Last week, Eric Besson, France’s Immigration minister presented a bill before the National Assembly entitled Immigration, Integration and Nationality.This is the fifth bill on the issue that the ruling UMP majority has brought before Parliament in the last seven years…
The bill was originally designed to ensure that French law on the free circulation of individuals belonging to the European Union complied with European directives on the matter.
Two high profile and violent incidents that occurred last July however led Mr. Besson ,at President’s Sarkozy’s behest, to toughen the bill.
On July 15, Karim Boudouda, 27, and an accomplice robbed a casino in Uriage-les-Bains, near Grenoble, in south eastern France.
During the car chase that ensued, the alleged thieves fired live rounds at the police with automatic weapons. Uzis were later found in an arms cache during a search of a local bar. Mr. Boudouda, who had previously been convicted of armed robbery, was killed when the police returned fire.
The following evening, violence wracked la Villeneuve, a working class neighborhood of Grenoble where Mr. Boudouda grew up, as youths protested the alleged robber’s death at the hands of the police.
Bus stops were vandalized, and fifty to sixty cars torched.
Violence flared anew the following evening, July 17.
Youths shot live rounds at police officers patrolling the neighborhood.
Those officers involved in the shooting of Mr. Boudouda were threatened and their names tagged on the walls of the projects in Villeneuve.
Interior Minister Brice Hortefeux visited the troubled area a few days later and vowed to restore order there.
On July 16, near Saint Aignan, in central France, Luigi Duquenet, 22, was shot dead when the vehicle driven by his cousin refused to stop at a police checkpoint. It appears that the young men, belonging to the Gypsy community, did not comply with the police demand that they pull over because the driver did not possess a valid driver’s license. In addition, it seemed that Luigi Duquenet feared he would be accused of having committed a robbery that had taken place recently in the vicinity. Finally, his lawyer Benoît Chabert told the press that Mr. Duquenet was in breach of the terms of his parole at the time of the incident, which may also explain why he did not want to encounter the police.
Last Friday, the gendarme who fired the shot that killed the young man was charged with manslaughter. The officer claimed that he fired only in self defense…
The day after the tragic incident, some fifty individuals armed with metal rods and axes attacked the local Gendarmerie at St. Aignan. Several cars were also torched and a local bakery robbed. It took two squadrons of Gendarmes to restore a semblance of order.
What shocked the nation and clearly rattled President Sarkozy, a former Interior minister himself between 2002 and 2007, who rose to prominence largely due to his past success in lowering the crime rate in France, was the initial local reaction to the incidents, namely violence and mayhem directed at the police and authorities.
In both cases, family, friends and supporters of the alleged law breakers went on a rampage. The rule of law was simply dismissed and ignored by throngs of thugs, undermining the contention touted by President Sarkozy and his UMP supporters that they had restored the authority of the Republic in every neighborhood in France.
Yet, the incidents clearly demonstrated that this was not the case, and that many people in France had absolutely no qualms about resorting to violence, and brazenly at that, when they considered that one of their own had been victimized by the police, the very symbols of the state and its authority in the streets and projects, no matter what the actual context was.
The President himself had to concede that certain values were vanishing…
Values such as respect, justice and democracy are simply alien to many, too many, as is the French Republic‘s motto of Liberté, Egalité, Fraternité…
The President came to Grenoble in late July, where he delivered a major speech on the issue of law and order, and imparted the conclusions he had drawn from the violent incidents of the preceding weeks.
President Sarkozy fired the Prefect of Isère (the highest official representing the state in the départements) where Grenoble is located, and assigned a clear mission to his replacement, Eric Le Douaron, restore the state’s authority, without weakness, wherever it is undermined.
For the President, the violence cannot be explained by social and economic factors, the conventional excuse. On the contrary, the initial violence was unleashed against the state, and its representatives by individuals who simply espouse no values at all.
Violence is not caused by inequality or injustice, as the left invariably claims, but is engendered by a permissive environment in which no one has the courage to confront it. Criminals and delinquents are not the victims of an unjust social and economic order which compels them to resort to crime in order to survive.
These people behave the way they do because they have nothing but contempt for the core values of our society, the President explained.
They are not victims, but the bane, of society…
How should society protect itself from these forms of nihilistic violence?
