Anger in French suburbs
01 January 1991
Anger in French suburbs
artdoc August=1992
Six young black people have died in less than a year in France's
suburban housing estates. Tensions, already high after last
autumn's riots in Vaulx en Velin, the school students' protests
and the Gulf war, erupted again last March when Djemel Chettou,
aged 19, was shot dead by a supermarket guard at Satrouville.
This resulted iii several nights of rioting. Similar
outbreaks have been reported throughout France.
A game of bitter attrition is being played out, with groups of
youths contesting the authorities which marginalise them.
Sometimes, the results are horrific. On 7 May, in a village in
the Val d'Oise, 17-year-old Barmoro Fofano fell to his death from
a sixth-floor window during a police search following incidents
in a shopping centre. On 27 May, 19-year old Aissa Ihich died
from an asthma attack while in police custody in Mantes la Jolie,
a suburb of Paris. Initially, police claimed his death was due
to a heart attack, but Aissa's friends discovered that his
inhaler had been taken from him. Police had let him die.
Tensions and occasional eruptions of anger continued in Mantes.
In early June, a policewoman died as a result of a police car
chase of joyriders. Fifteen minutes later, police shot dead
Youssef Khaif who was in another stolen car, but had nothing to
do with the previous incident. In July, Mohammed Daoudi (aged 19)
and Mustapha Asouana (aged 29) were shot dead by an unlicensed
gunman in Angouleme.
Politicians reacted to this violence with a flurry of anti-
`immigrant' activity. And this was all done ill the context of
the Senate ratifying the Schengen agreement on 27 June and
political parties taking up positions for the 1992 legislative
elections.
The Right and sections of the Left highlighted `illegal
immigration'. In mid-June, Jacques Chirac, leader of the RPR and
mayor of Paris, said that it was understandable that French
workers were mad when they saw immigrant neighbours, with their
noise' and `smells' and `three or four wives, 20 kids, getting
50,000 francs in welfare benefits without working'. He directly
attacked the policy of family unity. At the same time the
Communist party published a pamphlet stating its opposition to
immigration and focusing on illegal immigration - this, the party
said, was `in solidarity with oppressed immigrant workers'.
Others came in on the attack. Charles Pasqua outlined a quotas
policy to limit further immigration and to restrict the
concentration of immigrants in the suburbs. Socialist prime
minister Edith Cresson announced that she did not rule out these
ideas and, in a television interview, said she was prepared to
charter planes to deport illegal immigrants. (This had a
particular resonance in France where on 18 October 1986, 101
Malian workers, many of them legal residents, were deported in
chains on a flight chartered by Chirac - an event which shocked
the public).
Although Edith Cresson backtracked somewhat on the latter
proposal, the socialist government announced a range of measures
designed to stress its intention of maintaining law and order
rather than making any fundamental improvements in the situation
of France's black population. The most concrete measures came
from minister of interior Philippe Marchand, who announced that
the police would be strengthened by an additional 2,300 officers
in the suburbs and by putting recruits in the last month of
training on the estates where there had been tension.
Furthermore, police in affected areas would get increased pay and
overtime, and two companies of armed CRS riot police would be
available to deal with any incidents. Finally a coordination unit
would be set up by the national police to exchange information
and teams of judicial police will be on hand to question young
people.
CARF, no 4, September/October 1991
France EC racism