flyby
10th November 2005, 20:02
(The following was written and circulated by A World to Win News
Service, available as a yahoo-uk news group) available here (http://uk.groups.yahoo.com/group/AWorldToWinNewsService/)
The revolt of France's "low-class scum" lights up the sky
7 November 2005. A World to Win News Service. The rulers of France
are facing their worst crisis in decades. Prime Minister Dominique de
Villepin has invoked a half-century old law that has not been used
since France's colonial war in Algeria, allowing local authorities to
declare a state of emergency and impose a curfew forbidding anyone to
be on the streets at certain hours. Although de Villepin ruled out
turning to the army at this point, his critics point out that once
such measures are imposed, they can be taken as a challenge, and if
sufficient force is not used to enforce them, the government could
find its situation deteriorating still further. The problem, for
them, is a revolt by the people France's Interior Minister Nicolas
Sarkozy called not human beings at all but racaille, rabble or low-
class scum. The once-voiceless youth from the cités (housing estates
or projects) have put themselves at the centre of events, and forced
everyone else to define themselves in relation to them.
Shortly after he took his present job, Sarkozy declared "war without
mercy" against the "riffraff" in France's suburbs. He said he would
take a Karcher, a high-pressure water hose most famously used to wash
dog excrement off sidewalks and streets, to "clean out" the cités,
home to much of the immigrant population and the lower section of the
working class of all nationalities. This was not just talk. He
unleashed his police to harass and humiliate youth even more than
usual. It is common for young men walking down the street alone at
night to be suddenly jumped by a carload of cops for an "identity
check" that often means getting thrown on the ground, handcuffed if
they open their mouth to protest, and slapped around. In recent
weeks, the police have sharply stepped up this persecution. From time
to time youths responded by burning cars at random, something that
has become a common act of rebellion in France in recent years.
Their smouldering anger first burst into flames on 27 October in
Clichy-sous-Bois, a suburb to the east of Paris formerly considered a
quiet town. A group of young teenagers were coming home after an
afternoon spent playing football. Later the police claimed that
someone had tried to break into a construction site office in a
vacant lot that lay in their path, although there are no offices on
the lot, or anything of value. A carload of police showed up – the
BAC, a special brigade whose job is to brutalise cité youth. The kids
ran. Three of them tried to escape by climbing over a metre and a
half-high wall. Several youth who had been arrested earlier and were
being held in other police cars overheard the cops' communications.
One cop radioed in a report, saying they had seen some teenagers
climbing over the wall into an electrical power substation. "They're
in mortal danger," he said. "Well," came the response, "they won't
get far." Almost an hour later, the firemen's rescue squad showed up
and finally had the current cut off. They found two boys dead, and a
third severely hurt.
Small groups of youth burned rubbish bins and cars and threw rocks
and bottles at police that night. The next afternoon there was a
silent march in solidarity with the families of the two dead youth,
Bouna Traore and Zyed Benna. The media described them as 15 and 17
years old, although some local people say both were younger than
reported. Bouna, whose family came from Mauritania, was known as a
good soccer player. Zyed, of Tunisian origin, was considered a nice
kid by older neighbours because he offered to run errands for them.
The next night saw more local outbreaks on about the same level as
the previous one.
In the following days, Sarkozy helicoptered into a nearby town –
local youth say he didn't dare come to Clichy. Striking his most
macho pose, he ranted about "hoodlums" and racaille in what his
critics and supporters alike took as a deliberate provocation. On 31
October, the police fired a tear gas grenade into a mosque crowded
with worshippers celebrating an important night of Ramadan, the
Muslim holy month. The effects lingered for the rest of the week. The
authorities refused to apologize for anything. The parents of the two
dead boys stood firm in the face of government efforts to conciliate
them.
