Sunday, Nov. 13, 2005

Restless Youth

By JAMES GEARY and JAMES GRAFF/Paris

It's a damp, cold November night in the run-down Paris suburb of Clichy-sous-Bois. The rioting that has consumed France for over two weeks began here, but tonight things are relatively calm. No cars are burning; no fire fighters are hosing down flaming Dumpsters; no gangs of hooded youths prowl the streets. Police vans cruise slowly along the narrow roads, but all they encounter is two young men in a heated argument outside one of the dilapidated high-rise apartment blocks. "They're talking about deporting immigrants!" shouts Paul, who moved to Clichy-sous-Bois from Congo when he was 2. "We aren't immigrants! We're French!" The other man bellows back, "They're not going to deport immigrants!" Agitated and upset, Paul gives the other guy a shove. And that's when Gouneidi Traore steps in.

Traore, 26, grew up in some of the other gritty projects like Clichy-sous-Bois that ring Paris, one of 15 children of a Malian street cleaner. He lives here with his girlfriend in a one-room apartment, a block away from his parent's flat. He works here, too, as a mediator hired by the local council. His job: to counsel the area's poor youth, and at night to look for potential trouble — and to stop it before it starts. When he sees that the argument over deportation could turn ugly, he positions himself between the two men, urging them to head on home. Traore deplores the violence that has racked France, but he knows firsthand the anger and resentment that fueled it. "If someone has a record with the police, he's finished," says Traore, who's tall and lean with a friendly yet authoritative manner. "They won't get a job. I tell them, 'Look, I've been through misery and I'm a bit integrated. I have my own apartment.' To them, I'm a success story."

France will need a lot more success stories like Traore's if it is to quell the rage burning across the country. The riots lit up some 300 towns and cities — over the weekend, clashes broke out in Lyons' city center and on the outskirts of Toulouse — and cast a harsh light on how France's ideal of equality has failed people from dreary banlieues like Clichy-sous-Bois. The state is officially color- and religion-blind, so successive French governments have refused to acknowledge, or even compile data on, racial or ethnic origins. There is a single, unified French identity; no combined identity of Algerian French or French Malian is recognized.

However well-intended, the doctrine proved less effective in practice. Assigned to initially inviting public-housing projects, immigrants, their children and grandchildren ultimately found themselves captives of places like Clichy-sous-Bois, segregated from white society and marginalized from economic and political life. Second- and third-generation French grew more disillusioned, more resentful and more alienated. It's an explosive socioeconomic mix that exists across Europe (see following story), and has now erupted in France. The task ahead is to make the country's lofty rhetoric match reality. The young men behind the violence "are rioting, not because they hate the Republic," says Dounia Bouzar, an anthropologist who has worked extensively with banlieue delinquents, "but because they want to be included in it."

Job opportunities would be a good start. Discrimination is illegal, but banlieue residents routinely report that they are turned away once a potential employer spots an Arabic name or undesirable postal code. To document the problem, Sorbonne sociologist Jean-François Amadieu sent identical résumés in response to more than 250 job ads; the only difference was that he gave some applicants Arab-sounding and others more "French" names. Résumés from white male applicants with French names elicited five times more job offers than those that could have come from North Africans. "There's a massive gap between what we say and what we do," says Amadieu.

Salem Sefrioui, 29, an architect living in the upscale 16th arrondissement of Paris, is one of the lucky few who have escaped the banlieue. Born in Casablanca, he grew up in Colombes outside Paris, but with the advantage of educated and supportive parents. They pulled all the strings they could to get him into the élite Lycée La Folie St. James in Neuilly, using his grandfather's more respectable address there. "I always make sure to include the fact that I speak Arabic on my CV," says Sefrioui. "I have two nationalities, not two half-nationalities. But my story might have been a different if I hadn't gotten out of Colombes."

The problem is not limited to big cities like Paris. Riots even reached places like Blois, a gorgeous medieval town in the Loire valley associated more with castles and cathedrals than with conflicts. But Blois has troubled banlieues of its own, and in two days of violence last week around 20 cars were torched and bands of youths fought running battles with riot cops. The mayor, Nicolas Perruchot, thinks the violence was inspired by television images of unrest elsewhere, but admits "the underlying ills are there" even in bucolic Blois. Youness Ouzaanik, 21, a smart, funny young man who lives in Blois' projects, couldn't agree more. "The banlieues are as much a part of Blois as the castle," he says. "I'd like to see our neighborhood included in the tourist brochures."

Perruchot won office in 2001 on promises to restore order and renovate the banlieues, which he's tried to do by more than doubling the number of municipal police, and by exploiting tax-exemption schemes to encourage businesses to relocate to designated banlieues. But reversing decades of decay doesn't happen fast. "There's nothing left in our area," laments Mourad Salah-Brahim, 21. "Virtually every business has moved out."

Back in their gilded Paris offices, the French government didn't seem to get it. Apart from a brief, uninspiring call for calm on Nov. 6 and a few comments at a press conference last Thursday, President Jacques Chirac remained largely invisible throughout the crisis. Prime Minister Dominique de Villepin announced that the government would spend more on public housing, intensify its efforts to find jobs for unemployed youth, and allow local authorities to declare curfews (about 100 communities did, including Lyons). For many, though, the measures were reminiscent of the well-meaning but ineffectual initiatives announced by past governments.

Interior Minister Nicolas Sarkozy became a cause of the crisis for some, and its solution for others. Sarkozy acknowledged that deprivation and discrimination were behind the riots, but refused to apologize for his tough talk. "It's not just unemployment, injustice and racism," he said on television. "It's fear generated by gangs that live from drugs and stolen cars." That hard line has earned Sarkozy the scorn of some youths. "I will slit his throat or shoot him," says Osman, 14, to approval from his middle-school classmates in Clichy-sous-Bois.

Sarkozy has tapped into a craving for law and order in France, where most people recoiled from the rioters' defiance. He said he would deport any foreigners convicted in connection with the violence. But he showed a softer side, too, favoring "positive-discrimination" programs, and even advocated giving foreigners the right to vote in local elections. A poll commissioned by Le Journal du Dimanche last week showed that 53% of those questioned said they had confidence in Sarkozy to solve the problems of the banlieues, with 52% for De Villepin and 29% for Chirac. "Sarkozy's language is understood perfectly well," says Nadine Morano, a member of the governing Union for a Popular Movement who grew up in the tough Cèdre Bleu housing project in Nancy. "He's the only real alternative for changing the country."

Maybe so. But before he can change the country, he'll have to change the banlieues. Over the weekend, police intercepted a flurry of e-mails, blogs and text messages calling on rioters to leave their gutted ghettos and do some damage to the Champs Elysées, the Arc de Triomphe and the Bastille. Some 3,000 extra police were deployed throughout Paris. Sarkozy makes no secret of his ambition to succeed Chirac as President, and often refers to a "rupture" with the past to describe how he would govern. But in Clichy-sous-Bois and hundreds of places like it across France, rupture has already occurred. If the rifts that have been exposed over the past two weeks are not healed, violence could flare again.