The French intifada?

The electrocuted youths' Muslim and Algerian identity immediately led many to assume the rioters to be of fundamentalist persuasion. Daniel Pipes, an American commentator, known for his ideological loyalty to Israel's Likudists dubbed the event as Europe's first 'intifada'. Those assumption proved to be false when French 'intifada' soon subsided in the face of the government's carrot and stick policy of combining curfews with significant concessions at the social level. The assorted theorists who saw through their prism the signs of the clash of civilisation in the event also backed out. In fact, the revolts in the ghettoised suburbs only brought to the open the French delusion that the incantation of 'Liberte, egalite, fraternite' would somehow mark the reality of life for non-white French men and women: Repression, discrimination and segregation.

France of great French revolution consists today of two different countries, one rich of swanky French and another poor belonging to 5 million hapless immigrants mainly from North Africa. This is not acceptable in a country baptised by French revolution.

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After all, it was France itself which once encouraged immigration from its former colonies particularly Algeria which was relinquished with great reluctance after a bloody war of liberation in the 1960s because of work force shortage. It is true, when the first immigrants arrived in France they accepted inequalities because they were not born in the country and things were often better than where they came from.

Now the second and third generation immigrants have been born in France and signed up to the principles of the republic. They can see they are not treated equally which is shocking to them. They obviously are no more prepared to accept the discrimination. The French establishment a generation ago exiled the immigrants to miserable apartment blocks built around Paris -- faraway from the city centre. Whether or not the ghettoisation was the purpose of this social policy, it was inevitably the consequence.

Serious issues did not arise for as long as there were enough jobs to go around. But that has changed in recent decades and throughout 1990s there were indications of a tinder box in making. When the Paris metro was bombed in 1995, the terrorist attack was blamed on local adherents to the armed Islamic group as a result of Algeria's domestic politics arising out of conflict between the country's military regime and Islamic Salvation Front (FIS) spilling into France. The fear engendered by the event left an exaggerated impression on French psyche of Islamist terrorism in their country creating a growing audience willing to lend an ear to the racist rants of politicians such as Jean Marie Lepen.

It may be true to an extent that the militant Islam has gained a toehold among the French citizens of North African origin. But the religious radicalism is directly related to the appalling level of alienation among the targeted demographic group and this alienation stems from social and economic conditions of the immigrants. Also the blame on Islamist backlash is considerably diluted as the reports suggest that the rioters included more than a sprinkling of immigrants from non-Muslim part of North Africa and some under-privileged Gallic natives.

The preference of death to police harassment paints desperate picture of dereliction and neglect in Clichy-sous-Bois where the non-whites live and the place where the riots began points to level of the immigrants' incendiary angst. The profound infrastructural decrepitude in the ghettoes is compounded by underfunded schooling and sporadic social services. Add to that 40 percent unemployment -- four times the national average -- and you are left with an ideal recipe for all explosion saying 'we've had enough of police treatment, joblessness, poverty and racist insults.'

But the rightwing elitist French ruling class chose to add insult to injury by turning to its colonial past to crush an African revolt and calling the rioters more 'scum'. It thinks that the 'thugs' will just disappear with the deployment of 'riot squad'. Ironically it has totally forgotten the price it had to pay in French Algiers. It is yet to learn that it takes social measures to address social explosions.

France is estimated to have the largest Muslim immigrant population in Europe, 10 percent of the national total. In a country of the laudable principles of liberty, equality and fraternity the multi-culturism is still a taboo as reflected among others through a draconian ban on headscarf in schools. French youngsters of Arab origin can hardly be accused of not playing by the rule when an Arab name on a job application increases the chance of its rejection and when they are constantly subjected to police harassment As a result, the smugness about the state of race relations is puntred leading to the big polities making or breaking the governments. The race relation today threatens to become a potent battlefront in the first part of twenty-first century.

It is not surprising for the French to be upset by the upheavals they are witnessing. They would do well to realise that overcoming the 'us' and 'them' mentality requires good will on both sides and that the riots had at least as much to do with 'class' as they did with 'race'.

It may be argued that the young proletariates of innumerable French ghettoes, notwithstanding their lack of direction upheld a very French tradition of revolt that instantly brings to mind the cataclysmic revolution of 1789.

Brig ( retd) Hafiz is former DG of BIISS.