Instead of dying out after the weekend, the flames grew higher and
spread. Hundreds of cars were burned and scores of people detained
every night. A week later, as the fighting died down here, an even
bigger clash between youth and police took place in nearby Aulnay-
sous-Bois. Small groups of very young teenagers set cars on fire in
some 20 towns around Paris, many of them in department 93, east and
north of the capital. A police station, an unemployment office, big
and little stores, two schools and a bus depot were burned down. By
Friday 5 November, 900 cars had been burned in the Paris region; the
next night flames consumed 500 cars in the Paris region and nearly
800 more in half a dozen cities across France from north to south.
With one possible exception, a retired autoworker killed in his
parking lot in murky circumstances, there have been very few reports
of the youth deliberately attacking ordinary people of any
nationality in the cités or anywhere else, although a handful of
bystanders have been hurt. In fact, there seems to be much less
fighting between youth of different neighbourhoods than usual. The
targets of the youth are very clear and not at all random in the
broad sense: the police, the government and anything seen as its
representatives, and the prevailing social order. Burning cars is a
form of disorder and challenge to authority that the forces of order,
as they call themselves in France, cannot tolerate.
The police answered with water cannons – Sarkozy's Karcher, and
especially rubber bullets, along with tear gas and clubs. Youth say
the "flash ball" bullets really hurt, especially in the face or neck.
On 4 November, for the first time in France, helicopters hovered just
over the rooftops of massive public housing complexes in Paris and at
least one other city. They shined searchlights onto walkways and into
apartment windows, filming everything and coordinating mobile squads
of police. But the tactics of the authorities have gone through
stages. At first there were not many arrests. The police would sweep
up everyone they could catch at a given scene, and later release most
of them. The authorities seemed to be hoping the youth would lose
heart, and worried about further inflaming them. Almost a week and a
half later, with the youth becoming bolder than ever, Sarkozy
proclaimed, "Arrests – that's the key." After that, hundreds were
taken into custody every night. By 7 November about 20 had already
been sentenced to prison and 30 more were awaiting trial for what the
government threatens will be very serious charges. According to
official figures, half of those in jail at that point were under 18,
and almost all under 25.
The authorities are howling that the youth are "using real guns",
which would be unusual in France. In the only such incident reported,
police in Grigny, south of Paris, said they were "ambushed" by groups
of young men with baseball bats and guns. It turned out that two
officers were slightly wounded by non-lethal birdshot. The police
claimed they had found an empty real rifle shell on the ground
afterward. This may be a way for the state to justify the use on
their part of far more deadly force.
An editorial in the so-called leftist daily Libération claimed that
the fighting is being "organised" by "gang kingpins eager to clear
out the police so they can deal drugs, and by imams seeking cannon
fodder for their jihad." As far as the first charge is concerned, the
press itself has quoted cité residents pointing out that serious
dealers are not going to organise anything that disturbs business. As
a man from Aulnay said, "It's the state that's very happy to see
drugs flood into the ghettos." The underground economy in all forms
thrives in the cités, but that's not what lies behind this outbreak.
Some politicians claim to see the hand of Al-Qaeda behind it all,
which is a coded way of saying that the proper response to these
youth's actions is a bloodbath. But even the charge that it is a
consciously Islamic upsurge or that imams are leading it is totally
wrong. Muslim leaders in the cités have been sending out their
followers to try and pour water on the outbreaks since the beginning.
Even if they sympathise with the youth against the government, they
are against what they consider unruly behaviour. The Union of French
Islamic Organisations issued a fatwa (religious ruling) forbidding
all Muslims to participate in or contribute to "any action that
blindly hits private or public property or could constitute an attack
on someone's life."
The French government's attitude toward Islam is two-faced. It
attacks the rights of Muslims under the guise of secularism. It
banned women wearing a head covering from entering a school – as if
depriving observant young Muslim women of an education is anything
but racism and more oppression of women. At the same time, Sarkozy
has spent great efforts to pull the imams under the government's
wing, so that the government presides over their appointment and
financing, and in some ways turn them into an organised arm of the
state to be used to control immigrant communities. In Aulnay, a woman
remarked, "Every time something like this happens they build a new
mosque. That's not what all of us want."
