France: The young men leading the riots are proud of their actions, writes Lara Marlowe at La Grande Borne housing estate, Grigny
If The young men of La Grande Borne held their ground yesterday, strutting proudly over the battlefield from which, as they told it, they drove 70 riot police on Sunday night.
The asphalt is charred where two cars burned, and broken glass is scattered over the boulevard where the CRS buses were parked. Hundreds of black plastic cylinders - the tops of tear-gas canisters - litter the pavement.
The rioters, all in their late teens, want to show off their war wounds. Abdel-Aziz splays his fingers so I can see the burn from a Molotov cocktail. His younger brother Karim lifts his T-shirt to show me a red welt on his chest, left by a "flash-ball" stun gun. "I've got one on my back too," he boasts. Cheb Munir displays a deep cut on his index finger.
"It lasted five hours!" says Abdel-Aziz. "There were 200 of us - all the men in the housing project. We had five pump-action rifles." Police reports spoke of pellet guns, and said 30 police were wounded at La Grande Borne, two of them seriously. The teenagers show no remorse for cops they sent to hospital. "We wanted to kill them," Abdel Hamid (15) says gravely.
A car drives slowly by. The north African Arab driver leans out the window and shouts at the teenagers: "Shut up. I told you not to talk to journalists." A caïd, as gang leaders in the banlieue are known? For a moment, I believe the interior minister's [Nicolas Sarkozy] allegations of an organised structure among rioters.
Most of the youths vanish in seconds, only to drift in and out of the small group that hovers while I discuss the riots with older residents of La Grande Borne.
"I'm the big brother here," Abdel (30) introduces himself. He is a baggage handler at Orly airport. "Big brother" is the term that has emerged to describe the older, cooler heads who are allegedly trying to stop the riots. But as I soon learn, they are much closer in attitude to the rampaging youths than to frightened, white, middle-class France.
To hear Abdel and the teenagers talk, they are the victims of police brutality.
"This place was quiet," Abdel says. "Three days ago, the police came in buses and started harassing us with identity checks. It was sheer provocation. Last night, it exploded, and it will explode again tonight if they come back."
In theory, the "big brothers" dissuade teenagers from destroying their own neighbourhoods. How do you convince them to stop, I ask Abdel. "There are no arguments," he says. "There's no recreation centre here. There's no place where they can meet. This is an abandoned housing project. If it doesn't calm down soon, it will never calm down. Repression works for a while, but if you get hit enough, you fight back." But two schools were burned in Grigny before Sunday night's battle with the police. Don't the rioters care that they were destroying their own neighbourhood? "That wasn't us. They were independent," Abdel says of the school arsonists. What about the two burning cars that brought in the riot police on Sunday? "Two cars - that's nothing," he comments.
La Grande Borne has seen four serious riots since 1992, Abdel explains. The first started when a white man shot at teenagers who were making noise, wounding two. The police protected him, so the youths of the housing estate spent a night burning and pillaging. "I participated in that one," Abdel says nostalgically. "I'm too old for that sort of thing now." A few minutes later, he strikes an ambiguous note. "If you ask, everybody participated here last night, but nobody participated." Abdel and his friends boast about the ferocity of Sunday night's battle. "We've got experience now," he says. "Remember, this is our fourth riot. The police were firing flash-balls; it's like being hit by Mike Tyson. And they fired tear-gas canisters straight at us - not overhead. One kid lost an eye. It was a real battle. The cops couldn't take it anymore. They really ate the dust. They retreated when they ran out of munitions."
Abdel and Mouloud, a delivery man and also a "big brother", confirm police reports that girls joined in the rioting at La Grande Borne. "Not that many, about a dozen," Mouloud says. "People on our side were clapping," Abdel continues. "Even mothers came out and were clapping." The sense of injustice runs deep here. "There's an industrial zone next to La Grande Borne where 3,000 people work," says Mouloud. "Only 50 of them are from Grigny. They don't trust us; they say we're blacks and Arabs." What do the rioters want? "Money!" says one African. "Cash!" He looks at me provocatively, and for a moment I think I'm about to be mugged. He slips away, and Moussa, another African teenager, answers my question. "For Sarkozy to get out. If he resigns, that's the end of the riot." "He's wrecked his career with this," Abdel observes.
"We want to f**k Sarkozy, that's all," says Mouloud. "He's got to stop talking about washing us with power hoses. We're not sh*t. We're French. We were born here." The Union of Islamic Organisations in France yesterday announced a fatwa, or religious ruling, ordering the rioters to stop. Most of the Africans and Arabs in the banlieue are Muslims, but Abdel and his friends are not impressed.
"Fatwa! Don't make me laugh," Abdel says. "We don't feel represented by those people. We didn't vote for them. They're just filling their pockets. People don't pray here." A statement from the Action Police CFTC union yesterday said that "nothing seems capable of stopping the civil war that spreads a bit more every day across the whole country." Abdel, Mouloud, Moussa and the others don't think this is civil war - yet. "But it could become one," a teenager called Karim interjects."It was just the kids fighting last night," Mouloud adds. "If Mr Sarkozy's police don't change, the worst is yet to come."