Politicians link riots to polygamous immigrants

French youth take part in a protest against the government's handling of recent urban unrest in France. Picture / Reuters

PARIS - Senior French politicians were accused of "blatant racism" by left-wing politicians and anti-racism campaigners yesterday after linking France's suburban riots to polygamy amongst African immigrant families.

The head of the ruling centre-right party in the National Assembly and an employment minister both suggested that unruly teenagers from large, polygamous families had helped to cause the four-week storm of arson and violence in the country's poor suburbs.

Bernard Accoyer, leader of President Jacques Chirac's UMP party in the national assembly, said that polygamy was "certainly one of the causes" of France's worst urban violence for four decades.

The junior employment minister, Gérard Larcher, was also quoted as saying that large, polygamous families generated "anti-social" behaviour and helped to explain the riots.

Speaking on radio yesterday, he said that his original remarks were "an appeal for a debate on the issue, rather than a value judgement." The lack of jobs in poor suburbs - some of which have 40 per cent youth unemployment - was clearly a more direct cause of the unrest, he said.

Polygamy among African immigrant families has also been linked to the riots by the aristocratic, far-right politician Phillippe de Villiers and the head of the Académie Française, Hélène Carrère d'Encausse.

Mme Carrère d'Encausse, a respected historian, told Russian TV that the cause of the riots was "clear".

"In an apartment, there are four wives and 25 children...It is obvious why the children are running wild on the streets." Although officially illegal in France, multiple marriages are, in practice, tolerated, so long as they took place before the family emigrated.

According to women's rights pressure groups, there may be as many as 30,000 polygamous families in France.

Left-wing politicians and anti-racism campaigners nonetheless expressed revulsion yesterday that mainstream politicians and academic figures should be giving such a "prejudiced and distorted" view of the riots.

Officials at the anti-racist pressure group, "Mouvement contre le Racisme et pour L'amitié entre les Peuples (MRAP)" pointed out that the youths involved in the riots were mostly French citizens, from a mixture of ethnically Arab, African, French and eastern European families.

"To start blaming such a complex problem on polygamy among a minority of African families is blatant racism," said one MRAP legal official.

"We will consider whether to bring legal actions against these people for incitement to racial hatred." The employment minister, Mr Larcher, said yesterday that he believed that polygamy was a factor in the riots, but perhaps only a minor one.

Apart from unemployment, the real problem was the "disintegration of African families, when confronted with (western) values of equality" and what he called the "cultural poverty" of many immigrants.

The riots, which began on 27 October, have calmed in recent days.

The interior minister, Nicolas Sarkozy, blamed by some for provoking the riots by referring to criminal gangs in the suburbs as racaille or "scum", has emerged as the great political beneficiary of the violence.

The popularity of M. Sarkozy, already campaigning to become president in 2007, leaped by 10 per cent to 61 per cent in an opinion poll published yesterday.

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