The basic problem with this revolt, as far as the powers that be are
concerned, is not who is behind it, but that no one is. No one
started it, so there is no one to call it off. The foreign media have
exaggerated certain aspects of the fighting. There have been few full-
scale pitched battles, and even the hit-and-run actions have left
very few police seriously injured. Most youth most of the time seem
to be avoiding head-on confrontations they feel they can't win. The
reason for the French government's crisis is that whatever Sarkozy
thought he was doing, the situation has gotten out of his or anyone
else's control. It has turned out to be not proof of the power of the
state's steel hand, as Sarkozy may have hoped, but of its limits and
of the power of the streets. The state has been unable to stop these
disturbances so far. Not only have their efforts failed; they have
just fanned the flames, and worse, spread burning oil to every part
of the country. Their state itself is not in danger, but the youth
are contesting their authority.
The Minister of the Interior's CRS, the national riot police, are
said to be stretched thin and tiring. Significantly, an emergency
meeting of ministers on 4 November included not only Sarkozy and the
various ministers responsible for aspects of life in France's
ghettos, but also the Defence Minister. Calling out the army,
however, may not be a solution either, especially in the longer run.
In one town in department 93, a shopkeeper who was critical of the
youths for destroying property explained why he thought the
government was hesitant to bring in the regular armed forces. "If the
army comes it, that's it. I'm shutting down and so will every other
shopkeeper in 93. No one will stand for that." In fact, extreme
hostility to such a government action would extend far more broadly
than the department and its shopkeepers. It might create a
polarisation in which many people who do not stand with the youth now
would consider the government unacceptable. For historical reasons
that have to do with the French state's collaboration with the Nazi
occupation and with the French colonial war in Algeria and the May
1968 revolt that rocked the country, dislike of the forces of order
runs particularly broad and deep in France.
This crisis has had contradictory effects on the ruling classes and
what in France is called "the political class", those who take turns
running the government. It has set them against one another at some
moments, and pulled them apart at others. At first Prime Minister
Dominique de Villepin tried to distance himself from his Interior
Minister, Sarkozy, a political rival whom he criticised for using
intemperate language. For the first few days and to some extent
afterward, President Jacques Chirac distanced himself from both of
them with his silence. Criticism of Sarkozy's language even came from
one of Sarkozy's fellow cabinet members, the token Arab junior
minister for "Equal Opportunities". One of the several police unions
called for Sarkozy to shut up because he was endangering cops. But a
week or ten days later, very few establishment figures had anything
bad to say about Sarkozy in public – his big mouth had become the
least of their worries.
The youth are demanding Sarkozy's resignation. That demand is almost
universally repeated by people from immigrant backgrounds and very
widely supported by people of all nationalities in the cités and far
more broadly, including a large part of the middle class. Sarkozy is
the most open face of repression, a man who styles himself as
an "American"-style politician in the sense of a boastfully
reactionary bully who doesn't try to hide it. That suits his position
as Interior Minister, which is probably why his rivals gave him that
office. His job is to represent the hard edge of the state against
the people, using force against not only immigrants and their
children but also strikers, and imposing repression in general. Maybe
at first de Villepin and Chirac were hoping that Sarkozy's arrogance
would be his downfall. But no one in the political class could accept
a situation in which the racaille drove the country's chief cop from
office.
The Socialist Party doesn't dare try to take political advantage of
the situation to reverse their own decline, at least right now, even
though their rank and file would welcome going after Sarkozy. Their
leaders argue that "restoring calm" is a precondition for even
talking about anything else and explicitly refused to join the call
for his resignation.
