…Minister for the interior Nicholas Sarkozy’s remarks calling violent youth ‘scum’ also provoked further violence, several experts say. “Sarkozy’s choice of words makes me think of the rhetoric used by military police in racial dictatorships, and of regimes practising ethnic cleansing,” Hugues Lagrange, social researcher at the independent Paris Observatory of Social Change told IPS.
Lagrange said conditions of extreme poverty, high unemployment and the racial segregation that hinders immigrant access to jobs lay at the heart of the rebellion. Instead of dealing with these issues, Sarkozy is stirring up unrest “to establish tighter electoral links with a populist right-wing extremist population.”
commondreams.org
Shades of Algeria: French government approves emergency curfew powers
The French government has approved giving curfew powers to regional authorities to stem the worst urban violence the country has seen in nearly four decades, Interior Minister Nicolas Sarkozy said after a cabinet meeting.
…Prime Minister Dominique de Villepin told national television late Monday that the curfew powers would be invoked under a 50-year-old law first brought in as an unsuccessful attempt to quell an insurrection in Algeria, at a time when the north African country was a French colony.
In Germany, a cautious sense that ‘we don’t have to fear this’
Cars were set on fire in Berlin, in the German city of Bremen and in Brussels in what appeared to be copies of the communal riots in France, and European leaders warned that poor and dissatisfied youths of immigrant backgrounds lived all over Europe.
The incidents late Sunday night, though minor so far, served as a reminder to many Europeans of the absence of any guarantee that the violence sweeping France could not spread to other countries in Europe that also have large, relatively poor and culturally alienated ethnic communities, most of them predominantly Muslim.
And, to be sure, there already has been intense communal violence elsewhere in Europe, if nothing quite like the French disturbances, most notably the fighting between Pakistani and Bangladeshi immigrants and the police in several towns in northern England a few summers ago.
And yet, as officials and community leaders watched the violence in France on television, there seemed to be at least a cautious and tentative conviction that the chance was small that riots on the scale of those in the Paris suburbs would break out in other countries.
Well this is just whistling in the dark for sure. Virtually every country in Europe has similar population of disenfranchised ex-colonials.
Here are the fruits of imperialism, as Jean Paul Sartre predicted back in 1960. The only long-term solution would be a coming to terms at last with White Supremacy. Instead, they will go the way of brutal repression, like always. What happens to a raisin in the sun?
