Ongoing Paris violence rooted in depression

PARIS - The worst outbreak of urban violence in France in 15 years has triggered renewed fears about the country's alienated Muslim youths and rattled the Government.

The clashes in the Paris down-at-heel suburb of Clichy-sous-Bois spread into nearby towns with high immigrant populations, an indication of growing unrest among immigrant communities.

The trigger was the accidental death of two teenage immigrants, electrocuted after scaling a wall of an electricity relay station to flee a police identity check.

A man of Turkish origin was also badly injured. Police have denied chasing them into the station.

The last time violence erupted on such a scale in French cities was in 1990 in the Lyons suburb of Vaulx-en-Velin, also touched off by a controversial death involving the police.

This time, though, the rioting carries an edgy post-September 11 fear that Islamists may be radicalising jobless young Arabs.

The violence at Clichy-sous-Bois became quasi-religious when a police teargas grenade hit a mosque and moderate Muslim leaders were unsuccessful in calling for calm.

Others say the real roots of the violence are far deeper and touch on the alienation felt in many French immigrant communities.

The unemployment rate is about 20 per cent in the rundown suburbs of Paris, roughly double the national figure.

The soulless, concrete housing estates in the towns and suburbs that sprung up around Paris in the 1960s and 70s to house immigrants have done nothing to ease the sense of despair.

As a result, many youths are jobless and drifting, easy prey to gang culture or Islamists.

For such people, the only time they ever got the state's attention was through violence with the state's representatives, said Michel Wieviorka of School for Higher Studies in Social Science.

"The violence is an expression of despair, fury, a feeling of injustice.

"For the last 25 years, no government, be it right or left, has been able to tackle this structural problem ... France can't cope with the fact that its model of integration is all at sea."

The violence has badly shaken the current centre-right administration and damaged the image of Interior Minister Nicolas Sarkozy.

At a parliamentary session this week, Prime Minister Dominique de Villepin admitted the situation was extremely serious, while President Jacques Chirac appealed for calm.

"Tempers must cool down. The law has to be applied in a spirit of dialogue and respect," Chirac said.

In 2002, Sarkozy was the darling of many for his crackdown on crime.

Today though, he is being criticised for fuelling the tensions with grandstanding and dumb policing.

Just a week before the rioting, Sarkozy declared a war on violence in the rundown suburbs, pledging to create a mobile police squad that would crack down on drug dealers, pimps and gang leaders.

In his televised visits to the riot-hit towns, Sarkozy has relentlessly stuck to his hard line, calling rioters scum and vowing to clean up crime.

But every time Sarkozy has shown his face, the violence has got worse, with the rioters sensing his visits to be a provocation.

As a result, Sarkozy's presidential ambitions have taken a battering. The press have taken a delight in attacking him, and De Villepin, another likely presidential runner, coldly sidelined him in the parliamentary debate on the violence.

Local mayor, Xavier Lemoine, voiced exasperation that the police under Sarkozy had become seen as an armed force that was only seen in neighbourhoods at times of crisis.

One of Sarkozy's first acts as Interior Minister was to scrap community policing schemes and replace them with interventionist plans. It may serve him well to return to the softly softly approach.