The revisionist Communist Party is no less unhappy with the
situation. They try to heap all the blame on Sarkozy and the right,
as if when they were in power the so-called "left" parliamentary
parties didn't take the same stance toward the cité youth (a
Socialist education minister called them "savages") – and more
importantly, as if during their many years in office these parties
didn't help make French society what it is today. The party does call
for Sarkozy's resignation, but at the same time it has distanced
itself far away from the cité youth. Asked on radio if youth who burn
cars are "victims or offenders," party head Marie-Georges Buffet
quickly answered, "Offenders." Her party's press called the
rebellion "the disastrous result of disastrous policies." They
clamour for an "investigation" of the death of the two boys, as if
the facts weren't clear enough – as if this were not clearly a case
of right and wrong and the people had not already reached a verdict.
While CP elected officials held a "peace" demonstration in front of
the Prime Minister's offices, their local forces tried to
organise "peace" demonstrations in working class neighbourhoods. In
the last weeks youth have risen up in towns run by Socialist,
Communist and rightwing mayors without distinction because which
party is in power makes no difference in their lives.
The truth is that France has seen far too many years of "calm" in the
face of oppression and the kind of "peace" that comes from the
downtrodden accepting their fate. What's so good about quietly
accepting the kind of life imposed not only on these youth but on the
great majority of people in France? Violence within the ranks of the
people seems to be at a low point right now and the spirits of the
youth are soaring. Their rebellion is not a "disaster". It is very
good. It represents fresh air amid political and social suffocation –
something positive amid a pervasive atmosphere of cynicism and just
putting-your-head-down-and-trying-to-get-by that has prevailed for
far too long since the defeat of the May 1968 rebellion and the
betrayal of people's hopes represented by the Socialist-led and
revisionist-supported Mitterrand government. These youth want to
fight, not vote – and they are going up against the predominant idea
that nothing can be changed in a country where the electorate united
against the openly fascist candidate Jean-Marie Le Pen a few years
ago, only to elect Chirac and get Sarkozy. Whatever mistakes the
youth may be making, this rebellion represents the best hope that
France has seen in decades for a different kind of society.
Is important to note that one of the main carrots offered by Prime
Minister Villepin, who plays the "good cop" to Sarkozy's stick, is a
programme that would allow youth to leave school at age 14, instead
of 16, so that they can start working as "apprentices" in below-
minimum wage jobs of the dead-end kind reserved for school dropouts.
In other words, the best that is being promised them is more or less
what their parents endured, when their parents endured that in the
hopes that their children would get something better. What the phoney
socialists and revisionists refuse to admit is that even if the
capitalists and their government wanted to, they couldn't offer these
youth decent jobs and still employ them profitably. That's why the
ruling classes consider the unemployed and especially the immigrants
and their children "useless" people to be suppressed and gotten rid
of to the extent possible. Sarkozy's policies are an expression of
this underlying economic reality.
The often-heard complaint among mainstream and even many "far
left" "political people" that these youth are "apolitical" is one-
sided and mainly nonsense, although these youth have not gained the
conscious understanding that would be necessary for them to go
further, even in the limited sense of having a clear understanding of
the nature of their enemies and seeking allies against them. It is
not "apolitical" to reject the only life the system can offer them –
it is breaking with the bourgeois definition of what politics are
allowed and whether the starting point of politics is, as another
article in Libération said, the "recognition" that the present system
is the only possible one. In fact, not only have the youth refused to
accept the circumstances in which they themselves are imprisoned,
they pay more real attention to key world affairs such as in Iraq and
Palestine, or at least feel them more deeply, than many of their
elders who have let their opposition to imperialist crimes go soft
because "their" government tries to appear uninvolved.
These youth are neither "victims" nor "offenders". They have become
makers of history, taking action on a scale that no one else has in a
country where the majority feel ground down at best. They have
stormed onto the stage of political life that has been forbidden to
them. There is a consensus among mainstream political parties and the
tolerated opposition that this outbreak should be stifled and/or
crushed, but above all ended – quickly. These youth are struggling to
awaken, in a country full of sleepers, and it's about time.
