Spiked Article - Letter From a Burning Banlieue

8/9/2019 Spiked Article - Letter From a Burning Banlieue

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Monday 14 November 2005Letter from a burning banlieueAs the dust settles over Aulnay-sous-Bois, an Oxford student asks the

rioters what all that was about.Pdraig Belton

AULNAY-SOUS-BOIS, PARIS - Before I came to fisticuffs with the youngrioters I was interviewing, before they relieved me of my camera, we spoke.It was nightfall; we were solidly on their turf, their project in the Aulnayneighbourhood of Rose des Vents. The Franco-Algerian adolescent who gaveme his name as Kabir The Gun, one of my two subsequent boxing partnersfrom their group of seven, was quick to point out to me his neighbourhood

was ghetto, Bronx, with an exaggerated bravado and pride in thetoughness of his tract which lingered for me after.

The mural nearby us read libert, unit, respect, depicting Cassius Clay, thepugilist who would take the name of the Prophet, rasul Allah. But theseyouths are not religious; their fighting possesses no truck with the faith ofpeace that passeth understanding. Indeed, fighting is their religion; itsprophets, televised gangsters who for them symbolise power and anger.

But they are followers nonetheless, these young rioters, showcasing arepertory of imitation, performing an identity of violence they have seenacted out on flickering screens. They might occasionally add Israel, Jews andSharon to France, Sarkozy, the racist police and those others whose namesfollow, in their drunken, possibly drugged, excited invocations, the gallicequivalent of Fuck. Britain and New Labour get off lightly; America does notwholly escape - but France is the true target for their disdain. These areneighbourhoods whose inhabitants in an anti-Casablancan moment booedthe Marseillaise during a Franco-Algerian football fixture in October 2001,and did so again during the recent demonstration mobilised by Aulnaysmayor, shopkeepers and councillors against their banlieues rioting.

Aulnay-sous-Bois has seen the worst violence of any of the banlieues todate. But on an official map, reading Aulnay like a cartographer of state, its


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grittiest neighbourhood of la Rose des Vents seems wholly legible and Gallic- its streets bear the labels Rue Auguste Renoir, Rue Rembrandt, Rue EdgarDegas, Rue Paul Czanne. Its map records a church, St-Jean, with a cross, aParc Dpartmental du Sausset with pleasant-looking lake and unstinting useof green and blue inks, and no legends that denote either housing estates oranything grim which might lie out of place in the bucolic countryside.

Go, and you note two things at the RER-B stop that immediately precedesAulnay-sous-Bois. The graffiti starts, and all the white people get off. Butupon exiting the station one could be forgiven an unsettling suspicion youdaccidentally got off at the wrong dodgy banlieue. In the Vieux Paysneighbourhood and the area about the station - the southern bit - the onlyindication that youre not in another of the worlds well-heeled metropolitansuburbs comes from awfully well-reinforced steel walls setting the houses,replete with gardens and long driveways, apart from the street. Its whenyou go north from there, up toward the Citron plant and the main roadbisecting the banlieue, that you encounter the fields of high-rise housingprojects, the famous cits.

Go to the estates that border the Parc Robert Ballanger or those of the TroisMille further to its north, underneath the ascending curve of aeroplanesdeparting from Charles de Gaulle airport. The edgier of them, like the one weare in now, have large fences dropped from the sky separating everyquantum of space, like organelles in a cell. Dropped second and scraping theair are the residential buildings, white in their tall landing-pod surreality and

intermittently dominating the otherwise vacant skyline: this article was tohave had pictures. On the street the glass of each bus stop has been broken,the pieces linger on the ground; the burnt-out cars have for the most partbeen towed away, but some remain.

But its people smile and greet you, and answer your queries for directionspleasantly and unhurriedly. As in all ghettoes, there are here both criminalsand people trying to make a life, handfuls of the first and the latter in theirthousands. Here they get on with their lives: children study in fenced-inschools, play basketball on a sturdily fenced court, then enter fence-enclosed

residential buildings with their parents. Cit dwellers are quite friendly tocurious outsiders, but grow silent and uncomfortable when you bring up theunspoken current event. In the grocers, or on the street outside wherepeople congregate, locals do not want to say anything about their ownchildren, students or customers. One elderly man insists the vandals arefrom other banlieues; another complains they cannot use corporalpunishment here as their own parents could in North Africa; a third, in histhirties and who works with youth, admits they are the same students withwhom he works.

There is similar reticence in other shops and the mosque. The mosque isunmarked in either French or Arabic, in an industrial quarter of town, the


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only clues lying in the nearby halal butcher and sauna, shoehorned betweenentering lorries and a food preparation vocational school. A kindly Algerianimmigrant in his late thirties had been explaining to me that it was a difficultsituation for residents, but what were they to do, when Suleiman, middle-aged and the presumptive imam with short grey beard and skullcap, showedme the door with some force, his one hand on my shoulder and the other onthe hand he had been shaking, explaining he did not appreciate pryingoutsiders. Jean-Claude, a courteous restaurant owner on the banlieuesnorthern border and not an Aulnaisien, was similarly reluctant to discuss theriots, though he shared that his customers were down from 90 to 30 pernight, clients were staying in past nightfall, and that it was a difficultsituation, but what could one do? He hoped the worst was over.