Firstly, the President argues, we must face the facts and admit that the integration of immigrants in France has failed. Formerly, French society did succeed in assimilating foreigners who settled in France, but that is no longer the case.
How can it be that young people of the second if not the third generation feel less French than their parents or even grandparents, the original immigrants, the President wondered? It is a pertinent question, which the President failed to answer.
Since the French integration model, assimilation, has failed, immigration must be curtailed if not stopped altogether.
Many of the President’s critics, and they are innumerable, concluded form this section of the speech that Mr. Sarkozy established a direct link between crime and delinquency on the one hand and immigration on the other, a thesis the Front National of Mr. Le Pen has propounded for decades…
The President did not explicitly make that claim here, or anywhere else for that matter, but others, who do not belong to the far right, already have.
A French sociologist, Hugues Lagrange, a research director at France’s CNRS (the National Center for Scientific Research) studied trends in juvenile delinquency in twenty-five of the toughest inner cities around Paris.
He concluded that social and economic conditions were insufficient to explain and account for crimes and felonies committed by juveniles.
Cultural factors simply could not be ignored, as they often tend to be, to avoid any potentially disturbing conclusions concerning the behavior of youths of certain ethnic backgrounds …
Adolescents brought up in families originating from the Sahel (i.e., Senegal, Mali, Mauritania, Muslim, African nations) are three to four times more likely to commit acts of juvenile delinquency then are youths of French origin and two times more likely than youths of North African extraction, he concluded after studying 4,000 youths between 1999 and 2006.
Youths from the Sahel are steeped in Muslim culture, live in large families with many brothers and sisters which are dominated by the father. Polygamy is often the rule (30% of male heads of households have more than one wife), and brides are often young, uneducated, without resources of their own and thus submissive.
According to estimates cited by Le Point, there are between 16,000 and 20,000 polygamous families in France, affecting some 200,000 people…
Tensions within the household abound, due to the bickering among the several wives, and to overcrowded living conditions, leading many of the children to spend most of their time outside in the streets.
As a result, more and more black youths are becoming juvenile delinquents.
Hence, during the 2005 suburban riots, most of the rioters were black. Unlike the riots at the Val-Fourré (a poor section of Mantes-La-Jolie, a city west of Paris, where many immigrants reside) fifteen years earlier, where we were confronting youths of North African descent, we found ourselves pitted against blacks, a policeman told Le Point.
For Lagrange, a youth will have a much better chance of succeeding in school, and later finding his place in society, if his mother is respected in the home, is herself educated, and holds a job of her own.
It seems therefore, that the mother’s role and status is fundamental and instrumental in the successful integration of her children.
It must be said that Mr. Lagrange’s thesis is highly controversial in France. No self respecting liberal or leftist is about to countenance it.
Most, including on the right as well, are much more comfortable with the politically correct approach to the issue: it is social and economic deprivation that engenders delinquency. One's cultural background is irrelevant. The refusal to even seriously examine Mr. Lagrange’s perspective may explain why, as Mr. Sarkozy conceded, France’s policy of assimilation has failed…
In any case, the Saint-Aignan incident led President Sarkozy to launch a highly public campaign against illegal Roma encampments, though Roma do not appear to have been involved…
He did emphasize however, that the Roma who settled in designated campgrounds would be welcome to stay.
As such, Mr. Besson’s bill clearly reflects the President’s thinking on these issues, as expressed in the Grenoble Speech.
If the bill becomes law, it will then be possible to strip a naturalized citizen (who has been French for less than ten years) of his nationality should he or she murder a policeman or gendarme.
The authorities will also be authorized to hold those without valid visas or papers for up to 45 days. The limit is currently set at 32.….
Finally, those Roma who benefit from a 300 Euros allowance if they accept to go home will be closely monitored to ensure that they do not return to France to try and benefit anew from this program.
Mr. Besson’s goal, he told Le Parisien newspaper, is to create good little Frenchman. You may find it shocking that foreigners should become good little Frenchmen, but I think that’s great news. Being a good Frenchman does not entail that one should repudiate one’s history, origin or French culture. If my department can become one that manufactures good Frenchmen, I shall be very happy, he concluded.
Needles to say, reactions in France and elsewhere were mixed, if not outright hostile.