- end item-
Service, available as a yahoo-uk news group) available here (http://uk.groups.yahoo.com/group/AWorldToWinNewsService/)
The revolt of France's "low-class scum" lights up the sky
7 November 2005. A World to Win News Service. The rulers of France
are facing their worst crisis in decades. Prime Minister Dominique de
Villepin has invoked a half-century old law that has not been used
since France's colonial war in Algeria, allowing local authorities to
declare a state of emergency and impose a curfew forbidding anyone to
be on the streets at certain hours. Although de Villepin ruled out
turning to the army at this point, his critics point out that once
such measures are imposed, they can be taken as a challenge, and if
sufficient force is not used to enforce them, the government could
find its situation deteriorating still further. The problem, for
them, is a revolt by the people France's Interior Minister Nicolas
Sarkozy called not human beings at all but racaille, rabble or low-
class scum. The once-voiceless youth from the cités (housing estates
or projects) have put themselves at the centre of events, and forced
everyone else to define themselves in relation to them.
Shortly after he took his present job, Sarkozy declared "war without
mercy" against the "riffraff" in France's suburbs. He said he would
take a Karcher, a high-pressure water hose most famously used to wash
dog excrement off sidewalks and streets, to "clean out" the cités,
home to much of the immigrant population and the lower section of the
working class of all nationalities. This was not just talk. He
unleashed his police to harass and humiliate youth even more than
usual. It is common for young men walking down the street alone at
night to be suddenly jumped by a carload of cops for an "identity
check" that often means getting thrown on the ground, handcuffed if
they open their mouth to protest, and slapped around. In recent
weeks, the police have sharply stepped up this persecution. From time
to time youths responded by burning cars at random, something that
has become a common act of rebellion in France in recent years.
Their smouldering anger first burst into flames on 27 October in
Clichy-sous-Bois, a suburb to the east of Paris formerly considered a
quiet town. A group of young teenagers were coming home after an
afternoon spent playing football. Later the police claimed that
someone had tried to break into a construction site office in a
vacant lot that lay in their path, although there are no offices on
the lot, or anything of value. A carload of police showed up – the
BAC, a special brigade whose job is to brutalise cité youth. The kids
ran. Three of them tried to escape by climbing over a metre and a
half-high wall. Several youth who had been arrested earlier and were
being held in other police cars overheard the cops' communications.
One cop radioed in a report, saying they had seen some teenagers
climbing over the wall into an electrical power substation. "They're
in mortal danger," he said. "Well," came the response, "they won't
get far." Almost an hour later, the firemen's rescue squad showed up
and finally had the current cut off. They found two boys dead, and a
third severely hurt.
Small groups of youth burned rubbish bins and cars and threw rocks
and bottles at police that night. The next afternoon there was a
silent march in solidarity with the families of the two dead youth,
Bouna Traore and Zyed Benna. The media described them as 15 and 17
years old, although some local people say both were younger than
reported. Bouna, whose family came from Mauritania, was known as a
good soccer player. Zyed, of Tunisian origin, was considered a nice
kid by older neighbours because he offered to run errands for them.
The next night saw more local outbreaks on about the same level as
the previous one.
In the following days, Sarkozy helicoptered into a nearby town –
local youth say he didn't dare come to Clichy. Striking his most
macho pose, he ranted about "hoodlums" and racaille in what his
critics and supporters alike took as a deliberate provocation. On 31
October, the police fired a tear gas grenade into a mosque crowded
with worshippers celebrating an important night of Ramadan, the
Muslim holy month. The effects lingered for the rest of the week. The
authorities refused to apologize for anything. The parents of the two
dead boys stood firm in the face of government efforts to conciliate
them.
