French government fails to counteract rise in racism

IT was after midnight January 10th when Kamel Saber, a 31 year old French man and the son of Algerian immigrants, started home in his company van. Mr Saber usually wears a suit and tie, but he hadn't shaved that morning and wore an old tracksuit to help several of his 25 employees repaint the office of his courier service in the Paris suburb of Asnieres.

"That night," he told The Irish Times, "I looked like an Arab."

Three plainclothes policemen stopped to check Mr Saber's papers at a traffic intersection. "They were rude and aggressive. They called me `tu' [the familiar form of address used for animals and servants]. They made me get out of the van to open the bonnet. They kept pushing me; they were trying to provoke me.

Mr Saber is only 1.62m tall and weighs 55kg. "I'm not Schwarzenegger," he said. The cops grew angry when he asked them not to call him "tu" and had trouble opening the bonnet. While his secretary screamed "Leave him alone, he didn't do anything," the policemen threw Mr Saber to the ground, kicked him in the back, choked and handcuffed him.

On the way to the police station he was slapped several times, then dragged out of the van by his handcuffs and kicked again, before being held for 19 hours.

This is Kamel Saber's story. But it is corroborated by eyewitnesses, and he is suing the three policemen. His only crime was undebt de sale gueule; in other words, the cops didn't like his looks. Mr Saber had thought he was integrated in French society. He had worked hard to set up his company and never had trouble with the law before. That night, he felt humiliated. "If I'd had blond hair and blue eyes, it wouldn't have happened. It was racism."

SOS Racisme, the French watchdog group founded in the 1980s to counter Jean Marie Le Pen's extreme right wing National Front (FN), reports a significant rise in incidents like the one involving Mr Saber. "There is no doubt that racism in France is growing," Delphine Batho, the secretary general of SOS Racisme said. "The rise of the FN is its political aspect. Beyond that, you feel a banalisation of racism and xenophobia."

In 1995, the last year for which figures are available, at least seven people were murdered in racist attacks. One of them, a young Moroccan named Brahim Bouaram, was drowned when he was thrown into the Seine by two skinheads coming from an FN rally. Arabs are frequently refused entry to nightclubs in French resort towns, and are discriminated against in jobs and housing.

The FN feeds on and encourages such attitudes. This week, 52 per cent of the population of Vitrolles, southern France, voted for the FN in a mayoral election. The winner's husband, Mr Brund Megret, is the number two in the FN and is frank about his desire to "ethnically cleanse" France.

"If we want to send the Arabs and Africans and Asians back to where they came from, it is not because we hate them, it is because they pollute our national identity and take our jobs," Mr Megret recently said. "When we have power, we will organise their return. We will stop renewing their residence cards, and we will force companies to pay a tax on foreign workers that will eventually lead to the foreigners losing their positions."

More than a third of French people express support for some of the FN's ideas. Two thirds say new immigrants should be prevented from coming to France. While FN leaders are anti semitic - Jean Marie Le Pen has questioned whether Nazi gas chambers existed - the rank and file are anti Arab.

NORTH African Arabs are the main obsession of the frontistes, as FN followers call themselves. They see France's four million Arabs as a threatening alien culture.

"People say we're xenophobic," a former paratrooper frontiste told me at the Megrets victory celebration in Vitrolles. "That's not true: we say `welcome' to any foreigner who is a European Christian. But we can't assimilate Arabs. There are too many differences. They hate our country."

The French sociologist Emmanuel Todd points out that the Paris region and the Mediterranean coast - the two areas where the FN is most entrenched - were traditionally the most republican, left wing areas of France. What passes for racism is in fact, Todd oelieves, a kind of "frustrated assimilationism" which arises from the French belief in equality.

"The British don't believe that all men are equal, so they don't care if their immigrants become like them. The French have this universalist tradition, so it drives them crazy when people don't assimilate."

HELENE RUBAK is in charge of helping foreigners at CIMADE, a Christian charity that saved thousands of French Jews during the second World War. "Today's racist or xenophobic reactions are very near to the spirit of Vichy," Ms Rubak said.

Le Monde newspaper made the same point this week when it compared a passage from France's proposed new law on immigration with a December 1941 Vichy decree. The Debre law, named after the French interior minister, says that "any person who has signed a lodging certificate and lodged a foreign national, in the context of a private visit . .. must inform the city hall... of the departure of the person".

The Vichy law specified that persons Jewish or non Jewish who lodge Jews for whatever reason must make a special declaration to the police. This declaration must be made in the 24 hours following the arrival of the Jew"

The battle against racism is one of the few things that unites the French intelligentsia. This week, 59 film directors signed a petition saying they had all lodged illegal immigrants and asking the government to indict them under the provisions of the new law. A handful of associations do what they can to counter the FN's racist propaganda.

Ms Rubak said the government's approach has created an atmosphere of xenophobia and denunciation. "The government is not responsible for the rise in racism," she said. "But its approach is based on closing the borders, on turning inward. Many people in the administration - in hospitals, in city halls, in the police - have a vigilante attitude.

"The law says that French schools must be open to everyone, but we see many places where mayors or local employees refuse to register children unless their parents show residence papers. If they don't have papers, the employees denounce them to immigration authorities."

Meanwhile, the Toubon law on racism, named after the French justice minister, has been shelved because politicians from the governing right wing coalition cannot agree on it. The law would have made statements like Jean Marie Le Pen's famous "I believe in the inequality of races" a crime. Anti racist groups are dismayed as traditional political parties, void of ideology or vision, continue to abandon ground to the FN.