While in Las Vegas, the mayor suggests that those who deface roads with graffiti should have their thumbs cut off on television because, as he says : "You know, we have a beautiful highway landscaping redevelopment in our downtown [district]. We have desert tortoises and beautiful paintings of flora and fauna. These punks come along and deface it. I'm saying maybe you put them on TV and cut off a thumb. That may be the right thing to do." , in France, interior minister, Mr Nicolas Sarkozy, persists in speaking his mind (and that of a good number of rightist French?). His language is always forthright - one of the reasons why he is such an interesting and media-friendly politician. But it has been intemperate too. But -- using the word "la racaille" or "scum" to describe the rioters was incendiary, especially after an earlier controversial comment about "cleaning up" crime in other urban areas.
Nicolas Sarkozy's position as interior minister and also as chairman of the governing centre-right UMP party and the man most likely to challenge Mr Chirac for the presidency in 2007, has put him at the centre of this story, and there are suspicions that he is happy to use it in his battle against the prime minister and rival presidential hopeful, Dominique de Villepin. Mr Sarkozy is one of few French politicians prepared to tackle the twin issues of immigration and integration - he has some good ideas about positive discrimination and state funding for mosques - even if he has too much of an eye on the extreme right and the National Front leader, Jean-Marie Le Pen.
Last night's incident of a 56-year-old physically disabled woman sustaining 30% burns after the bus she was travelling in was set alight by youths in the northern suburb of Sevran, was the ugliest yet in the violence that has convulsed the suburbs of Paris during the past week. The number 15 bus had just left the town's railway station at about 9.30pm when it was forced to a halt by burning rubbish bins strewn across the road. Two hooded youths forced open the front door, emptied jerry cans of petrol over the floor and on the front-seat passenger and the driver, then threw lighted rags inside. Fresh attacks were reported in two dormitory towns outside the French capital where youths set fire to cars and two buildings.
There were also signs of the violence spreading beyond Paris, with arson attacks reported earlier in the day in Rouen in northern France, Dijon in the east and Marseille in the south.
Officials nonetheless expressed hope yesterday that the country's worst urban unrest in a decade could be on the wane. But on Thursday alone, more than 500 cars were torched in the Paris region, an increase on previous episodes.
Enraged citizens taking to the streets is one of the recurring themes of French history. But the latest bout of rioting in the suburbs of north-east Paris is a toxic and very modern mixture of alienated ethnic minority youth and heavy-handed response by the security forces. The trouble began in Clichy-sous-Bois when two teenagers being chased by police were accidentally electrocuted. No one else, mercifully, has been killed. But six nights of violence have seen volleys of stones and petrol bombs and cars burned on several other sink estates where unemployment is high, petty crime rife and the police are seen as the enemy. It is all serious enough for Jacques Chirac to have issued an appeal for calm from the Elysée yesterday.
Not for the first time, the unrest has highlighted tensions between wealthy big cities and their grim ghettoised banlieues, home to immigrants from the Maghreb and West Africa who have never been fully integrated into French society and have become an underclass for whom hopelessness and discrimination are normal.
Overreaction can have grave consequences, and the minister was right to admit that a police tear-gas grenade mistakenly hit a mosque. It is heartening too to hear of Muslim community elders ordering youths home. France's mood is not revolutionary but it is ugly. Mr Sarkozy talks of "zero tolerance" of crime, but in the long term it will take equal opportunities in education, housing and employment to keep the riot police off the meanest streets.
(reference: The Guardian)
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