France faces harsh reality over immigrant issues

PARIS - The rioting in France has shocked the Government into realising it must face a painful reassessment of its efforts to integrate immigrant communities into mainstream society.

Dismay at the violence was at first met by point-scoring among politicians but, finally, the fumbling realisation has set in across the nation that deep-seated problems need fixing.

Right now, that's as much unity as France can muster. The authorities are striving to recover control over no-go housing estates, where police and firefighters are shot at and stoned and schools, sports centres and businesses are set on fire.

Opinions are coloured by the awareness that successive Governments have failed miserably in ensuring that poor immigrants and their descendants make a success of moving to France.

For many of the estimated 4-5 million people of North and West African descent in France's population of 62 million, life means tedious and poorly paid jobs, a life locked in housing estates with shoddy apartment, poor schools and high crime, with a high turnover of residents and a crumbling family structure.

Unemployment is a constant peril: the national unemployment rate is 9.2 per cent, but for people of foreign origin it is 14 per cent, and in the suburbs of Paris, Lyons and Marseilles, it can be 30 per cent.

Unemployment for university graduates of Arab background is 26.5 per cent, according to the National Institute of Statistics.

So it is hardly surprising that so many youngsters, especially males, feel alienated, adrift between their origins and secular France.

The violence is an "expression of despair, fury, a feeling of injustice", said Michel Wieviorka, of the School for Higher Studies in Social Science.

"No Government has been able to tackle this structural problem ... France can't cope with the fact that its model of integration is all at sea."

Manuel Valls, a Socialist member of Parliament and mayor of Evry, a high immigration town south of Paris, said: "We have been engaged in a form of ethnic and social apartheid and segregation for at least 30 years."

Evry is a relative success among the towns that grew around Paris in the 1960s and 70s to house waves of foreigners hired to do menial jobs.

Evry has the same bad architecture and the same high unemployment rate but community and education schemes - shunned by Interior Minister Nicolas Sarkozy - have helped cut crime, lift religious rapport and boost school success.

At national level, a long road lies ahead before the immigrant minority enters the French mainstream. There is a pitiful lack of immigrant success stories in French society, with the exception of sport (Serge Betsen, Thierry Henry, Zinedine Zidane) and rap music.

All the MPs from mainland France are white, and the country has no black or Arab TV presenters. Only one large French corporation is headed by an immigrant.

There are almost no ethnic senior judges or school principals and immigrant police, doctors, lawyers, teachers and journalists are rare.

Fixing all this, says Valls, will take honest commitment, respect, a transfer of money from rich areas to poor areas and, above all, time.

The worry is that once the riots subside, so will the political enthusiasm for a long-term strategy.

"The same problem always comes back and nothing is done," says Yves Sintomer, a politics professor at Paris VIII University. "There is violence, the media speaks about it, the political class speak about it and after a few weeks or months it is forgotten ... but then it returns."

Liberte?

French Muslims banned from wearing headscarves in school.

Egalite?

France's non-whites twice as likely to be unemployed.

Fraternite?

Govt admits integration policies have failed.

Realite:

Chirac vows to restore order after France engulfed by rioting and violence.

- additional reporting INDEPENDENT