Top Stories from the Front Page of the
International Herald Tribune,
Saturday, January 3, 1998
PARIS - Paris is not burning, but the rest of France looks hotter these days.
A series of violent incidents around the country in the last few weeks, including the burning of 62 cars by about 300 youths in the city of Strasbourg overnight on New Year's Eve and New Year's Day, has given rise to fears France may be on the verge of another outburst of strikes and riots.
Two young men were killed by the police in different cities in late December, prompting car-burnings and other street protests. Bus drivers around France have been sporadically striking for weeks to protest nighttime aggression against them by young riders, including being spat upon, kicked and hit with baseball bats. Several hundred unemployed workers and their supporters are occupying 13 unemployment offices around the country, demanding year-end bonuses in their benefits.
In addition to the violence in Strasbourg, 59 cars were burned in the suburbs around Paris on New Year's Eve, according to press reports.
The incidents may be random, or related to the holiday season and warmer-than-normal weather. But such violence nearly always raises concerns in France, a country known since 1789 for explosions of public anger that can overthrow governments, reverse government policies and bring new faces to public power. Last year at this time, only a handful of violent events marked New Year's.
Although French newspapers and television usually do not say so, the vast majority of the perpetrators are of Arab and North African extraction, residents of the grim and hopeless housing complexes that ring Paris and many other major French cities. Young members of these communities, overwhelmingly jobless regardless of their level of education, feel they have little chance of integrating into French society, an expert said.
''There is a real problem of marginalization by race,'' said Antoine Garapon, a judge detailed to head a research organization on judicial issues called the Institute for Advanced Studies of Justice.
''Young people from these communities,'' he said, ''are in the despair of the suburbs, and they know they have no chance of getting out.''
Just before Christmas, 16-year-old Abdelkhader Bouziane was shot and killed by the police in a Paris suburb as he and a friend were fleeing in a small car. The next day, 24-year-old Fabrice Fernandez was killed by a local policeman during an interrogation at police headquarters in the southeastern city of Lyon. After each killing, young people stormed the streets and, in the case of the Paris suburb, burned the new local library.
Restiveness is on display in other corners of French society as well, particularly among the unemployed. For three weeks, several hundred jobless persons and their allies have been occupying local unemployment bureaus around France, particularly in the Marseille area, to demand an end-of-year bonus of about $500 in their benefits. They are supported by some, but not all, of France's unions.
They are also supported by France's Communist Party, which is operating in an informal governing alliance with the Socialist prime minister, Lionel Jospin. Robert Hue, the Communist leader, called the demand by the unemployed for a year-end bonus ''legitimate,'' and said the government ''should respond positively without delay.''
The unemployment fund actually is managed jointly by the unions and the French association of businesses, so the decision is not up to the government. But if Mr. Jospin is not successful in easing unemployment and poverty, it will work against him politically.
Unemployment ''is the blind spot of governmental action,'' Laurent Joffrin wrote in the newspaper Liberation this past week.
''The Jospin team has negotiated without mishap all obstacles but one: the extreme exclusion that continues to gnaw at French society.''
A national day of strikes and demonstrations in favor of the unemployed occupiers has been called for next week. Polls show more than 60 percent of the French favor their cause.
Angry demonstrators are a long French tradition. President Jacques Chirac won office in 1995 in part by promising to heal the ''social fracture,'' as he referred to the alienation of many French citizens from their government and their country. But less than a year after he gained office, the country was rent by transport strikes that brought Paris to a halt. By spring 1997, the center-right president had been weakened by the election of a Socialist government.
Now it is Mr. Jospin's turn to deal with these outbursts of violence and protest. He has said little about the car-burnings and the unemployment-bonus demands, although officials at his Labor Ministry point out he has raised aid for the longest-term unemployed and plans to propose reforms for France's vast welfare system this spring.
In addition, his government has proposed new measures on youth crime and delinquency.
© 1997 MLR - Révision : 17-01-1998.
Reproduction intégrale vivement conseillée avec mention
d'origine.
