ACRID fumes lingered in the air of Aulnay-sous-Bois yesterday as Mohamed and Sidi looked at the charred shell of a delivery van and explained why violence had erupted in the northeastern suburbs of Paris.

“Sarko has declared war on the estates, so it’s war he’s going to get,” said Mohamed, 20, the son of a Moroccan immigrant. Sidi, his friend, concurred: the suburbs had endured another night of street fighting because Nicolas Sarkozy, the Interior Minister and would-be President of France, had “disrespected” the estates with his tough talk and harsh police actions.

More than 200 vehicles were burnt across the north Paris region and 35 people were detained when rioting that began in Clichy-sous-Bois last Thursday spread to nearby Aulnay, Sevran and other districts in Seine-Saint-Denis, the département that rings the northeast quadrant of Paris.

Last night gangs of youths again rampaged through nine districts, hurling stones at police and setting fire to cars and buses. In the suburb of Le Blanc-Mesnil residents, some wearing bathrobes and slippers, poured into the streets to watch the flames. A school came under attack in Bobigny.

The unrest began after two teenagers were electrocuted when they climbed into a supply station to escape a police identity check. Another was injured.

M Sarkozy’s police were highly visible yesterday around Aulnay’s “Cité des 3,000”, an estate of slab-like blocks of council flats that in recent years has had riots and raids on suspected terrorist haunts.

The defiant anti-government talk of Mohamed and Sidi is the norm among the disaffected Muslims of the estates. After a seventh night of destruction, however, it was clear that they had a point.

M Sarkozy’s provocative tactics and his feuding with Dominique de Villepin, the Prime Minister, appear to have fed the unrest in districts that are permanent cauldrons of anger.

As Mohamed offered his analysis in “le Neuf-Trois”, as the troubled département is known from its police designation, President Chirac broke a week-long silence. Addressing the Cabinet in the Elysée Palace, only five miles but a world away from “le 93”, he called for calm and implicitly pointed the finger at the Interior Minister, who is a foe as well as leader of his centre-right UMP party.

The President said that he understood the “profound frustrations” of the immigrant districts. “The absence of dialogue and escalation of disrespect would lead to a dangerous situation,” he said. The message was aimed at M Sarkozy’s “zero tolerance” law enforcement, a fierce approach that community leaders and some of M Sarkozy’s own colleagues regard as counter productive. M Sarkozy, an iconoclast whose star status is on the wane, has offended immigrant groups and the Left by using gunslingers’ language, promising to “hose down” immigrant estates that have turned into havens for crime and drug dealing. He has caused anger by branding as la racaille — scum or rabble — the small-time lawbreakers who hold sway in les cités, the big run-down estates.

M Sarkozy was attacked this week by Azouz Begag, Minister for Equal Opportunities, for using “warlike” language. “Order is re-established by fighting the discrimination that victimises youths,” M Begag said.

The Interior Minister hit back yesterday, saying that people were weary with politicians who blurred reality with euphemism. “I use real words. When someone shoots at policemen, he is not just a ‘youth’, he is a lout, full stop,” he said.

M de Villepin has called for understanding of the estate residents’ plight and held a meeting with the parents of Ziad Benna and Bouna Traoré, the dead teenagers.

Insiders say that M Chirac told M de Villepin to let M Sarkozy handle the riots alone in the hope that he would damage his chances in the race for the 2007 presidential elections.

M Sarkozy offered the now-standard explanation for the rebellion in les cités, which symbolise France’s failure to integrate the workers who came from its former North African colonies in the 1950s and 1960s. “These problems are the result of the installation of foreign workers on the edge of our cities after the war, whose children could not find work,” he said. “The first generation of immigrants managed to integrate better than the third.”

Both Left and Right now accept this diagnosis of the failure of France’s “Republican” model of integration,but there is little agreement on how to tackle the challenge.

M Sarkozy has called for US-style affirmative action to help immigrant children to enter the mainstream and he wants the State to give more recognition for non-French cultures..

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