Instead of dying out after the weekend, the flames grew higher and
spread. Hundreds of cars were burned and scores of people detained
every night. A week later, as the fighting died down here, an even
bigger clash between youth and police took place in nearby Aulnay-
sous-Bois. Small groups of very young teenagers set cars on fire in
some 20 towns around Paris, many of them in department 93, east and
north of the capital. A police station, an unemployment office, big
and little stores, two schools and a bus depot were burned down. By
Friday 5 November, 900 cars had been burned in the Paris region; the
next night flames consumed 500 cars in the Paris region and nearly
800 more in half a dozen cities across France from north to south.
With one possible exception, a retired autoworker killed in his
parking lot in murky circumstances, there have been very few reports
of the youth deliberately attacking ordinary people of any
nationality in the cités or anywhere else, although a handful of
bystanders have been hurt. In fact, there seems to be much less
fighting between youth of different neighbourhoods than usual. The
targets of the youth are very clear and not at all random in the
broad sense: the police, the government and anything seen as its
representatives, and the prevailing social order. Burning cars is a
form of disorder and challenge to authority that the forces of order,
as they call themselves in France, cannot tolerate.
The police answered with water cannons – Sarkozy's Karcher, and
especially rubber bullets, along with tear gas and clubs. Youth say
the "flash ball" bullets really hurt, especially in the face or neck.
On 4 November, for the first time in France, helicopters hovered just
over the rooftops of massive public housing complexes in Paris and at
least one other city. They shined searchlights onto walkways and into
apartment windows, filming everything and coordinating mobile squads
of police. But the tactics of the authorities have gone through
stages. At first there were not many arrests. The police would sweep
up everyone they could catch at a given scene, and later release most
of them. The authorities seemed to be hoping the youth would lose
heart, and worried about further inflaming them. Almost a week and a
half later, with the youth becoming bolder than ever, Sarkozy
proclaimed, "Arrests – that's the key." After that, hundreds were
taken into custody every night. By 7 November about 20 had already
been sentenced to prison and 30 more were awaiting trial for what the
government threatens will be very serious charges. According to
official figures, half of those in jail at that point were under 18,
and almost all under 25.
The authorities are howling that the youth are "using real guns",
which would be unusual in France. In the only such incident reported,
police in Grigny, south of Paris, said they were "ambushed" by groups
of young men with baseball bats and guns. It turned out that two
officers were slightly wounded by non-lethal birdshot. The police
claimed they had found an empty real rifle shell on the ground
afterward. This may be a way for the state to justify the use on
their part of far more deadly force.
An editorial in the so-called leftist daily Libération claimed that
the fighting is being "organised" by "gang kingpins eager to clear
out the police so they can deal drugs, and by imams seeking cannon
fodder for their jihad." As far as the first charge is concerned, the
press itself has quoted cité residents pointing out that serious
dealers are not going to organise anything that disturbs business. As
a man from Aulnay said, "It's the state that's very happy to see
drugs flood into the ghettos." The underground economy in all forms
thrives in the cités, but that's not what lies behind this outbreak.
Some politicians claim to see the hand of Al-Qaeda behind it all,
which is a coded way of saying that the proper response to these
youth's actions is a bloodbath. But even the charge that it is a
consciously Islamic upsurge or that imams are leading it is totally
wrong. Muslim leaders in the cités have been sending out their
followers to try and pour water on the outbreaks since the beginning.
Even if they sympathise with the youth against the government, they
are against what they consider unruly behaviour. The Union of French
Islamic Organisations issued a fatwa (religious ruling) forbidding
all Muslims to participate in or contribute to "any action that
blindly hits private or public property or could constitute an attack
on someone's life."
The French government's attitude toward Islam is two-faced. It
attacks the rights of Muslims under the guise of secularism. It
banned women wearing a head covering from entering a school – as if
depriving observant young Muslim women of an education is anything
but racism and more oppression of women. At the same time, Sarkozy
has spent great efforts to pull the imams under the government's
wing, so that the government presides over their appointment and
financing, and in some ways turn them into an organised arm of the
state to be used to control immigrant communities. In Aulnay, a woman
remarked, "Every time something like this happens they build a new
mosque. That's not what all of us want."
