Massive Riots in France

[Melcheor]

Originally posted by johnny: Like i said, they all have double nationalities, which means that their country of origin cannot refuse to take them in. If France wants to eject a few hundred Algerians, who all have both French and Algerian passports, they can simply send them back to Algeria, even when they are born in France. It's simple, if you don't behave to normal French standards, you don't deserve to live in France, and you have to go. I don't see anything wrong in reasoning like that.

Beisides, if they really do have dual nationality, what's stopping algeria doing the same? Technically (according to the above argument) france can't refuse either.

[Dreamer128]

French riots still escalating

The violence in France continues to escalate. More than 30 police officers were injured last night, two of them seriously, and 1,400 cars were set on fire. Public buildings were burned down in a number of French cities and, for the first time, the rioters fired at police with shotguns. A police trade union is calling it "civil war" and has appealed to the government to send in the army. It also wants a curfew in the city suburbs.

A number of leading Muslim clerics in France have appealed for calm. Many of the rioters are second and third-generation youths of North African origin.

The president of the employers' association Medef, Laurence Parisot, has warned that the rioting will have serious effects on the French economy. She says the restoration of law and order should be the government's first priority.

A number of countries, including Great Britain, the United States and Australia, are warning travellers to be particularly careful in France. So far no tourists have been directly involved in the riots, which are largely confined to the poorer suburbs of French cities.

(rnw.nl)

[shamrock_uk]

A nice little article by John Simpson. Reader comments found at the bottom of the page.

Violence exposes France's weaknesses By John Simpson BBC World Affairs Editor Last spring, over dinner in Paris, a close friend of mine who runs one of the biggest opera houses outside the French capital told me: "I've got this persistent feeling that 1968 is just about to happen all over again." He had no idea that the violence would erupt in the dreary, featureless suburbs. He thought it was because the French political system had run out of ideas and credibility, and he knew the French. These moments of weakness are the times when trouble always seems to break out. Moment of weakness? If President Jacques Chirac and the centre-right government which supports him had been in full control of France's political life, it is hard to think these long days and nights of continuous rioting would have taken place. The feelings of resentment and simmering anger in the suburbs would have been just as strong, but the crowds would mostly have held back. Years of reporting on riots and revolutions have shown me that crowds display a mysterious collective sense which somehow overrides the perceptions and fears of the individuals who make up the mass. And crowds have a remarkable feeling for the weakness of government. There is of course a huge well of fury and resentment among the children of North African and African immigrants in the suburbs of French cities. The suburbs have been woefully ignored for 30 years. Violence there is regular and unexceptionable. Even on a normal weekend, between 20 and 30 vehicles are regularly attacked and burned by rioters. Power decline This time the riots are joined up, pre-planned, co-ordinated. At some level of consciousness, the demonstrators know that the governmental system they are facing is deeply, perhaps incurably, sclerotic. Mr Chirac, standing back until his ministers showed their inability to agree a clear line on the rioting, seems not to have the answers when he speaks now. His presidency is overshadowed by an inescapable sense of past corruption and weakness, and he has governed France at a time when its economy and its position in the world have both declined sharply and markedly. No matter that events have thoroughly borne out his criticisms of the US and British invasion of Iraq in 2003. The Muslim teenagers who briefly applauded him then have long since forgotten all that - though of course if he had supported President George W Bush and Prime Minister Tony Blair then, he would be in even greater trouble now. In 1968, too, President Charles de Gaulle and his ministers spoke sternly of the need for order to be restored immediately, and yet they did nothing. If the riot police could have restored order they would have done so, but they were overstretched and outwitted, and their only response was more of the kind of violence which made the crowds even more ferocious in their turn. Anti-French tone I remember the 1968 riots very well. But of course the differences between then and now were as great as the similarities. For a start, the riots of 2005 are still all about the bitter and genuine grievances of the Muslim and African communities, ignored and demeaned and kept in poverty by a system which cares very little about them. Only if a much wider swathe of French society gets involved on their side will the situation become truly pre-revolutionary, in the way that the crowds of 1968 were. And since the riots have taken on a fiercely anti-French tone, and the violence and destruction have sickened so many people in the suburbs themselves, that seems unlikely at present. France, though, tends to move forward in fits and starts, rather than organically, and these fits and starts are often associated with violence. Spirit of revolution Thanks to the Revolution, violence even has a kind of virtue which it simply does not possess in a country like Britain. When government becomes incapable of change, the crowds in the streets have to do the changing for themselves. There is a great deal that has to be changed. I have seen many times for myself how the CRS, the deeply aggressive and ferocious force of riot police, have attacked Muslims and Africans in the streets in times of trouble. Last April, Amnesty International singled out the violence and racism of the French police towards the non-white people of the suburbs for particular criticism. Nicolas Sarkozy, the Interior Minister, now seems to be playing politics with the situation by appealing to the most basic and resentful attitudes of conservative France. Much of the violence on the streets of France's cities is mindless; some of it is malign. But simply stamping it down will not work - and anyway the CRS and the civil police have tried that, and their toughness has only made things worse. France is going to have to change towards its unwilling, often unwelcome young second-generation population, and accommodate them better. It is not enough to demand that these people drop their sense of themselves and fit in with the way France has traditionally ordered its affairs. But most of all there has to be change in attitudes at the top. And if Mr Chirac cannot do it, he will be fatally damaged as president.

[Sir Degrader]

Bah, update, someone has just been killed. Chirac thinks curfews will help. Bah. Send in the army, and stop these riots by any means nessesary. As long as they don't succumb to political pressure as they did in the Algeria war, the French Military should be able to simply let loose a storm upon the rebels.

[Stratos]

They're not really rebels, just a mob of angry teenage rioters. And sending in your armed forces against your own population is an extreme measure, and should only be reserved for extreme situations. I would call the current situation an "extreme situation", not yet.

[Timber Loftis]

Really? How many dead before you call it extreme? I know if it was over here in "the land of the free" the national guard would have rolled in a day or two ago.

[Luvian]

They don't have to order the army to shoot on sight, just have them take up a defensive perimeters around them and push them back/disperse them.

That's how we delt with the native americans who took up arms and tried to defend their area when the city in question wanted to raze part of it to add an extention to the local golf course a couple of years ago. After a couple of days they gave up and we got a new golf course.

[Timber Loftis]

And Rage Against the Machine got a new hit song.

[johnny]

Originally posted by Stratos: They're not really rebels, just a mob of angry teenage rioters. And sending in your armed forces against your own population is an extreme measure, and should only be reserved for extreme situations. I would call the current situation an "extreme situation", not yet.

The only thing that could make this even worse is when people start dying in the streets, and i believe there already is one victim, an old man who was trying to put out a fire got molested by these "angry young teenagers".

It's time they grab the bull by the horn and end this crap, by all means necessary, if that means some of the terrorists, because that's what they are, have to die, then so be it. France is giving a poor example of how to act in crisis situations here. I bet if this was happening in Algeria, it would have been over days ago. I also think, that if this was an angry mob of raging neo nazis, or a horde of footballhooligans, they would have acted a lot more convincingly.

[Timber Loftis]

Terrorist.
Revolutionary.
Freedom Fighter.
Patriot.
Oppressed.
Liberator.

It's all about point of view, isn't it?