Unrest brings French leaders under fire

As urban violence spread Sunday from the shores of the Mediterranean to the German border and onto the streets of central Paris, the French government came under increasing fire for its dithering response to the mounting wave of unrest.

Government leaders have held repeated meetings amongst themselves and with neighborhood representatives, and more than 2,300 riot police are patrolling the uneasy Paris suburbs to deal with youths burning cars and buildings. But officials have offered no concrete proposals to quell the disturbances, even after 10 straight nights of tumult.

"Where is the president of the republic when such grave things happen?" asked opposition Socialist party leader François Hollande on Sunday, criticizing Jacques Chirac for his silence since appealing for "dialogue" last Wednesday. "I would like to hear from him."

The right-wing nationalist leader Philippe de Villiers urged the government to "send the army into the suburbs" to put down what he said was "looking more and more like an ethnic civil war."

On Saturday night, violence that has racked the city's suburbs spilled over into better-off districts, with youths setting fire to 28 cars in the streets of the capital.

Incidents of arson were also reported in the early hours of Sunday from cities in the south, such as Marseille, from Lille in the north, and from Strasbourg in the East, among others. Over 1,000 cars were torched nationwide during the night, according to a police count.

The wave of unrest by immigrant-descended young men has spread nightly since two teenagers electrocuted themselves on Oct. 27 while hiding from police in an electrical substation in the Paris suburb of Clichy-sous-Bois.

The violence has drawn fresh attention to the frustration and despair simmering in heavily ethnic neighborhoods plagued by unemployment, poverty, and crime. France is home to the largest immigrant community in Europe, totaling some 10 percent of its 60 million population.

These districts have sporadically gone up in flames before, attracting public and political attention for a brief span, and then reverting to normal life out of most peoples' sight and mind.

Former President François Mitterrand once publicly sympathized with the inhabitants of the projects, wondering aloud in 1990, while he was still in office, "What can a young person hope for, born in a soulless neighborhood, living in an ugly building surrounded by ugliness, grey walls in grey surroundings for a grey life, surrounded by a society that prefers to avert its eyes and get involved only when it is time to get angry and to stop people from doing things?"

But never has such violence continued so long and spread so widely, points out Jean-Luc Parodi, a pollster and prominent political analyst. "This is going to shake things up, it will certainly start a debate" about the circumstances that have provoked the unrest, he predicts. "Cars burning in Paris will act as a wake-up call to people who live there," such as government ministers, he adds.

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