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Riots and repression, and more neo-liberalism, in France
FRANCE HAS been shocked by weeks of violence.
Nightly riots started in the poor estates of Paris’s outer edges and
spread to more than 300 cities. Around 9,000 vehicles have been set
afire since the violence erupted on 27 October. At the height of the
unrest, youths burned 1,408 vehicles across France in one night (6
November). The disturbances have been described as the largest civil
unrest hitting France since the riots in May 1968, then the prologue to
the general strikes and occupation of factories in which millions of
workers participated.
Today, however, the leaders of the trade unions (let
alone the Communist Party), have not lifted one finger to provide an
alternative to the growing malaise in French society. The repeated
attacks on workers’ rights, the driving down of living standards and the
worsening social and economic situation are the direct results of the
neo-liberal policies of the government. The French bourgeoisie is on the
ropes: it cannot compete against its international opponents and seeks
to gain an advantage by attacking its own working class and poor.
Despite determined struggle by the working class on issues like
education, pension ‘reform’ and privatisation, it is the failure of the
leadership of organised labour to fight for a consistent alternative, to
unite behind its banner all the exploited, which has led to the feeling
amongst disaffected youth that rioting is the only possible way to make
their voices heard.
Interior minister Nicolas Sarkozy is the most vocal
representative of the neo-liberal rightwing. A rival to prime minister
Dominique de Villepin in the race to become the candidate for the
governing right-wing party, Union for a Popular Movement (UMP), in the
2007 presidential elections, he likes to grandstand on law and order.
Any kind of security emergency and you can bet that ‘Sarko’, as he is
known in the media, will make a statement for the cameras. Two days
before the rioting started he visited the Parisian suburb of Argenteuil
and described local youth who came out in protest as ‘racaille’, rabble
or scum. He called for "crime-ridden neighbourhoods to be cleaned out
with a Kärcher", a high-powered industrial hose.
Then, on the night of 27 October, police hunted down
three teenagers in Clichy-sous-Bois. The boys were coming back from a
football game and wanted to avoid a police identity check. They climbed
over the wall of an electricity substation where two of them got stuck
in the installation and died. The next morning, Sarkozy declared that
they had been involved in a burglary and the police could not be held
responsible. The deaths sparked a day of rioting in Clichy, followed by
several more days of violence in the area. On Sunday 30 October, the CRS
(riot police), deployed in the poor areas, went into another borough in
Clichy, previously untouched by violence, firing-off tear gas canisters.
One of them exploded inside a mosque during a prayer service.
Rioting spread rapidly to cities like Lille, Evreux,
Rouen, Strasbourg, Rennes, Nantes, Toulouse, Marseille, Cannes and Nice.
The areas touched by these events have much in common. Their poor
boroughs are modern day over-crowded ghettos, where half of the
inhabitants are under 20 years old, unemployment is above 40% and
identity checks and police harassment occur daily. The ‘poorest subjects
of the republic’ suffer poverty and racism, and dependence on government
benefits.
The authorities try to hold the residents in check
using the strong arm of the CRS. The latter was again exposed as a
brutal, racist force when two officers were filmed beating a young man
in the Paris suburb of La Courneuve, with six of their colleagues
looking on. French president, Jacques Chirac, praised the
"professionalism and sang-froid" of the French police on the same day
that the TF1 channel filmed an officer taunting an Arab youth in a Lyon
suburb. The officer was heard to say: "Do you want me to take you to an
electricity substation?" The threat was repeated by a second policeman
on the scene: "So you want to go and fry with your mates? You want to go
into the transformer?" When the boy responded by saying that this was
not the way to calm down the estate a third officer replied: "We don’t
give a shit if the estate calms down or not. Actually, the more it gets
fucked up the happier we are".
The reaction of these officers is a flawless
translation of the orders they received from their political masters.
Bernard Accoyer, UMP leader, in the lower house of parliament declared
that "amongst the youths involved in crime there is an
over-representation of children who come from polygamous families". His
comments were repeated by several other government representatives, such
as employment minister, Gerard Larcher, and echo the racist filth
peddled by the Front National (FN) and its leader Jean-Marie le Pen.
Sarkozy is seeking to surf this wave of racism by calling for the
expulsion of all foreigners caught rioting and has suggested that even
French nationals, if involved in rioting, could see changes to their
status in the future.
The political elite has united with Sarkozy to
confront the disturbances with increased repression in the short term
and more neo-liberal measures in the long term. Vague promises of urban
regeneration aside, the main measure taken was the revival of a law that
allows regional representatives of the government, prefects, to
implement curfews and declare a state of emergency. This law was last
used by General de Gaulle in 1961 to suppress the national liberation
struggle of the Algerian people against the French colonial masters. It
was used in Algeria and also in Paris, where up to 200 French Algerians
were killed by the police.
The French parliament has now voted to prolong the
state of emergency to three months and the law has been used to impose
curfews in 30 districts. Across the country, 11,500 police have been
deployed, 2,700 people have been arrested, and over 350 adults and 68
juveniles have been imprisoned. The police have charged five parents for
failing to control the behaviour of their children and teenagers have
been arrested for posting messages on the internet.
While most of the international press poured scorn
on Sarkozy for inflaming the situation, he is gaining widespread support
from the same commentators for his neo-liberal programme. According to a
Financial Times editorial (8 November), the urgent measures needed to
further the integration of what it calls, "the latter day sans culottes
at the margins of the French economy", are "to cut the minimum wage and
payroll taxes… reduce the job protection rights of those in work to
create a more level playing field for those without".
So, the logic of capitalism is to create integration
by making the majority of working-class people as poor and vulnerable as
those who have nothing to lose. The measures announced by de Villepin go
in the same direction. The job creation schemes for the poor estates are
not to provide real jobs but amount to reheating existing government
policy: allowing young people to quit school at 14 and start an
‘apprenticeship’ with almost no wages and without any real legal
protection. The government wants to turn a whole generation of young
people over to employers, without any real rights, and use them to push
down the working and living conditions of French workers as a whole. The
government has recently brought in a new contract for first time
recruits to the labour market. The CNE (contract nouvelle embauche)
allows employers to make workers redundant by sending them a letter
during the first two years of their employment, with no obligation to
state the reasons why. Workers will not have the right to fight the
redundancy.
The government is determined neither to bend under
the recent workers’ mobilisations and action, including strikes in
national rail against ‘rampant privatisation’, nor under the pressure of
violence from the most downtrodden sections of society. It will try its
utmost to push on with its neo-liberal programme.
Of course, it is not through rioting that the
government will be stopped. On the contrary, the French political elite
has used the riots to impose even more draconian repression and whip up
racism and division.
In the events of the last month it has been the
trade union leaders, with a mobilising power of hundreds of thousands at
their finger tips, who have been found most wanting. They could have
stepped in with mobilisations, fighting for a socialist programme
against the government and forged unity between the inhabitants of the
poor estates and the working class at large. Such a struggle could have
cut across the racist lies of the rightwing, exposed the government
policies for what they are and forced the hated CRS police off the
estates.
Karl Debbaut
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