The basic problem with this revolt, as far as the powers that be are
concerned, is not who is behind it, but that no one is. No one
started it, so there is no one to call it off. The foreign media have
exaggerated certain aspects of the fighting. There have been few full-
scale pitched battles, and even the hit-and-run actions have left
very few police seriously injured. Most youth most of the time seem
to be avoiding head-on confrontations they feel they can't win. The
reason for the French government's crisis is that whatever Sarkozy
thought he was doing, the situation has gotten out of his or anyone
else's control. It has turned out to be not proof of the power of the
state's steel hand, as Sarkozy may have hoped, but of its limits and
of the power of the streets. The state has been unable to stop these
disturbances so far. Not only have their efforts failed; they have
just fanned the flames, and worse, spread burning oil to every part
of the country. Their state itself is not in danger, but the youth
are contesting their authority.
The Minister of the Interior's CRS, the national riot police, are
said to be stretched thin and tiring. Significantly, an emergency
meeting of ministers on 4 November included not only Sarkozy and the
various ministers responsible for aspects of life in France's
ghettos, but also the Defence Minister. Calling out the army,
however, may not be a solution either, especially in the longer run.
In one town in department 93, a shopkeeper who was critical of the
youths for destroying property explained why he thought the
government was hesitant to bring in the regular armed forces. "If the
army comes it, that's it. I'm shutting down and so will every other
shopkeeper in 93. No one will stand for that." In fact, extreme
hostility to such a government action would extend far more broadly
than the department and its shopkeepers. It might create a
polarisation in which many people who do not stand with the youth now
would consider the government unacceptable. For historical reasons
that have to do with the French state's collaboration with the Nazi
occupation and with the French colonial war in Algeria and the May
1968 revolt that rocked the country, dislike of the forces of order
runs particularly broad and deep in France.
This crisis has had contradictory effects on the ruling classes and
what in France is called "the political class", those who take turns
running the government. It has set them against one another at some
moments, and pulled them apart at others. At first Prime Minister
Dominique de Villepin tried to distance himself from his Interior
Minister, Sarkozy, a political rival whom he criticised for using
intemperate language. For the first few days and to some extent
afterward, President Jacques Chirac distanced himself from both of
them with his silence. Criticism of Sarkozy's language even came from
one of Sarkozy's fellow cabinet members, the token Arab junior
minister for "Equal Opportunities". One of the several police unions
called for Sarkozy to shut up because he was endangering cops. But a
week or ten days later, very few establishment figures had anything
bad to say about Sarkozy in public – his big mouth had become the
least of their worries.
The youth are demanding Sarkozy's resignation. That demand is almost
universally repeated by people from immigrant backgrounds and very
widely supported by people of all nationalities in the cités and far
more broadly, including a large part of the middle class. Sarkozy is
the most open face of repression, a man who styles himself as
an "American"-style politician in the sense of a boastfully
reactionary bully who doesn't try to hide it. That suits his position
as Interior Minister, which is probably why his rivals gave him that
office. His job is to represent the hard edge of the state against
the people, using force against not only immigrants and their
children but also strikers, and imposing repression in general. Maybe
at first de Villepin and Chirac were hoping that Sarkozy's arrogance
would be his downfall. But no one in the political class could accept
a situation in which the racaille drove the country's chief cop from
office.
The Socialist Party doesn't dare try to take political advantage of
the situation to reverse their own decline, at least right now, even
though their rank and file would welcome going after Sarkozy. Their
leaders argue that "restoring calm" is a precondition for even
talking about anything else and explicitly refused to join the call
for his resignation.
