France tackles inequalities, extremism after attacks

[webfact]

France tackles inequalities, extremism after attacks
By ELAINE GANLEY and SYLVIE CORBET

MONTFERMEIL, France (AP) — As France's prime minister kicks off a new plan to fix troubled schools and restive suburbs, the people he's trying to help are more skeptical than hopeful. They've heard these promises before.

This time, the stakes are arguably higher. The impetus for the new government proposals announced Thursday came after French-born Islamic radicals shocked the nation in three days of terrorist attacks.

The government plan focuses on healing social and religious fractures by starting with schools, which Prime Minister Manuel Valls called the "essential link" in transmitting French values of secularism and freedoms that are often absent in notorious suburbs, or "banlieues." Tinderboxes of discontent, the banlieues house France's poorest, especially minorities with immigrant roots, including many Muslims from former French colonies.

Concern about schools jumped to the forefront of national debate after some children refused to observe a minute of silence for victims of the Jan. 7-9 attacks on a kosher market and satirical newspaper Charlie Hebdo. Twenty people were killed in the attacks, including the three gunmen, who had lived in impoverished neighborhoods in Paris and its suburbs.

Valls shocked many this week by referring to a "territorial, social, ethnic apartheid" that especially affects the suburbs, and convened a special government meeting Thursday to tackle this societal divide.

In suburbs northeast of Paris on Thursday, residents denounced the terrorist attacks, but many could understand why some children didn't observe the moment of silence.

"People were killed in the housing projects by police, and there was no minute of silence" for them, said Aly Sacko, a 28-year-old working with the city hall in Clichy-sous-Bois. Two teenagers with immigrant backgrounds were killed in a power substation in Clichy-sous-Bois in 2005 while fleeing police, sparking weeks of riots in suburbs across the country. Similar incidents have prompted smaller riots in other cities in the decade since.

Sacko, a French-born Muslim of Malian origin, said the prime minister's plans to fix poverty and social tensions are a "dream." ''Nothing will change, I promise you," he said.

The plans announced Thursday include special training and testing for school teachers about French and European citizenship, secularism and how to teach it.

Specific funds to help the poorest families with some schooling costs will increase by 20 percent, to 45 million euros ($52 million), Education Minister Najat Vallaud-Belkacem said.

Another idea is to teach children how to distinguish between extremist propaganda and verified information in the media. Every secondary school will be requested to develop its own radio, newspaper, or blog.

The ideas remain vague, and relatively modest. And they are not France's first effort to tackle troubles in the suburbs.

Unrest first broke out in 1990. Then-President Francois Mitterrand said the projects "provoke rejection, despair" and presciently called it a "problem which will weigh for years on our society."

Violence continued to simmer. The big wake-up call came in 2005 with fiery nationwide riots. Mainstream France seemed to discover only then that swaths of the population were living in a parallel world. Soaring unemployment, a high crime rate and even lack of access to public transport fed a deep sense of inequality.

The situation in the suburban housing projects defies France's model for integration — assimilation by which all colors, races and creeds blend into a single people. It's illegal to count people in France by ethnic or religious background, and diverse populations are expected to blend in — not live in ethnic enclaves.

Yet it is French officialdom that pushed newcomers into suburban projects, where today dozens of nationalities mostly cling to their roots.

When he was president, Nicolas Sarkozy made fixing the suburbs a priority. He created a Ministry of Immigration, Integration and National Identity — since dismantled — and in 2008 unveiled a master plan. It included $728 million to create new trains and tramways, an expansion of "second-chance schools" for dropouts, and professional guidance for thousands of youths wanting to start a company or get on a job track. It also included more police.

The plan grew and changed along the way. The global financial crisis hit, and Europe's debt troubles, and attention turned elsewhere. There is no clear record of how assiduously it was enacted.

The housing project that was home to Amedy Coulibaly, one of the Paris gunmen behind this month's attacks, remains a different universe from the gilded governmental palaces of the capital, just a few miles (kilometers) away. Some doctors and postal workers refuse to venture into the Grande Borne in the town of Grigny. Even police enter with caution to a zone where drug dealers and teenage thugs hold sway.

Some improvements are visible in suburbs that received attention after the 2005 riots. In what was once one of the toughest projects in the Paris region, known as Les Bosquets (The Groves) in the town of Montfermeil northeast of Paris, high-rises and long buildings scarred with graffiti have been demolished, and replaced with human-sized town houses.

A police station has been installed in neighboring Clichy-Sous-Bois — where the 2005 riots got started. However, a long-promised tramway to reduce the approximately 90-minute journey by bus and train to nearby Paris and its job prospects hasn't yet materialized, and may not be in place before 2019.

Samir Ouahfi, a 29-year-old father of three working in a cafe in Les Bosquets, had little hope that the current government would do better than its predecessors.

"They say there is equality and fraternity," he said, referring to the French national motto. But here on the gray concrete of the projects, he added, "there isn't any."
___

Corbet reported from Paris. Angela Charlton in Paris also contributed to this report.


-- (c) Associated Press 2015-01-23

[PepperMe]

Yeah why not..... after all, it is not the first time Paris has fallen to the enemy and the government go down on their knees to the bad guys.

Grow some balls for crying out loud.

[NeverSure]

[wabothai]

Most people worldwide just work for a living to have a decent life. Our leaders are the ones to blame for f....g up this peaceful quest.

Shame on them. That includes, Obama and Putin and .......quess who.

Time for some global disobedience. or am I not allowed to say this?

[Xrey24]

Yeah why not..... after all, it is not the first time Paris has fallen to the enemy and the government go down on their knees to the bad guys.

Grow some balls for crying out loud.

OK ..... but what do you intelligently suggest?

[arjunadawn]

Yeah why not..... after all, it is not the first time Paris has fallen to the enemy and the government go down on their knees to the bad guys.

Grow some balls for crying out loud.

Wow, this is brilliant.

Your point is regrettably sad, for a once great people with historical greatness into the distant past. I recall being told "the only war the french ever won was the civil war, and that was because the french were fighting.... the french!"

Edit: my comments are not intended to impugn french people per se, just their recent tendency to deny reality- much like my own country.

Edited January 23, 2015 by arjunadawn

[Paulc01]

Yeah, give people more free stuff. That ought to work. Look how successful it has been in Detroit, Chicago, Newark, etc.

[Steely Dan]

If the French want to do something try addressing the ideology which causes violence and stops assimilation. You can throw a wall of money at the problem areas and it won't make any difference because poverty alone is not the cause of the problems, indeed ideology is infact the cause of poverty.