By James Button Herald Correspondent in Paris November 12, 2005 Here is a tale of two cousins. One stayed in France, one felt so betrayed he left it for good.
Aziz Senni, 29, grew up in the high-rise towers of Mante-la-Jolie, 40 kilometres west of Paris and one of 300 French towns where young men have rioted and burnt in the past two weeks. He remembers police humiliating him in the street because he was Moroccan-born and the girl with him was white. He says his boss at a postal company ordered him not to introduce himself to phone customers as Aziz but as Anthony. After rising to run a transport company that employs 100 people Aziz told his story this year in a book, The Social Escalator was Broken so I Took the Stairs. He is a French success story but, as his book title suggests, doesn't entirely feel it. "I love France but things have gone very wrong here," he says. "France preaches liberty to the world but doesn't offer it to its own people." His cousin Hamid has a tougher tale to tell. When he was a boy, his father, a Moroccan immigrant and factory worker, told him: "I don't know how many degrees are available but you are going to get them all." Hamid got three, in economics, but still couldn't find work. So he applied for an elite degree. The supervisor was blunt: Hamid was well qualified for the course but he would never get a job afterwards. So "I can't take you," the supervisor said. "You'll screw my figures." Hamid says the meaning was clear: his skin was the wrong colour. "I started to feel so insecure," Hamid said. "You think, 'An entire country can't be wrong. I must not be good enough.' " Then he went to Sweden, got an MBA and a good position at the phone company Ericsson. In the late 1990s he decided to give his home another chance. He sent CVs around the country and was offered one job, as a travelling salesman for a German vacuum cleaner company. At that point Hamid gave up on France. The 30-year-old now lives in London, got a job immediately for BP, then Philip Morris, and now runs his own management consulting company. "I have been adopted by England," he says. "I've never had discrimination. It's my home. "In our family we say, 'Our father is Moroccan, our mother is France," he says. "I feel like I've been abandoned by my mother." That's why he understands the anger behind the riots. "Everyone is against violence but at least violence is maybe a way to get out of this misery. Violence seems to be opening doors, that's what is dangerous. All the other paths have been shut down." If Hamid is angry he is also educated, from a close-knit family. Most of the young men that have rampaged through the suburbs in the past two weeks are not. Many have failed at school. Their sisters outperform them. The manufacturing jobs their grandfathers were invited to France to do in the 1950s and '60s are long gone. They often scorn their fathers, who are jobless too and so lack authority at home. Amid the tower blocks of the urban periphery they know only the underground economy of drugs and crime. They feel despised by the francais de souche - ethnic French - and often feel hatred in return. Mix these together and you get a sense of the fury that has shaken France. As the rioting slowed by the week's end - perhaps because 1600 youths had been arrested and some already jailed for up to eight months - the talking began. In the National Assembly - where not one of 574 deputies is from an Arab or Muslim background, although Muslims make up nearly 10 per cent of the population of 60 million - the Prime Minister, Dominic de Villepin, declared that the republic faced "a moment of truth". Then, like an Australian treasurer on budget day, he introduced a modest package of social initatives for troubled areas. However the, political analyst Dominique Moisi, of the French Institute for International Relations, says governments of both right and left have neglected these neighbourhoods for 30 years. There is no constituency for radical reform, he says. Those who would benefit are not engaged in politics, and the average taxpayer has no desire to spend the money. "We need a Great Society," he says, referring to the huge US spending program that lifted many black Americans out of poverty in the 1960s. "We need a Lyndon Johnson. But I don't see a Johnson on the horizon in French politics." Moisi calls the violence "a catastrophe that was bound to occur" and indeed it did not come out of the blue. Agence France-Presse has catalogued riots in the suburbs every year bar one since 1995. They are nearly always sparked by the death of one or more young black men or "beurs" - suburban slang for French Arabs - after a clash with police. Here is another much discussed figure: nearly 30,000 cars were set on fire in France this year even before the current riots began. But this is largely invisible crime. While the mayhem gave foreign newspapers an easy headline - Paris is burning - the postcard-Paris that tourists know was not. On Saturday night diners ate lobster at the packed Brasserie 1925 opposite the Gare du Nord. Two suburban train stops away, at Villeneuve-la-Garenne, young men smashed windows, threw petrol bombs into cars and tried to burn down buildings. Middle-class Parisians who later watched it on TV said they felt as if they were living in another country. Somewhere down the line the land of egalite has split in two. While its workers enjoy some of the best social services in the world, France has had 8 to 12 per cent unemployment for 20 years. It has Western Europe's worst rate of youth unemployment. In the high-rise districts around Paris and other cities the figure for unemployed youth can be as high as 60 per cent. The result is a society of insiders and outsiders, says Aurore Wanlin, a research fellow at London's Centre for European Reform. She thinks, for example, that her homeland effectively chooses to accept high unemployment in order to protect those with jobs: since the country's rigid job protection laws make it hard for employers to fire, they are also loath to hire. Britain, by contrast, has an unemployment rate of less than 5 per cent. It is no workers' paradise: many people do menial jobs for low pay. But the Blair Government, and especially the Chancellor of the Exchequer, Gordon Brown, believe as an article of faith that workers are more likely to feel part of society than people sitting at home, even if their unemployment benefit is reasonable, as it often is in France. Much was gleefully written this week, especially in US and British newspapers, about how France had to rethink its republican model, which, because it refuses to recognise differences of race or culture, is also unable to recognise discrimination suffered by a particular group. In France there is plenty of evidence of discrimination. A study last year showed that a man with a standard French name got 75 job interviews offers from 100 approaches, while a man with an Algerian name got 14. But Moisi thinks the main problem is the economy. After all, both the US and Britain have had huge urban riots before. Britain's biggest riots were in the early 1980s, when unemployment was well above 10 per cent. Moisi thinks that the rioters, for all their alienation, have behaved in a thoroughly French way. Like farmers and unionists who go readily into the streets, "they wanted to be listened to," he said. "Suddenly they realise they exist in the eyes of the French Government and the world. They had to destroy in order to exist." http://smh.com.au/news/world/leave-la-france-for-some-its-the-only-option\ /2005/11/11/1131578234429.html ------------------------ Yahoo! Groups Sponsor --------------------~--> Get fast access to your favorite Yahoo! Groups. Make Yahoo! your home page http://us.click.yahoo.com/dpRU5A/wUILAA/yQLSAA/uTGrlB/TM --------------------------------------------------------------------~-> Post message: [EMAIL PROTECTED] Subscribe : [EMAIL PROTECTED] Unsubscribe : [EMAIL PROTECTED] List owner : [EMAIL PROTECTED] Homepage : http://proletar.8m.com/ Yahoo! Groups Links <*> To visit your group on the web, go to: http://groups.yahoo.com/group/proletar/ <*> To unsubscribe from this group, send an email to: [EMAIL PROTECTED] <*> Your use of Yahoo! Groups is subject to: http://docs.yahoo.com/info/terms/
