Published on November 08, 2005

The worst violence on French soil since World War II has pushed long-ignored ethnic grievances to the fore. France’s violent street battles between disaffected youths and riot police in poor Paris suburbs and other cities with sizeable Muslim or immigrant communities have gone on for 11 consecutive nights as of yesterday.

They only needed the slightest spark to ignite. The unrest started on October 27, following the deaths of two youths by accidental electrocution while fleeing from police in Clichy-sous-Bois, a poor urban jungle teeming with Muslim families and immigrants from North Africa.

It mattered little that the tragic deaths had nothing to do with police brutality. The thousands of cars that have been burned and the ferocious clashes between the rebellious youths and security officials trying desperately to restore law and order give testimony to the pent-up discontent of the growing hordes of social outcasts that French society has chosen to ignore until now.

In these latest incidents, unruly troublemakers have torched public buses, primary schools and churches. Besides throwing rocks and other projectiles, rioters have reportedly fired guns at police.

A police union called the ongoing violence, which has spread to cities like Nantes, Rennes, Strasbourg, Lens and Toulouse, the worst since the end of World War II. France’s main business group has warned that if the government cannot end the rioting soon, then investment and tourism, the two key component of France’s economy, could suffer badly.

The sustained social disturbance has led to suspicions that Islamic extremists may be manipulating the volatile situation to escalate their underground campaign against the French state. Even though one of France’s biggest Muslim organisations has issued a fatwa against the rioters, there is no guarantee that such an edict can actually persuade angry youths to return to their senses.

There may have been differences among politicians on how security officials should have handled the worsening situation in the first several days of the rioting. But all politicians, regardless of ideological hue, have come to the conclusion that the first priority is to apply forceful action to quell the unrest before they can even begin to sort out the root causes of the violence.

The authorities are expected to restore law and order in all of the trouble spots in the coming days, if not weeks. French society will then have to face a set of disturbing truths and complicated social problems that have been chipping away at the very foundation of the country’s ideas about multiculturalism. For a country like France to maintain its social cohesion, society as a whole must redefine and make potentially disruptive and painful adjustments to ensure the different ethnic, religious and cultural groups within can get along.

Behind the facade of France’s democratic idealism – Liberte, Egalite and Fraternite – frustration among fast-growing ethnic minorities, which make up almost 10 per cent of the total population, over racism, unemployment and police harassment have been brewing for years, if not decades. Impoverished Muslims and North African immigrants and their children have become disillusioned by harsh social and economic realities, particularly structural factors that they feel have trapped them in a never-ending cycle of poverty and destitution.

Such factors include attempts by France to protect its own particular brand of welfare state at the expense of new entrants to the job market, particularly those belonging to ethnic minority groups, who tend to be poorly educated and low-skilled and therefore less employable. Relegating poor minorities to the outer suburbs hardly make fermenting problems go away, as the current violence has shown.

Rioting provides a way for these second-class citizens to protest a system they feel is keeping them down. No country in the world can lay claim to a harmonious race-relations model that has worked in the past, continues to work today and will work in the future without regular adjustments and overhauls. The process to correct the injustices may be long and fraught with obstacles, but the time to start is now. And the most crucial first step is the restoration of law and order.

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