FRANCE: There is a new awareness of the racial discrimination that erodes French values, writes Lara Marlowe
All Frenchmen are equal, but some are more equal than others.
If the riots that led to the declaration of a state of emergency in France this week serve no other purpose, they have created new awareness of the racial discrimination that eats away at France's "Republican values".
"When people think 'French', I don't want them to think only of Pierre and André," an Arab student from the troubled department of Seine-Saint-Denis told me. "I want them to think of Muhammad and Mounir too." The prime minister, Dominique de Villepin, said much the same thing on television: "We have to change our behaviour, the way we look at people."
The day after his implied criticism of racism, Villepin insisted in the National Assembly that "the French model of integration" - based on the refusal to admit the existence of minorities - must be preserved.
"Discrimination against north African Arabs and blacks, to call them by their name, whether they be French or not, is widely practised, with impunity, in employment," a report delivered to the minister for social cohesion, Jean-Louis Borloo, said in September.
President Jacques Chirac had a premonition of the present unrest when he wrote France For All during his presidential campaign in January 1995. "When too many young people see only joblessness or temporary training positions at the end of uncertain studies, they end up rebelling," Chirac wrote. "For the time being, the state manages to maintain order, and the social handling of unemployment avoids the worst. But for how long?"
French commentators have interpreted Chirac's silence as the only possible reaction to this proof of his own impotence. "The invisible man," the New York Times called the French president.
In yet another dig at Chirac, interior minister Nicolas Sarkozy said on Thursday night: "Political leaders are inaudible because they don't tell reality like it is."
While the banlieues burn, the president and prime minister work closely in tandem, with Villepin taking the lead in public.
Sarkozy distanced himself from Chirac and Villepin's decision to declare a state of emergency, in case it backfired. He seems to believe the violence will drive the electorate further right, and that he will be the beneficiary. For a man widely accused of helping to incite the riots, he is incredibly cocky.
"Dominique de Villepin wouldn't last 10 minutes longer than me if I had to leave the government," Le Point magazine quoted him saying on demands for his resignation.
Nor has Sarkozy repented for what the equal opportunity minister Azouz Begag called his "warlike language". His comment on Begag was condescending at best: "He's rather a nice lad. He came and apologised."
On Thursday night, Sarkozy said: "Those who burned the bus where there was a 56-year-old handicapped woman, those who threw stones at a bus and sent an 18-month-old child to hospital, when I say they're hooligans or scum, I stand by it."
For nearly 30 years, French governments have treated the banlieues as if they were farms or Indian reservations to be maintained on government subsidies.
Despite his aggressive language, Sarkozy is the only French politician who has suggested a measure that might alleviate the country's ghettoisation: "positive discrimination" or imposed quotas for hiring Arabs and Africans.
At least two studies found that a CV with a French name was five times more likely to result in a job interview than an identical CV with a foreign name. An address in one of the 700 housing estates that are home to 8 per cent of the French population also dooms a CV to the waste bin.
And it's getting worse. "Between 35 and 40 per cent of young men [ from the banlieues] without diplomas are unemployed," sociologist Hugues Lagrange said. "Since 2002, youths with university studies are also reaching double the jobless rate of those from other areas."
Police brutality and harassment through frequent identity checks are constant complaints among youths of immigrant origin. Two broadcasts drove that home this week. A hidden camera filmed an identity check in a burger restaurant in La Duchère, a housing estate near Lyon, for TF1.
"Why are you calling me [ by the familiar] tu?" a youth asked a policeman. "Do you want to fry, you too, with your buddies?" The policeman replied: "Do you want to end up in an electrical transformer?" The allusion to the accidental electrocution of two immigrant teenagers, which started the riots, was obvious.
On Thursday night, France 2 broadcast footage of two policemen kicking and beating a young man in the Paris suburb of La Courneuve. France 2 waited three days before showing the tape, after it was shown to the interior ministry. The suspension of the policemen involved was announced before the broadcast.
The riots raise a legitimate ethical question: does the presence of television cameras egg rioters on? The right-wing deputy Jacques Myard, who suggested "a moratorium on broadcasts" thinks so. But 28,000 cars were burned in the first 10 months of this year, before the riots started, when there were no journalists there to incite arson.
In a country where politicians and journalists are excessively cosy, it took only a nod and a whisper for the networks to fall into line. France 3 decided to stop announcing the number of cars burned. France 2 ceased identifying the housing estates where there was violence because it feared fuelling competition. And all of the networks began broadcasting long, boring reports about good people in the banlieues.
One story about north African entrepreneurs in Mantes-la-Jolie backfired. "I can get contracts," the interviewee said. "But the clients tell me they don't want any Arabs on the construction site."
French commentators have been enraged by "Anglo-Saxon" coverage of the riots, seen as revenge for critical French reporting on Iraq and the aftermath of Katrina in Louisiana.
Michel Gaudin, the national police chief, was annoyed by reports that tourists might desert France. "Tourists don't go to the places where it's happening," he said. I've heard at least a half dozen French people object to the use of the words "civil war" in English language reports, though they often come up in French discourse. All France is scandalised that CNN has used flames on a map to show where the violence is happening.
At least half a dozen journalists have been attacked in the riots, including a Korean woman reporter who was beaten unconscious. RMC radio station yesterday criticised CNN for allegedly paying the youths whom Sarkozy calls voyous €500 a day to act as guides and security guards.
It may be the only employment they'll ever know.