MasterShake69
Posts: 752
Joined: 11/30/2005 Status: offline
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How race relations are going in france ;) http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/in_depth/4417096.stm http://riotsfrance.ssrc.org/ Civil Unrest in the French Suburbs, November 2005 On October 27, 2005, two French youths of Malian and Tunisian descent were electrocuted as they fled the police in the Parisian suburb of Clichy-sous-Bois. Their deaths sparked nearly three weeks of rioting in 274 towns throughout the Paris region, France, and beyond (see maps, pictures, and graphs here.) The rioters, mostly unemployed teenagers from destitute suburban housing projects (the cités HLM) caused over €200 million in damage as they torched nearly 9000 cars and dozens of buildings, daycare centers, and schools. The French police arrested close to 2900 rioters; 126 police and firefighters were injured, and there was one fatality – a bystander who died after being struck by a hooded youth. The French government’s response, if not swift, was predictable. Then Interior Minister Nicolas Sarkozy declared a “zero tolerance” policy towards urban violence. A year later, when civil unrest again flared up in the same suburbs – on October 1, 2006 in Les Mureaux, Yvelines, again the result of an incident with the police – Sarkozy returned to the his “law and order” discourse. The government’s response in November 2005 and since was amplified by a wide range of commentary that attempted to link the rioting to illegal immigration, Muslim separatism, and polygamous practices. In fact, while most of the rioters were second generation immigrant youths, the underlying issues were far more complex, involving social and economic exclusion, racial discrimination, and most importantly the capacity of the French Republic to respond to these challenges while maintaining its distinctive model of and formal commitment to the social integration of individuals, no matter what their color or creed. http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/world/europe/article2983714.ece N retrospect, it was not a good idea to have left his pistol at home. Called to the scene of a traffic accident in the Paris suburbs last Sunday, Jean-François Illy, a regional police chief, came face to face with a mob of immigrant youths armed with baseball bats, iron bars and shotguns. What happened next has sickened the nation. As Illy tried to reassure the gang that there would be an investigation into the deaths of two teenagers whose motorbike had just collided with a police car, he heard a voice shouting: “Somebody must pay for this. Some pigs must die tonight!” The 43-year-old commissaire realised it was time to leave, but that was not possible: they set his car ablaze. He stood as the mob closed in on him, parrying the first few baseball bat blows with his arms. An iron bar in the face knocked him down. “I tried to roll myself into a ball on the ground,” said Illy from his hospital bed. He was breathing with difficulty because several of his ribs had been broken and one had punctured his lung. His bruised and bloodied face signalled a worrying new level of barbarity in the mainly Muslim banlieues, where organised gangs of rioters used guns against police in a two-day rampage of looting and burning last week. Not far from where Illy was lying was a policeman who lost his right eye after being hit by pellets from a shotgun. Another policeman displayed a hole the size of a 10p coin in his shoulder where a bullet had passed through his body armour. Altogether 130 policemen were injured, dozens by shotgun pellets and shells packed with nails that were fired from a homemade bazooka. It prompted talk of urban “guerrilla warfare” being waged on French streets against the forces of law and order.
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