Martine Aubry, head of the Socialist party condemned Sarkozy’s policy of expelling the Roma as abominable. It is a policy that damages France, she added.
Le Soir, a Belgian newspaper, accused Sarkozy of implementing a policy of discrimination aimed at one specific segment of the population.
The Swiss paper Le Temps wrote that to transform an ethnic minority into a scapegoat for electoral purposes is a poor way to tackle the issue.
The Telegraph of London dismissed Sarkozy’s policy as a means to co-opt the far right electorate at a time when the Front National, under the leadership of Marine Le Pen (the daughter of the party’s founder Jean Marie Le Pen) is moving towards the center.
The European Commission was also highly critical.
Viviane Reding, the European Commissioner for justice and fundamental rights, characterized Sarkozy’s policy of expelling the Roma as shameful.
Let me be perfectly clear. In Europe, there is no place for ethnic or racial discrimination, she added.
Yet, she did not stop there, but also said the following: the gruesome memories of deportations during World War II are still vivid; to repeat such practices would mean the end of Europe. As a custodian of European treaties, I reject this and will not allow it.
This direct allusion to Vichy France and the deportation of the Jews incensed the French government.
At an EU summit held Thursday September 15, President Sarkozy vilified Reding’s statement as outrageous.
The summit, originally intended to discuss economic reform and Europe’s difficulties in crafting a common foreign policy, was dominated by the Roma question.
The European Commission president, José Manuel Barroso, and Sarkozy discussed the matter robustly. «There was a big argument — I could also say a scandal — between the president of the European Commission and the French president,» the Bulgarian prime minister, Boyko Borisov, said, according to the Bulgarian daily Dnevnik.
Asked about the hour-long exchange, the German chancellor Angela Merkel said «the lunch was good — but only regarding the food.»
One European diplomat, not authorized to speak publicly, described the debate as «heated.» Another said: «Voices could be heard through the door.», wrote the NYT.
Another EU official said: "Sarkozy was caught with his pants down. So he tried to create a distraction. It was a very strong exchange…Many people questioned Reding's choice of words, but not a single person except Sarkozy questioned the substance," said a Barroso spokesman.
"There was a huge row over lunch with President Barroso insisting that he had a job to do of upholding EU laws on the free movement of its citizens and he would continue to do it.
"We will continue to consider whether to take legal action against France. That work is going on.", wrote The Guardian.
Is France’s policy discriminatory and racist?
Of course we are not aiming at a given ethnic population," said Sarkozy. More than 500 "illegal settlements" had been demolished in France in August, he said, with 80% of the people affected being French, added The Guardian.
Yet, on August 5, a French government directive written by Michel Bart, the Interior minister’s chief of staff, contained the following:
300 illegal camps must be evacuated in the next three months, first and foremost those of the Roma. In each département, the Prefect must undertake a policy the aim of which is the dismantling of all illegal camps, first and foremost, those of the Roma.
Clearly, the policy did target a specific ethnic group which is illegal under both French and European law. The Socialist party quickly denounced the document as a symbol of a xenophobic policy.
It was hastily rewritten as soon as it became public in mid-September.
Unfortunately, the Roma are not treated much better elsewhere.
There are some twelve million, mostly in Central Europe and in the Balkans, of what The Guardian called Europe’s pariah people.
The fall of communism failed to lead to any improvement in their lot, on the contrary.
Bulgaria and Romania had pledged to help the underprivileged Roma when they applied for EU membership, but then failed to do so once they joined the Union. What you see here these days is terrible conditions. They have no hope of getting jobs. If they get 20 euros a month from collecting scrap metal, that’s a lot. How can we tell them not to go to France and beg on the streets? , Nicolae Stoica, head of Roma Access, an organization that defends the rights of Roma in Romania, told the NYT.
Now that Romania, Bulgaria, Hungary, Slovakia and the Czech Republic are all in the EU, the Roma are free to go where they please within the Union.
Unfortunately, the vast majority are uneducated and have no particular job skills.
Most, therefore, must resort to begging, petty thievery or welfare to survive.
According to Brice Hortefeux, the French Interior minister, the number of Romanians (almost all Roma) arrested in Paris last year, chiefly for pick pocketing, increased by 138%.
