jacques brinon / ap no more Residents of suburban Aulnay-sous-Bois march in silent protest against the violence

	SPECIAL REPORT

Posted Sunday, November 6, 2005; 9.34GMT
Banlieues like Bobigny, Aulnay-sous-Bois and the original flash point of Clichy-sous-Bois make up a tinderbox that few tourists see and no one in France wants to talk about. The working-class suburbs of Paris are dominated by sterile high-rise public housing where Arab immigrants from North Africa were shunted when they started arriving in France in the 1950s. Now, their children and grandchildren subsist in squalor alongside more recent black and South Asian immigrants and their French-born kids. Families struggle to hang on to their dignity while drug dealers and petty criminals exploit some of the only business opportunities to be found in these run-down towns. Unemployment rates are at least double the national average of 9.8%; in some neighborhoods, they surpass 40%. It is the French version of the social malaise that besets European cities from Amsterdam to London to Madrid.

The core problem is what the French politely refer to as "social exclusion." Residents of the banlieues feel cut off from jobs, from education, from decent housing, and ultimately from political life. There are some 5 million Muslims in France, but there is no Muslim member of the National Assembly. Poverty remains the fate of far too many alienated youth, who say they're turned away from jobs because of their ethnicity or faith. Discrimination, whether on racial or religious grounds, has never fitted into France's idea of itself, subsumed as it is by so many fuzzy platitudes about republicanism. But for the people seething on the streets last week, it's real. "These are all kids who feel they're not considered really French," says Sidaty Siby, a Malian who heads the Franco-African Association in Clichy-sous-Bois. "When they look for work, they don't find it; when they ask for housing, they don't get it. We want everyone to stop burning cars, but people have to realize that there was a reason for all of this."

The spark for last week's chaos was the senseless deaths of two teenagers on Oct. 27 in Clichy-sous-Bois, a jumble of largely dilapidated high-rises inhabited almost entirely by immigrants and their descendants. Bouna Traore, 15, of Malian origin, and Zyed Benna, 17, whose parents are Tunisian, took refuge with a third teenager in the relay station of a high-voltage transformer. They may have thought they were being chased by police, and when they entered the station the first two were electrocuted and the third badly burned. The rumor spread in the projects of Chêne-Pointu in lower Clichy that the police were at fault, though an official inquiry found that there was no pursuit.

That evening, an angry group gathered in front of a nearby fire station to protest the deaths and soon started burning cars and breaking windows. At a nearby postal sorting station alone, nine cars were incinerated. The battle flared when police arrived. A peaceful march the following Saturday in honor of the two dead — led by youth wearing T shirts that read mort pour rien (Dead For No Reason) — did nothing to lower the tension. The pattern was set for a growing contagion of altercations between young men and French riot police across northern Paris.

Nearly as stunning as the outburst of violence was the French government's failure to control it. It was forced to suspend some train services from Paris to Charles de Gaulle Airport after two trains were targeted by riotous youths. Politicians seemed flummoxed — and most French didn't seem to expect much else. Last month, a survey by polling agency CSA found that 76% of respondents had little or no confidence in their political leaders, regardless of ideological stripe. The riots have done nothing to improve those leaders' standing.

At the center of controversy, where he most likes to be, is Interior Minister Nicolas Sarkozy, president of the governing Union for a Popular Movement (ump) and the main rival of Prime Minister Dominique de Villepin for the ump presidential candidacy in 2007. Sarkozy's law-and-order campaign to crack the crime and drugs rings in immigrant areas has raised hackles. So has his penchant for tough talk. In June, he said criminal elements should be cleaned out "with an industrial power hose." Just days before the mayhem started, when he ventured into the troubled banlieue of Argenteuil to outline a tough new plan to fight crime, some in the crowd threw stones at him. Sarkozy slammed the troublemakers as "scum," and some protesters took it personally. "These neighborhoods have been on the edge for a long time," says Babali Doulou, 27, a Senegalese immigrant who lives in the gritty Seine-Saint-Denis district and cleans airplanes at Charles de Gaulle Airport for a living. "This is because of Sarkozy."

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