The revisionist Communist Party is no less unhappy with the
situation. They try to heap all the blame on Sarkozy and the right,
as if when they were in power the so-called "left" parliamentary
parties didn't take the same stance toward the cité youth (a
Socialist education minister called them "savages") – and more
importantly, as if during their many years in office these parties
didn't help make French society what it is today. The party does call
for Sarkozy's resignation, but at the same time it has distanced
itself far away from the cité youth. Asked on radio if youth who burn
cars are "victims or offenders," party head Marie-Georges Buffet
quickly answered, "Offenders." Her party's press called the
rebellion "the disastrous result of disastrous policies." They
clamour for an "investigation" of the death of the two boys, as if
the facts weren't clear enough – as if this were not clearly a case
of right and wrong and the people had not already reached a verdict.
While CP elected officials held a "peace" demonstration in front of
the Prime Minister's offices, their local forces tried to
organise "peace" demonstrations in working class neighbourhoods. In
the last weeks youth have risen up in towns run by Socialist,
Communist and rightwing mayors without distinction because which
party is in power makes no difference in their lives.
The truth is that France has seen far too many years of "calm" in the
face of oppression and the kind of "peace" that comes from the
downtrodden accepting their fate. What's so good about quietly
accepting the kind of life imposed not only on these youth but on the
great majority of people in France? Violence within the ranks of the
people seems to be at a low point right now and the spirits of the
youth are soaring. Their rebellion is not a "disaster". It is very
good. It represents fresh air amid political and social suffocation –
something positive amid a pervasive atmosphere of cynicism and just
putting-your-head-down-and-trying-to-get-by that has prevailed for
far too long since the defeat of the May 1968 rebellion and the
betrayal of people's hopes represented by the Socialist-led and
revisionist-supported Mitterrand government. These youth want to
fight, not vote – and they are going up against the predominant idea
that nothing can be changed in a country where the electorate united
against the openly fascist candidate Jean-Marie Le Pen a few years
ago, only to elect Chirac and get Sarkozy. Whatever mistakes the
youth may be making, this rebellion represents the best hope that
France has seen in decades for a different kind of society.
Is important to note that one of the main carrots offered by Prime
Minister Villepin, who plays the "good cop" to Sarkozy's stick, is a
programme that would allow youth to leave school at age 14, instead
of 16, so that they can start working as "apprentices" in below-
minimum wage jobs of the dead-end kind reserved for school dropouts.
In other words, the best that is being promised them is more or less
what their parents endured, when their parents endured that in the
hopes that their children would get something better. What the phoney
socialists and revisionists refuse to admit is that even if the
capitalists and their government wanted to, they couldn't offer these
youth decent jobs and still employ them profitably. That's why the
ruling classes consider the unemployed and especially the immigrants
and their children "useless" people to be suppressed and gotten rid
of to the extent possible. Sarkozy's policies are an expression of
this underlying economic reality.
The often-heard complaint among mainstream and even many "far
left" "political people" that these youth are "apolitical" is one-
sided and mainly nonsense, although these youth have not gained the
conscious understanding that would be necessary for them to go
further, even in the limited sense of having a clear understanding of
the nature of their enemies and seeking allies against them. It is
not "apolitical" to reject the only life the system can offer them –
it is breaking with the bourgeois definition of what politics are
allowed and whether the starting point of politics is, as another
article in Libération said, the "recognition" that the present system
is the only possible one. In fact, not only have the youth refused to
accept the circumstances in which they themselves are imprisoned,
they pay more real attention to key world affairs such as in Iraq and
Palestine, or at least feel them more deeply, than many of their
elders who have let their opposition to imperialist crimes go soft
because "their" government tries to appear uninvolved.
These youth are neither "victims" nor "offenders". They have become
makers of history, taking action on a scale that no one else has in a
country where the majority feel ground down at best. They have
stormed onto the stage of political life that has been forbidden to
them. There is a consensus among mainstream political parties and the
tolerated opposition that this outbreak should be stifled and/or
crushed, but above all ended – quickly. These youth are struggling to
awaken, in a country full of sleepers, and it's about time.
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