Copenhagen? No. This is Clichy-sous-Bois, which most French people know only as the place where the worst wave of riots in contemporary France began; a place where young people from immigrant families clashed with police and started hundreds of fires among the dilapidated, overcrowded bunkers; a place few French recognized as their own country.
Clichy’s startling makeover is part of an “urban renovation” plan worth billions. It appears to be France’s answer to the well-known plight of people in the banlieues, the infamously segregated suburbs, synonymous with poverty and France’s failure to integrate its immigrants.
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“Our old building was dirty. We used to fight with the rats,” said Lassaad Kadour, 35, holding his daughter to his waist.
“Clichy-sous-Bois is a changed place.”
But walk five minutes to a part of town where the buildings appear condemned and people still live inside. You will see young people who don’t have jobs, who can’t access good schools. You will see that public transit is so scarce, it can take two hours to get to Paris, 10 kilometres away.
You will also see that makeshift prayer rooms are overflowing. There aren’t enough mosques at a time when a major study has found the difficult conditions — poverty, unemployment and lack of access to education — are contributing to a rise in Islamic orthodoxy. The Salafists are gaining ground.
For the young, the urban makeover has merely been cosmetic surgery, while things continue to rot inside.
“They have put makeup on Clichy’s face,” said Bourama Marna, 21, “but behind it there is profound pain.”
Said Clichy deputy mayor Mehdi Bigaderne: “The Republic has deserted us. It is a policy of disintegration.”
France recently elected a Socialist president, François Hollande, whose talk on immigration and integration was more tempered than that of his rivals.
The country remains, however, a cauldron of anxiety over these issues, particularly as they relate to Muslims. The extreme-right, anti-immigrant Front National party won two seats in this month’s parliamentary election — the most it has had since 1988.
“The problem in France is that it asks children who are born here and grow up here to eat French, sleep French, but they still don’t accept me as French,” said Bigaderne, the son of Moroccan and Algerian immigrants.
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It’s a common refrain among young people in Clichy, where education levels are low and dropout rates are high.
Marna, handsome and wiry and always wearing a baseball cap, smiles sheepishly when asked why he dropped out of high school. He said it was no use to him because success was reserved for others.
“For example, if I wanted to be president of France, it would be impossible,” said Marna, who was born in France with Senegalese roots.
“A real Frenchman is white,” he explained, “not black or Arab.”
Youth unemployment stands at 43 per cent in Clichy (22 per cent in France as a whole), and the chance at finding a job is even worse for a dropout.
Marna recently found work hauling cartons at a vegetable distribution warehouse, two hours from Clichy. But it is unstable. At the end of each week he doesn’t know if he has work the next.
Lack of access to good schools and jobs is perhaps the main sources of bitterness for the young of Clichy. In April, Amnesty International warned of worsening racism and discrimination against Muslims in France, especially “excluding Muslims from employment on the basis of stereotypes and prejudices.”
France’s last president, Nicolas Sarkozy, was particularly unloved in these parts. He made immigration part of the election campaign. He vowed to cut the numbers in half — allowing only 100,000 foreigners to immigrate annually — saying France could barely integrate the immigrants it had already.
He made efforts to address the problems in the suburbs after his election in 2007. His 2008 Suburbs Hope program, a kind of Marshall Plan, sought to pair young people with jobs and improve access to education. More bursaries were created to send disadvantaged young people to prep schools for the elite universities.
But for the most part, it failed, according to the former secretary of state who was in charge of it. Funding for programs didn’t materialize. Far fewer jobs or internships were created than promised. The idea of busing children to city-centre schools to reduce segregation was nixed.
Bigaderne calls it Suburbs Hopeless.
The urban renovation program is still underway in suburbs throughout the country, appreciated by people moving into the new buildings. But Bigaderne and others worry that if the underlying social malaise isn’t addressed, these new suburbs will turn into the “vertical slums” that make up the rest of Clichy.
Clichy, like many French suburbs, was built after World War II as an answer to the housing shortage and initially was home to middle- and upper-middle-class French. But they left for better housing and, as immigration increased, the newcomers gradually replaced them.
In 1981, major riots erupted in Les Minguettes, a neighbourhood in the south Lyon suburb of Vénissieux. Like in Clichy, those riots were also staged over a perceived exclusion from the French dream.
