France Riot Watch: One Year Later
The burnt out remains of a city bus sit on a road near council housing in Le Blanc-Mesnil, north of Paris, October 27, 2006. Youth gangs Young Muslim immigrants around the French capital have set fire to passenger buses during the last week, a year after three weeks of civil unrest hit the Paris suburbs in 2005.
Washington Post: A Year After Suburban Riots, France Is Mostly Calm
French officials deployed 4,000 extra police officers in the country’s poorest suburban areas Friday as the anniversary of last year’s wave of arson attacks arrived with only scattered incidents of violence, according to early police and news media reports.
The security precautions followed several weeks of increasing tension in the suburban areas of Paris where residents — most of whom are Arab and African immigrants and their French-born children — have complained that the government had not lived up to promises it made, after last year’s nationwide rampage, to improve living conditions and employment opportunities.
The major differences this year:
1. Deployment of police
2. Awareness of the immigrant Muslim population and immigration problems.
3. Election year
Small groups of men — some of them armed — attacked two public buses in the northern suburbs of Paris early in the evening. In one incident, two armed men boarded a bus in front of a train station in the town of Le Blanc-Mesnil, yanked the driver off the vehicle and ordered all the passengers off before throwing a gasoline bomb and burning the bus, French media reported. Authorities reduced bus service into the area and limited night bus service in many other suburbs.
In the past week, about half a dozen public buses have been attacked and set ablaze in suburbs of Paris and Lyon, and gangs wielding rocks and metal pipes have ambushed police in some Paris suburbs.
A man looks at the wreckage of a bus that was set alight in the port city of Marseille. A young woman is in critical condition after a night of gang violence in parts of France that coincided with the first anniversary of the suburban riots that gripped the country.
The violence has decreased for now which is a good thing. But, France has structural demographic and immigration problems that are just now being exhibited.
Stay tuned……
Suburban citizen group ‘AC Le Feu’ President Mohamed Mechmache (L) and vice-president Samir Mihi (C) attend a march in Paris, October 25, 2006.
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France Watch: Muslim Immigrant Youths March Through Paris
France Immigration Watch: France Retreats on Immigrants
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