My rioters, though, are more talkative. They offer to take me to basementcaches of Molotov cocktails, drugs and Kalashnikovs. When riot police fromthe Compagnies Republicaines de Securit arent around, they speak withexaggerated bravado, pointing out wreckage they claim responsibility for.(When riot police are around, they use monsieur, and are quiet.) Theseyouths model racial harmony, children of Arab and black Africans togetherpatrolling their streets as comrades in violence. Theyre kids, generally aged15 to 18, and they have simply been having a rather violent holiday, bashingup cars and bus stops because its fun to do so.

Sandy Mayson, 25 and a recent Yale graduate living in Paris as a freelancejournalist, was blocks to the north of me in the Trois Mille, two immense

buildings which between them contain the indicated number of housingunits. Her rioters, shortly after they said the riots had nothing to do withreligion and informing her there were Christians and Buddhists rioting aswell, claimed to have two friends in Guantanamo Bay, directing her to tellthem hello. She suspected they were talking rubbish; they seemed forinstance familiar with no biographical details about their world-travellingfriends.

The banlieues are bannum leucae or, in late Latin, banleuca - territorywithout the citys walls but, theoretically, within the limits of its laws. Paris is

attempting to regain the sway of its banns here. Policing is a remarkabledrama to observe now, and fits an exegesis of the banlieue riots as thehandiwork of young criminal gangs rather than a spontaneous Francophoneuprising of the oppressed to gladden the hearts of Trotskyists. Go to thetourist core, the Champs and the Arc de Triomphe, and you will see visiblepolicing in spades. This is policing intended not only to deter, but to bevisible, to comfort tourists and native Parisians that their city is intact. Icounted 10 police cars by the Elyse metro station Monday night, then byPlace de la Concorde two large buses painted blue, on the sides with whiteletters labelled Gendarmerie.

But go to Aulnay and a quite different pattern emerges. At first, it appears


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minimally policed if at all; only the periodic patrol car from the badlyfinanced police annexe, and the riot units at moments of conflagration. Butlook closer, and there are signs that here there is indeed a war being foughtby the French state - not by a massive billeting of troops to reassert theabeyed sovereignty of state against rising masses, and the monopoly ofleviathan on force, but a more secret war being fought by the securityservices against youthfully determined criminal gangs, clandestinely andquietly selecting its targets, and in the shadows so as not to alienate abroader and possibly tendentious populace.

There is a bus of gendarmes here as well, but this one does not bear the titlegendarmerie on the side to comfort those it protects and serves; it has itslights out, and is parked at an out-of-the-way stop a few roads removedfrom a project, to effectively simulate an off-duty bus. Peer closer into itsdarkened windows and it is a hive of activity. Look carefully at cars passingby after nightfall, and one sees not only those occupied by cit residents andshopkeepers, but those that bear in each seat beefy short-coiffured menclearly only recently out of the forces, if at that, with more than a bit oftechnological wizardry inside to boot. The French state is here, too; it hasnot given up on these of its neighbourhoods; it merely joins the battle on itsterms, and against its selected enemies.

But to win more than selected battles, it is the economy that must improve.The banlieues will not advance towards peace until the market draws all oftheir youth into employment. Talk of a Sixth Republic increases along with

disaffectedness from a once deferential nation toward its rulingEnarquecracy, and a president who this week seemed curiously silent andwhose shoulders looked small when he sought to use the once augustrepublican language of De Gaulle.

My rioters, in the end, told me I would need to pay them to continue talkingto me; first 100 euros, then 50, to include a tour of the cache with theMolotov cocktails. I told them I would come back later, but would accepttheir tour. Then Kabir said if I did return, I would then need to take the tourfor 100 euros, or he would perform an operation on me which one might

refer to as a particularly thorough circumcision. We scrapped; as we did so,a second-generation West African youth stole my camera; we stared at eachother for several moments. Then Kabir and his comrade declined furtherengagement, and ran off with my camera. I realised I was angry, so I tookout my pen, and wrote.

Over the grey Aulnay projects the sunset rose red, stamped with the whitepartial moon of the huntress.

Patrick Belton is a writer and president of the Foreign Policy Society. He

lives between Oxfordshire and a Swiss writing garret, ordinarily stays out ofstreet brawling, and is finishing a doctorate at Oxford University. He writes


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daily on Oxblog.com, and his writing on French Muslims has appeared in theTimes Literary Supplement.

reprinted from: http://www.spiked-online.com/index.php/site/article/596/

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Spiked Article - Letter From a Burning Banlieue