As such, Italy but also Denmark have been expelling Roma as well.
Eastern Europe’s inability to deal with its Roma minority and provide it with decent, dignified living conditions has now become the EU’s problem as a whole.
Unfortunately, the Roma do not have the means to protect, let alone assert their rights.
The Roma are fair game – politically disorganised and lacking a strong lobby, needing a US civil rights-style movement of the 1950s and 1960s to better their lot, they are an easy target. This dispute has put the issue on Europe's political agenda as never before. Pots of money will be thrown at the problem. Integration and education programmes, conferences, seminars, activism, NGO campaigns will acquire new vigour, wrote Ian Traynor in The Guardian.
Paradoxically, however, Sarkozy’s new obsession with expelling Roma may have unwittingly done them a favor, by exposing their plight for the entire planet to see.
The intractable problems that they pose may now be addressed, and in Brussels no less.
But then, Sarkozy and the EU may choose to quickly move on to something else, less volatile and controversial.
In the mean time, the Roma will keep abandoning their miserable conditions at home and head for Western Europe.
There is not much for us in Romania.. And now that we are in the European Union, we have the right to go to other countries. It is better there, Maria Murariu told Suzanne Daley of the NYT.
Twenty-eight Roma residents from Barbulesti were recently expelled from France. Among them was Ionel Costache, 30, who said he would return to France in a week or two. “My son, who had eye problems, he got a 7,000-euro operation there that he would never have gotten here. And when you don’t have work, you can still eat with their social assistance,” he said. “France is a much better place than Romania.”, Suzanne Daley wrote in conclusion…
At his best, Mr. Sarkozy is a thrilling politician; at his worst, a shameless opportunist who bends with the wind, wrote The Economist last month.
Alas, It is the latter Sarkozy we have been seeing of late…
Was the Roma issue so pressing that he should invest so much energy and political capital both at home and abroad to try and confront it?
Conventional wisdom has it that President Sarkozy pounced on the Roma and the law and order issue to try and restore his standing among his traditional electorate, the elderly, rural France and those blue collar workers he had managed to woo away from the Front National in 2007, and which are drifting away…
Perhaps.
Yet, it also seems that Sarkozy feels personally offended whenever violence erupts somewhere in France, thereby highlighting the fact that the authority of the state is still in a parlous condition, if not totally inexistent, in too many corners of the land.
Restoring that authority and the values of the Republic had been one of his fundamental commitments, and forms the very basis of what some call Sarkozysme.
If the French and Sarkozy himself conclude that he has failed to live up this commitment, then he has no business being in the Elysée palace, let alone running for a second term.
He has thus reached a critical juncture in his presidency.
He must make headway on the law and order front, and impose his highly unpopular pension reform. His effectiveness and credibility as a leader depend on it.
Nevertheless, it must be said that the Roma deserved better. Sarkozy should not have succumbed to the temptation of exploiting the plight of a hapless people in order to try and improve his poll numbers.
Such practices are not worthy of a statesman, of someone who aspires to be a good one and recognized as such. There is a huge contradiction between Nicolas Sarkozy’s goal to reinvent himself on the international scene as a G-20 president and his goal to reinvent himself at home by playing to far-right voters. He should have realized that he can’t do both at the same time, Dominique Moïsi, of the French Institute for International Relations, told the NYT.
France confronts a wide array of serious and vexing issues.
Here are but three:
The Social Security deficit will reach 23.2 billion Euros this year, seriously undermining the nations health system, among the finest in the world.
Its income tax system is in dire need of reform.
France’s debt has reached such heights (100% of GDP by 2013) that next year, more funds will be allocated to paying the interests on it then devoted to education, previously the state’s largest expenditure, and defense....
Hence, France desperately needs major structural reforms.
As such, President Sarkozy should have no time to waste on peripheral issues, no offense to the Roma intended.
Mr. Sarkozy’s term ends in some eighteen months.
The Presidential campaign will begin in earnest one year from now.
That leaves Sarkozy with less than twelve months to grapple with these serious issues.
What has he left to lose?
The next presidential election?
Perhaps.
But it is one he will not win if he does not change course…
(all translations from the French are mine. The photograph of the burning cars in Villeneuve is by Lisa Marcelja/MAXPP and appeared in lepoint.fr)
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