This story has been flying a big under the radar screen (at least outside the blogosphere) over the past week, but France’s government is coming under increasing political pressure to find a solution for civil unrest in suburban France that has unfolded over the past week. Over the past couple of nights, rioting youths in the the Seine-Saint-Denis region north of Paris have shot at police and firemen as they battled youths who torched car dealerships, public buses and a school.
The triggering event of the rioting occured last Thursday in the northeastern Paris suburb of Clichy-sous-Bois after the accidental deaths of two teenagers who were electrocuted while hiding from police in a power substation. However, the unrest is really the outgrowth of French society’s failure to integrate millions of immigrants who have come to France over the past generation, many of whom are unemployed immigrants from the Middle East and North Africa who live in poverty in low-cost, suburban housing projects. The riots are focusing attention on the differences between France’s generally affluent big cities and their poor suburbs, where the North African and Muslim immigrants and their French-born children struggle with high unemployment, crime, poverty and a lack of opportunities. As with such ghetto areas anywhere, crime-ridden gangs dealing drugs and stolen goods control many of the more decrepit housing projects and are benefitting from the chaos of the current riots.
As we saw in the chaotic aftermath of Hurricane Katrina in New Orleans, the line between civil order and unrest is fragile, and not easily restored once crossed. Daniel Drezner has more along those lines in this post and related comments.
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Tom,
You are right that this has been flying under the radar screen. For an excellent analysis of this, please see
http://eureferendum.blogspot.com/2005/11/ah-come-on.html
Shows socialism at its finest.
When the people get used to relying on Government to solve all the problems, then they do nothing but look for more and more handouts from the Government. Why work?. It’s not a big suprise that the handouts are not enough and more and more and more is requested.
The next step is to blame the Government for putting them in their current situation. (happening now)
Hmm… is it really flying under the radar?
I guess it is in the sense that international news generally flies under the radar of most Americans, who just aren’t interested. It’s certainly been getting lots of play on the two dozen international news sites I start my workday with for a while. For that matter, so is Ethiopia, but I bet most Americans who rely on the nightly network news or the Houston Chronicle for their news don’t have a clue about that either.
I understand that Mr. Chirac has called for dialogue, so I’m sure the problems are well on their way to being resolved now! 😉
Kevin, in terms of flying under the radar, it certainly is not being talked about in the business and legal circles that I run in Houston. And I agree that the local coverage of international stories is spotty, at best. One of the main reasons that I retain a subscription to the NY Times is for their coverage of international news.
Theodore Dalrymple lives in France now, and he’s got an interesting take on the situation.