{ um, help? }

[delga]

You know, generally, Ilisten to the news everyday, and start my day's internetting by heading to BBC news. That being said, I've been out of the loop this weekend because of going to London etc. So, even though I've heard about rioting in France, I have no idea what started it or why it's happening: can anyone fill me in?

From what I can tell, it has to do with racial tensions in the country but that's all the BBC website can tell me. I'm waiting for my laundry cycles to finish so in the meanwhile I'm going to go to The Independent's website and see if I can access archives but until then, anyone on the flist know what's what?

Comments

[wliberation.livejournal.com]

Okay, so I've been talking about this even before this entire thing happened, because let's face it, it was a timebomb anyway, but I've been doing it in Finnish so this might be tricky. :)

Basically, this is due to poor living conditions in the ghettos, high unemployment amongst the people living there (immigrants and second-generation "immigrants" from the Maghreb countries), cultural tension between the people living in the ghettos and the "real French people" (/said with sarcasm, I must note), and the general racism in France that is only serving to "tighten" the situation further.

The thing is, France's immigration policy (or rather, the policy of how to merge the immigrants into the rest of the society) is a complete failure. They've been trying to blend the immigrants into the rest of the people seemlessly, trying to make them "more French" in some way. Basically, they're denying that they are a minority at all; they're treating them as if their cultural background doesn't matter one bit; they're trying to make the difference invisible. The forbidding of religious symbols (read: veils) in schools is a good example of this. This leads to cultural tension and loss of identity.

At the same time, racism in France is horrendous. The immigrants are put to live in the ghettos (why, I do not know; I'd better look more into it) where they have no chances of making anything out of themselves because they live in the ghettos. It's a vicious circle, because to others, just the fact that you live in a ghetto is good enough a sign to prove that you're a "bad seed". People can't get jobs if they live in the ghettos because employers will take one look at your address and say, no thank you. This has lead to the fact that most of the young people - heck, most of everyone - living in the ghettos are unemployed. This leads to poverty which leads to bad living conditions and not getting proper education. Also, the police force is said to treat those living in the ghettos especially suspiciously, meaning that if someone's, say, having a house parting, the cops will probably soon appear to break it up. The cops and government try to keep them in a tight leash because there's an expectation that they'll behave badly. This I've heard. Furthermore, the public in general treats the immigrants as a threat. Even the "second-generation immigrants" who have been born in France and have lived there all their lives are not necessarily considered French by the "common folk".

There's probably more to it than that, but I think that these are the major issues here. Hope I made sense.

[wliberation.livejournal.com]

*parting=party. Duh.

[delgaserasca.livejournal.com]

You know, I got this comment just as I'd finished crawling through a French article on Google news. And I have to say... I knew this, which makes me feel a bit stupid. More to the point, I saw this coming and, by the looks of things, so did you and every other vaguely intelligent person on the planet.

I guess I thought there was some sort of catalyst? Does that make sense? I thought maybe something had triggered this but it still feels like a timebomb (to use your excellent phrase) that went off without the fuse being lit. Which is a naive thing to say but also...yeh. Why did it go off now and not, say, tomorrow? Or three weeks a go? What was it about the current climate that made the conditions rife? And is this going to become the second revolution?

But thank you. This has been useful. I need to keep a closer eye on the news which is proving a little difficult at the moment. But I will selotape my ear to the radio if I must.

[delgaserasca.livejournal.com]

Oh, noorie says that the actual short term trigger was the electrocution of two males as they evaded the police. And that someone threw a grenade at some Muslims during Ramadan. Which is one of the most deplorable things I've heard ever.

[wliberation.livejournal.com]

I haven't heard anything about those two males or about the grenade thing, so I can't say anything about that, but yes, I imagine it would have been something like that happening. Something that the police or someone else did or maybe someone just finally had enough, and you know how it goes: when it's been boiling underneath the surface long enough, all you need is one person throwing a punch and then you have a bar fight.

...Okay, a really bad metaphor, I know, but you get what I mean. I don't think it's organised at all, though, from the looks of it. In fact, to me this looks like very typical chain reaction type thing.

[noorie.livejournal.com]

oh i actually read a huge article about this on saturday. the specific wave of rioting started because 2 young men/boy were electrocuted to death while fleeing from a police car. and later on some ASSHAT threw something (i forget, possibly a grenade or something smoking or explosive) into a muslim place of prayer during the ramadan (or right after, i'm so senile!!). those were the excuses that lit the fuse, but they didn't create the bomb. there's been a lot of tension in france for a long while now, and i think the above comment talks about that (although i don't know that i agree with the notion that people are made to live in ghettos, it's hardly medieval europe, it's rather that they can ill afford to live anywhere else in the city and since immigrants tend to be low income, they gravitate there). uh, what else. i don't suppose the french people like foreign immigrants any more than most nations. and i don't suppose the immigrants like being hated and treated like shit. then there's the whole religion thing. france prides itself on being a secular state (unlike the U.S., for example). it's a really big thing for them that state-related issues are kept religion-free, and that's part of the (official) reason kids going to public schools aren't allowed to wear a religious headdress, etc. obviously it upsets religious sentiments. also, i think a lot of the french people are feeling threatened by how the nature and culture of france are changing as a result of multi-culturalism and the immigrants' culture. they were going nuts over the american influence, so you can imagine what this does to them. *sigh* normally i'd think religious leaders of the immigrants are behind the rioting (they say it seems all too organized) but in this case i heard a lot of them actually tried to make things better and stop and talk to people and helped a lot at least in one of the neighbourhoods (the neighbourhood of the 2 boys). i'm probably not being correct but that's the gist of what i got from the situation. oh and the french heads of goverment are sort of hoping it'll all go away if they ignore it, while their minister of internal affairs thinks that if he can't fix it with a little force, he can fix it with a LOT of force. *rolls eyes*

[delgaserasca.livejournal.com]

Ah, ok; that's what I was wondering: the actual, short term trigger. I don't want this to become too much of a political debate but yeah, this has been waiting to happen for some time.

Thanks for the info; it's helped to make sense of a lot of what's been happening.