THE next revolt on the French estates “will be more explosive, they will use military weapons. They already have Kalashnikovs and rocket launchers in there,” says a 29-year-old Moroccan-born man from the most notorious of all the outer Paris towns.
The forecast, delivered with an Arab-tinged accent, does not come from one of the hotheads who have run wild for the past fortnight.
The opinion is that of Aziz Senni, one of the rare beurs, ethnic North Africans, who has worked his way out of estates to success in business.
M Senni was a baby when his parents brought him to France and a home in Val Fourre. The huge estate at Mantes-la-Jolie, by the Seine northwest of Paris, is best known for murderous riots in 1991. These became the story of La Haine (The Hatred), a hit film on the disaffected youths of les cités.
With five younger siblings, M Senni grew up under the eye of a strict railwayman father. “Les Gaulois”, the white French, left the estates. M Senni was in the thick of the 1990s violence, but by 23 he had extracted himself from the cycle of hopelessness.
He eschewed the common survival route of petty crime, earned a commercial diploma and founded a transport company in Mantes.
ATA, a franchised community taxi service, now operates in several cities and M Senni has caught the eye of President Chirac and the national media, while he remains admired on the estates where he is still based.
With deft timing, he tells his story in a book published in the week that two boys were electrocuted at Clichy-sous-Bois. He was not surprised when the lid blew off at Clichy on October 27 and ignited estates across the country.
“The pressure has been building for 30 years and things are much worse since the last time. It had to blow again,” he told The Times yesterday.
The trigger was Clichy, but the rage had been fed by the provocative words and tough police tactics of Nicolas Sarkozy, the Interior Minister, he said.
The unrest now seems to have calmed, although police are ready for a possible flare-up this weekend.
M Senni’s message is also tough. He says that the minorities must use their own resources to climb out of the ghetto. His book is called The social elevator is broken down. I took the stairs (published by l’Archipel).
L’ascenseur social is the doctrine under which the egalitarian Republic was supposed to raise its minorities to mainstream prosperity. When mass employment set in from the late 1970s, the lift stopped, stranding the ethnic Arab and black estate-dwellers in the basement.
M Senni is not bitter. With a young entrepreneur’s enthusiasm, he says that he is proud to be French and a moderate Muslim. He loathes what he says is the hypocrisy of the failed Gallic model.
“France needs psychoanalysis. It still cannot look at itself in the mirror and understand who it is,” he said. “France is still living at the beginning of the 19th century, thinking that it is still white and heavily rural. It does not know that its children have changed.”
The plight of the immigrant generations springs from what he calls a state lie. France trumpets its model of colour-blind equality, “while Sarkozy and the rest are pushing you towards communitarianism”, he said.
This is the term used to condemn communities that remain separate in the way that they have under multicultural models elsewhere.
“You are not allowed to be in a community,” he said. “If you try and you are Muslim, they associate you with al-Qaeda.”
He recognises the failings of the “Anglo-Saxon” system but admires the way that it is more open to minorities.
He cites a cousin with a postgraduate degree who could find only a job selling vacuum cleaners.
“He went to England three years ago and was recruited by BP. They put him on a fast-track programme and sent him for more training at Oxford. Now he’s starting his own business.”
M Senni says that France must make its equality doctrine work by using US-style affirmative action.
Such positive discrimination, officially abhorred, is needed, he says, to rescue minorities from schools that shunt most pupils into low-skill job training, and from employers who reject applicants with foreign-sounding names.
The idea, still rejected by the political mainstream, is now gaining ground.
Its main supporter is, paradoxically, M Sarkozy, a would-be president who agrees with most of M Senni’s views while fanning the anger with his police crackdown.
M Senni’s message to the rioters is that he understands their rage but they must reject violence.
“I tell them that a vote is more powerful than a petrol bomb.”
They must find their own political leaders, he said. The parties are run by an elite who do not understand the poor, he believes. He has only contempt for the Socialist Party which, he said, spouts old-world Marxist dogma and fails to help the poor when in power.
“No politicians know what it is to look at an empty fridge and have to say that it will be ten days before we can go shopping.”
What next for France? Social commentators air their views
Laurent Joffrin, Editor of Nouvel Observateur magazine: “Once calm has been restored, is France going to accept the division, admit that entire parts of its territory live in dissidence, put a helmet-wearing cordon around them and subject them, because of social helplessness, to surveillance by vans with blue lights or to a curfew dating from the Algerian war? “Or is it, through renewed effort and realistic measures, which would constitute a break with what has gone before, to put itself on the path towards republican reunification? “A lot of things have already been done: they have not worked. A new chapter must be written.”
Michel Wieviorka, sociologist: “The riots of the past days have underlined indignation, anger, a profound sense of injustice and one of being scorned.
“They remind us that we have solved nothing since the 1970s and the first of our ‘hot summers’: entire sections of our youth are sacrificed in the name of our decomposing model of integration, which claims to be based upon the Republic but which forgets equality and fraternity for much of the population and which describes itself as social whilst it allows this same population to struggle with unemployment, exclusion and poverty.”
Alain Duhamel, political commentator: “The French Republic wanted to show the world that with its secular values, its schooling system, its language, its history, its universal principles and its strong State it was capable of transforming any foreigner, from any continent, whatever the colour of his skin and whatever his religious beliefs, into a true patriotic Gaul with a moustache and a tendency to moan.
“This methodical assimilation is one of the keys of the famous, indisputable French exception.
“Other countries — the United States, Great Britain, Germany, Holland, Canada — had chosen the different route of multiculturalism and communitarism. They accepted, they encouraged immigrants to cling to their culture, their language, their memory, their original habits. They gave them a margin of autonomy, of self-organisation. They admitted, they proclaimed, they facilitated these differences.
“In France, the republican melting pot, this mysterious and unique receptacle, sought the opposite. From multiple immigrants, it strove to form a single type of citizen. For a long time, Paris observed race riots and fighting in countries having opted for communitarism with gloating superiority.
“Today, it is its turn to cry over its burning model.”
Alain Etchegoyen, philosopher: “The Republic is not threatened by the short-lived sparks which light the fires. They are terrible scenes on improvised stages, but what goes on backstage is much more worrying.
“The dictatorship of the short term will produce a few announcements to be followed by semantic quarrels.
“Myopia threatens those who govern us. Ministerial advisers know they know nothing about daily life in difficult districts. Most of our intellectuals are better informed about Chechnya than about Clichy-sous-Bois.”
