the first brick was thrown or molotov cocktail lit. Besides the police, the victims have been the owners of shops and restaurants, and of residents who had the nerve to think their cars would be safe from arson.

Observers of the debate about the European-Islamic identity, or rather the social and political consequences of it, should take note. In France, the spark was the supposed murder by police of two teenagers. In Denmark, it was an insult to Mohammed. But reading through the news reports, the most obvious theme is not religious zealotry, but criminals with a tenuous relationship with Islam trying to take control of the areas in which they live.

That isn’t to say Islam was irrelevant to the rioting. The rioters are likely typical of Europe’s young Muslims, in that they have adopted the victim-mantle forced upon them by the state and the media.