Rioters Burn over 1,100 Cars in France, in Now Annual Arson Rite
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Related subjects: Denver Lessing, European Union, Global, In the Loop, Paris, Security & Surveillance, The Global Intercept Comments Off
After the unrest that spread across France in November 2005 —when Nicolas Sarkozy was interior minister and called for the mass deportation of French-born rioters of Arabic ethnicity—, a ritual of annual arson has sprung up, with hundreds of cars burned each year on 31 December. This year, the numbers soared by 30% over last year, reaching an estimated 1,147 cars fire-bombed or “burnt out”.
Even with 35,000 police deployed to keep the peace and prevent arson, the numbers escalated in what is becoming a worrying New Year’s Eve ritual across France. The areas most affected were the poorer outskirts of major cities; for example, “A total of 422 cars were burned in Paris-area housing projects, compared to 12 in the relatively well-policed Parisian intra muros”.
The “banlieus”, often including ethnic ghettoes heavy in populations of poor immigrant laborers or their French-born descendents, generally poorer and suffering from racial bias that is still deep-seated in French society, have tended to be the areas where the annual arson is most pervasive, in cities such as Paris, Strasbourg, Lille, Toulouse and Nantes.
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It was in the banlieu neighborhoods around Paris that the unrest of November and December 2005 got started, in response to a complex of social ills, but spurred primarily by incidents of police violence against ethnic north African French youths. Accordng to Time magazine:
In a country where car-burning isn’t a common symptom of socioeconomic unrest, news of so many automobiles being torched would be alarming — if not a sign of brewing insurrection. In France, however, word of the destruction that accompanied the evening the French call Saint-Sylvestre was met with a mix of Gaulic shrugs and low-grade peevishness.
The unrest of 2005 spread wildly out of control in part because the authorities were so slow to understand the reasons behind it and the public reacted with attitudes symptomatic (for those affected by persistent racial bias) of the same cultural and political barriers that were causing hardship in the affected neighborhoods. The French people cannot afford to take this explosion of ceremonial vandalism lightly, but authorities need to be careful not to appear to engage in another kind of crackdown like that fomented by Sarkozy in 2005, when he labeled the rioters “scum” and promised to expel them from France.
The Sofia News Agency reports that:
A total of 36 700 cars were burned in France in the first eleven months of 2008. The French President Nicolas Sarkozy declared the vandals setting vehicles on fire should be prevented from holding a driver’s license until they paid for the damages they had incurred.
Those figures are staggering, and seem to represent a serious crisis in France’s social fabric. Such incidents, including the general malaise affecting many youths, tinged with racial resentments and violent attacks, have been linked to France’s struggle to maintain levels of employment, even as economies around France face serious difficulties. Major banks failing or being nationalized, and the 13% unemployment in Spain, are symptoms of the economic ills leading to thousands of lost jobs in wealthy European countries, potentially exacerbating already dire divisions in society.
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