Wednesday 16 November was a quiet day in France. Only 163 cars were burnt by urban rioters in the whole of France and the state of emergency was lifted in some places and re-imposed in others. The urban unrest of the last two weeks is fading away, leaving some dead - the guy attacked for trying to defend his area from arsonists; some injured - the disabled woman set on fire in a bus by thugs, the 18- month-old baby who received a rock on the head and a whole lot of mindless vandalism: cars burnt, schools burnt, buses burnt, kindergartens burnt, shops smashed and so on.

  The death of the two young lads who were accidentally electrocuted when they ran into an electricity sub-station in Clichy- sous-bois north of Paris following an all too routine police identity check in the area was
not in itself the trigger to these events. The trigger was the reaction of the Interior Minister, Sarkozy, (France's answer to Blunkett, marital problems included) who called the unruly young people in the suburbs "riff-raff", thus confirming a tendency towards the blanket stigmatization of the population who live there.

  The equation suburbs = immigrants = delinquents, is, of course, the kind of brainless reasoning favoured by members of the National Front, and by some police officers, particularly those who "know" the immigrant population largely through their experience of the dirty Algerian war of independence. But the "immigrant"
population in the suburbs have been there for three generations and as such they walk around with French identity papers.  Unfortunately for them, they have Arab names and/or black faces and thus face discrimination in employment.
  Their problems are a concentration of those faced by French workers as a whole and have nothing to do with their level of "integration" into the French nation. After all, those Arabs who fought for the French during the Algerian war of independence (the so called "harkis") have themselves vegetated in ghettoes, the victims of post- colonial benign neglect. Even these Arabs haven't been allowed to integrate.

Can of worms

The background to this can of worms is not the state of the housing in the sink estates ("cités") in the suburbs of the major towns in France. Some of the housing, admittedly not all, is of fairly good quality having been built in the mid-1970s. British sink estates are a lot worse. Nor is the problem that of the absence of public services, education, health care, public transport and all the rest. These public services are present in these areas to an
extent which could only be dreamt of in an equivalent American or British ghetto. Let's not get things mixed up. No, the main problem of these sink estates is precisely the social and ethnic homogeneity of these areas or the concentration of people with  profound social problems there. Family breakdown, sole parenting, low self-
esteem, educational  difficulties, problems of employment co-exist with an often violent social environment
where young people grow up surrounded by delinquent gangs.

 To make matters worse, the French police force is mainly  installed in the quiet small towns, the spatial
deployment of the flics having stayed largely unchanged since the Vichy epoch. The police trade unions have

resisted all attempts at redeployment. As a rule then ,the cops only come to thump people they don't know in
areas they get lost in. Calm "middle-class" areas have a plethora of police stations. Earlier experiments with
community policing  ("police de proximité") undertaken by the "socialist government" of Jospin succeeded
in calming the suburbs but were abandoned by the super-cop Sarko on the ground that this allowed the proliferation of a parallel drug economy (true). In these terms, the more testosterone-propelled policing of the
current administration is believed to be more effective (not true). As a resultpolicing in the suburbs has taken on the "wham bang and thank you mam" style with lots of media attention.
 
 Funds going to the associations in the suburbs have been cut and job-creation schemes suspended. This is guaranteed to worsen community relations with little payoff in terms of the fight against thugs whose activities do, after all, provide some cash-flow in these areas where youth unemployment often hits 45 percent - the
highest rate in Europe. No wonder then that the government has decided to park the riot police (CRS) on a semi-permanent basis in these estates. Although country bumpkins with a well-deserved reputation for
brutality, they do at least know how to react  when they get lost in an area they don't know.
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