France faces ‘social and ethnic apartheid’ a decade after riots

Ten years ago today was a school holiday in France, in the Muslim month of Ramadan. Bouna Traoré, aged 15, the child of immigrants from Mauritania, and Zyed Benna, aged 17, of Tunisian origin, were hurrying home from a football game to break the fast when police gave chase.

The teenagers hid in a power substation where they were electrocuted. Within a quarter of an hour the first cars were torched in Clichy-sous-Bois, the banlieue north of Paris where the youths lived. By the 28th, rioting spread throughout the Seine-Saint-Denis department, then to all of France at the beginning of November. Prime minister Dominique de Villepin declared a state of emergency, the first since the Algerian war.

On this 10th anniversary of the beginning of the worst rioting in modern French history, media and politicians are again talking about the immigrant banlieues.

"It's on all our minds," prime minister Manuel Valls said at a special cabinet meeting on "equality and citizenship" in the suburb of Les Mureaux yesterday. "Exactly 10 years ago, our country was wracked by several weeks of riots which left no one untouched. The pain – how can we not think of Zyed and Bouna, of their families and loved ones – the images, the scars are still there."

The government has spent €48 billion to replace insalubrious old tower blocks in the quartiers (neighbourhoods) – as they are euphemistically known – with pretty little houses. They’ve rebuilt public squares and schools and improved public transport.

Youth unemployment

Yet the changes are mainly cosmetic. Seventy-two per cent of residents of the banlieues say urban renewal has not improved their conditions. The proportion of households in the banlieues living in poverty has risen to 38.4 per cent, nearly three times greater than the national average. Youth unemployment in the quartiers is 45 per cent, compared with 23 per cent elsewhere.

Stéphane Gatignon, the mayor of Sevran, near Clichy- sous-Bois, says peace in the banlieues is precarious. “Yes, it can explode,” he told France Inter radio. “We mustn’t fool ourselves. There are strong tensions, an extremely painful economic crisis.”

Youths still run when they see police patrols. Last May a policewoman and policeman were cleared of criminal negligence for failing to warn Benna and Traoré – or even alert the electricity company – when the teenagers entered the substation. The young people of the banlieues concluded the police always win.

A decade ago, images of hooded youths throwing Molotov cocktails summed up the banlieues. At the time, only foreign media dared point out that most of the rioters were Muslims. Today, especially since the Charlie Hebdo massacre last January, the suburbs are associated in the minds of the French with bearded Salafists and jihadists bound for Syria.

Eighty-three per cent of respondents to a poll by Le Parisien newspaper said their distrust of inhabitants of the housing projects has increased; 68 per cent said the government does not do enough for the banlieues; and 61 per cent said youths from the quartiers behave worse than others.

Risk of explosion

Valls shocked many of his compatriots when he spoke of France’s “social, territorial and ethnic apartheid” in the wake of the

Charlie Hebdo

killings. In his speech yesterday, he acknowledged the failure of 30 years of French urban planning and spoke of “the risk of an explosion of our society.”

The murders of a 24-year- old and two 15-year-olds in the slums of north Marseille at the weekend were further evidence of the “hyper violence” linked to drug trafficking in the banlieues, Valls said. Without using the word “Islam”, he denounced “the poison spreading in the heart of the republic; that of a counter-model of society, a model that is against the republic and its values.”

The only solution, Valls continued, was to be lucid but at the same time fight discrimination, racism and the stigmatisation of Islam.

In a new name-and-shame strategy, Valls listed 36 towns that do not provide adequate low-income housing. Although it is not explicitly stated, his plan for mixité sociale means moving ethnic minorities into white, middle-class neighbourhoods and providing financial incentives for whites to move back to the banlieues.