The spectre of 2005 looms over Parisian suburbs

Tuesday, November 27, 2007

The battles between youth and police in the Parisian suburb of Villiers-le-Bel are reminiscent of those in the autumn of 2005, when France faced three weeks of rioting.

On Sunday, Nov. 25, two teenagers from Villiers-le-Bel, a suburb located just north of Paris, were killed in a collision with a police car. Within hours the town was ablaze, along with four neighboring communities. 40 police officers were wounded, more than 20 cars set alight and 9 people arrested. The next night, battles between police and local youths began anew. If this sequence of events sounds familiar, it’s because we’ve heard the story before.

On Oct. 27, 2005, Zyad and Bouna, two teenagers from the Parisian suburb of Clichy-Sous-Bois, only a few kilometers away from Villiers-le-Bel, were electrocuted after a foot-chase with police. They ducked into a transformer station to hide, with fatal consequences.

Three weeks of rioting followed in the suburbs of nearly all major cities in France. Images of burning cars, smashed windows and riot police hit television screens around the world.

The situation hasn’t changed one bit

The two events are similar, and their contexts of poverty and exclusion are too, says Zohra Bitan, president of the association ma6tvachanger, which translates as ‘my housing project will change,’ who works with suburban youth.

“The situation hasn’t changed one bit: we still have ghettos. 2005 showed us that even if the suburbs are in flame, nothing gets done. This makes it four deaths in total, without counting the two which are ignored by the media. There’s drug addiction, aids, family crises, misery, unemployment, discrimination… All the money committed to the suburbs has done nothing to improve the situation. It’s getting worse. It’s time for people to hold the government responsible. We can’t continue putting on bandages if all they do is break,” Bitan explained to FRANCE 24.

If, on the ground, the situation seems ready to burst into violence again, the government has the power to improve things, explained Laurent Mucchielli, academic and author of When the Suburbs Burn: Lessons from the Autumn Riots of 2005.

“The only thing the government learned was how to communicate. In 2005, Nicolas Sarkozy [then minister of the interior] made mistakes. Remember his provocative statements before the rioting began? He said that the troubled neighbourhoods should be cleaned up with an industrial-strength power hose, as well as using the term “scum” to refer to the rioting youth. Afterwards, the authorities denied that there was a chase, and that the two teenagers were killed after climbing into the power station by themselves.”

The enquiry that followed revealed this version of events to be false, establishing that police chased the adolescents into the transformer station, where they died.

A new approach

Today, politicians are using a different tone. On a visit to Beijing, French President Nicolas Sarkozy has expressed the hope that “everyone calms down, and that we let the authorities decide who’s responsible.” As for the Prime Minister, Francois Fillon called the families of the two teenagers to give his condolences. Earlier, Michele Alliot-Marie, the interior minister, went to see the scene of the accident for herself.

On the local level, the mayor of Villiers-le-Bel, Daniel Vaillant, called for calm.

“I call on everyone, especially the youth, to find the calm that we once had in our community. Since yesterday, we’ve been in mourning. Tonight, the city has suffered,” he said during a radio interview.

On Monday afternoon, a silent march in memory of the two teenagers wound through the street of Villiers-le-Bel. Several hundred people took part. The marchers carried a photo of Moushin and Larami at the head of the procession with the words “dead for nothing” - the same slogan that was used in 2005.

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