In the 30 years since, Les Minguettes has been steadily receiving services. It now has a music school, a cinema, two supermarkets, a community centre and a tramway.
But, “the socioeconomic indicators continue to fall. There’s more unemployment, more poverty, we’re still one of the poorest zones in all of France,” said Christian Joyeux-Bouillon, director of the Minguettes Social Centres.
“As long as there is no work, people will continue to get poorer.”
To academics and civil-society groups that measure integration policies, France is seen as lagging in its efforts.
Researchers at Queen’s University in Kingston, who oversee the Multiculturalism Policy Index, rate France 2 out of 8, the same score it had in 2000.
The Migrant Integration Policy Index (MIPEX) gives France an overall score of 51 out of 100, down slightly from 2007, and criticizes French laws that make non-European Union residents ineligible for about 7 million jobs in both the public and private sectors.
France allows for dual citizenship, which is considered a progressive policy that helps immigrants retain their roots as they put down new ones. But on most measures, the country falls flat.
For instance, France — which has always repudiated the idea of multiculturalism — is officially blind to minority groups. Everyone is quite simply French. Therefore, equity or affirmative-action programs for under-represented groups don’t exist.
France has also been making it harder to obtain citizenship, with stricter administrative and language proficiency requirements. Immigration now entails an official “contract” that requires immigrants to agree to France’s secular and social values, and, if necessary, take language classes. When it’s time to renew their resident cards, their efforts are reviewed. Migrants also have to take a civic integration course, although compared to the Dutch one, it’s short and simple.
The result of these conditions is that the number of immigrants granted citizenship dropped from more than 108,000 in 2009 to 66,000 in 2011.
Despair isn’t universal in Clichy. Some young people feel they are moving up in the world.
Ali Belhadj, a friend of Marna’s, has a bursary to attend junior college and intends to go to university. Eventually, he hopes, he’ll enter the import-export business. Meanwhile, he holds down a part-time restaurant job in Paris.
“I want to be independent,” Belhadj said. “I am a bit lucky to have graduated high school, to be studying. At the end of the day, it depends on the person, the situation, where they live. It depends on a lot of things.”
It’s not likely that many share his optimism. The lack of jobs and feelings of rejection, accompanied by poor political participation, is leading many Muslims to embrace stricter forms of Islam, said French Islam academic Gilles Kepel.
It’s “a piety,” Kepel found in a major year-long study published in 2011, “that seems exacerbated by the particular circumstances” in Clichy.
For instance, halal food has become increasingly entrenched during the past 25 years, to the point that very few schoolchildren are using cafeterias.
Halal’s meaning has expanded into everyday life, extending well beyond meat to become synonymous with conservative Muslim values. Kepel found, for example, that very few Muslims in Clichy thought it acceptable to marry a non-Muslim.
In February, a group of prominent Muslims issued a public cry from the heart. They published a response in the newspaper Le Monde to a former government minister who, during the campaign, said that “not all civilizations are equal,” referring to Muslims.
“We are the children of immigration,” they wrote. “How many times must we scream it? How many times must we repeat it? We are French!
“We can no longer tolerate that certain representatives of this Republic attack us, reduce us, humiliate us, blame us . . . ”
“It’s up to us to say it. The kids in the suburbs can’t. Their only weapon is to burn cars,” said Yagoutha Belgacem, 42, one of the signatories and the artistic director of an Arab world-focused art group in Paris.
For as long as she can remember, Belgacem continued, she has felt the need to defend the fact that she, too, is French. Fed up, she and her co-authors felt they had to speak up.
France, Belgacem declared, “is not what it was in the ’60s and ’70s. Politicians simply cannot grasp the fact that France no longer has the same face.”
Things are far worse in France than when she was growing up, she said: the suburbs are in despair, politicians do nothing about it, and there is surging xenophobia.
She wonders if she were a teenager again, whether she’d start to wear a hijab to assert her Muslim identity.
“If I was 20 years old today, I wouldn’t stay in France. I would leave,” she said. “When you’re not wanted, it’s better to go somewhere where you are.”
She was asked what she would advise her 10-year-old son, come that time. She paused, shook her head, and simply shrugged.
Original Article
Source: the star
Author: Andrew Chung
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