France To Announce New Muslim Plan
Agencie France Presse:
French ministers are Tuesday to unveil a blueprint for tackling unemployment and discrimination in hundreds of low-income, high-immigrant suburbs that exploded into rioting in 2005.
Urban Affairs Minister Fadela Amara, a women’s rights activist of Algerian origin who grew up in a housing project, was to conclude four months of nationwide consultations in the Lyon suburb of Vaulx-en-Velin.
The suburb plan aims to improve living conditions, education and job prospects in the low-income “banlieues”, where the descendants of African and Arab immigrants say they are treated like outcasts in French society.
President Nicolas Sarkozy, who promised a “Marshall Plan” to tackle the root causes of the riots during his election campaign, was reportedly disappointed with Amara’s initial plan, postponing its official launch until next month.
The president made his first trip to the suburbs since his election Monday night, visiting a police station in Sartrouville west of Paris and launching an ad-hoc discussion with local youths who quizzed him about jobs and training.
He promised to return to Sartrouville to unveil the suburb plan’s full details on February 8, promising it would include training for youths without high-school diplomas.
“We won’t let anyone down, on one condition: that those who have been given advice and training make the effort to get up in the morning,” he told the youths.
Sarkozy has said the plan would be “extremely ambitious”, focussing on “people rather than places”, but Amara has warned the scale of the suburbs’ problems requires long-term investments and a radical shift in government policy.
Sarkozy’s tough line on law and order as interior minister made him a hate figure for many suburb youths, who voted massively against him last May.
Amid signs the “banlieue” plan may be falling into disarray, the government announced last week it was bringing back neighborhood police units to the troubled suburbs, scrapped six years ago when Sarkozy was interior minister.
The opposition Socialists had repeatedly criticised Sarkozy for dismantling the units and accused him of turning the police into a tool of state repression in the suburbs.
France’s “banlieues” have remained tense since the 2005 riots, the country’s worst civil unrest in decades, which largely pitted suburban youths of immigrant background against police.
The Paris suburb of Villiers-le-Bel witnessed a flare-up of violence in November, before hundreds of police officers were dispatched to restore order.
Vaulx-en-Velin, chosen to unveil the blueprint, is emblematic of France’s troubled suburbs: a town of 40,000 people, the poorest in the region, where unemployment hovers at more than twice the national average of eight percent, with peaks of 40 percent in some areas.
In 1979, a high-rise estate in Vaulx-en-Velin was the scene of France’s first ever suburb riot as frustrated immigrant youths torched cars and clashed with police. Violence flared again in 1990 with three days of full-scale riots.
Despite an ambitious urban renovation plan, with hundreds of millions of euros poured into the town since the 1980s, jobless rates remain sky-high, and Vaulx exploded into violence along with hundreds of suburbs in late 2005.
(AP)
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“The opposition Socialists had repeatedly criticised Sarkozy for dismantling the units and accused him of turning the police into a tool of state repression in the suburbs.”
Are they not just pathetic, inane and stupid..”These F*ks are the “cause” and we have seen the the “effect”(destruction by the ungrateful, unforgiving, mentally unstable immigrants)
January 22nd, 2008 at 8:20 pmHow about the policy of if you break the law we revoke your legal status and give you a free one way ticket home. I don’t see why that would be a problem to anyone. France, like the rest of the world is for people who follow the laws of the land. Wasn’t it Switzerland who was talking about deporting foreign trouble makers? Sounds like a good way to go to me!!!!!
January 22nd, 2008 at 8:25 pm“France To Announce New Muslim Plan”
Deportation
January 22nd, 2008 at 9:03 pmSounds like its the Gaza strip of France. No matter how much money you pour in, you get nothing in return.
January 22nd, 2008 at 11:00 pmAs I said previously, the right and the left are both responsible for what became our big cities surburbs. None of them wanted really measure itself with this postcolonial problem.
They followed as “veals” (a De Gaulle expression that discribed the Frenchs, but I would say all the plebes on that earth too) the political correctness, wellcome the nondesired (a fortiori the uneducated) immigration since the first oil hit (1973).
As these population were supposed to have escaped from countries with high human rights negation, or famine, grave economical problems… and given that the french guiltiness feeling after the colonial wars was the most well shared by the medias, that the charity missstress spirit was no-more of the upper-class, but also of the new “educated” proletariat, that the religion was relegated to the lonely bigots, therefore this new “aware” society was making “charity business” in letting enter the “barbarians” in our country.
Though, this well thinking society didn’t want to live with these “inferior beings” as proxy neighbours : they relegated them in new built surburbs : there, they had a big difference with their former clay cases, there they had running water, shower, heating…
The paradise ! yeah, at the beginning, when there wasn’t a teen surpopulation, that remained uneducated for a certain percentage, (I would say the same as the other strates of a population, but here it is more evident because of the concentration)
From the both political poles, there weren’t a real interest in these immigrants : no prodject was intended in a long term plan but rather for elections goals, you get then this aberration : “dismantling the units” .
Indeed Sarko did it, cause that was his agenda to have trouble in surburbs, and therefore get a chance to be elected with the help of the former national front electors ; otherwise, he wouldn’t have had a chance, the socialists and the liberal center-rights would have made the majority.
So, one can say that Sarko got the power as we say “à la hussarde”. So far, I am not regreting it, among the candidates, he was the most able to handle the society changes.
But there were other weaknesses that were perpetuated by the corporated administrations, especially of education : instead of nominate experienced teachers in these problematic places, they sent the new graduated ones, because, this well-thinking elite is rewarding itselt in nominationg their clientelised fidels in the ‘côte d’azur” for exemple ! idem for the post-men, the police…
so, when your inexperimented, in such “unknown” and unsecure society, you become a radical or you break (ça passe ou ça casse) ; that how happened the unnumerus controls on the same person during a day, some kind of humiliating procedé, or they comit suicide.
This is why a few decades after the police got unpopular there, while at the same time, the state didn’t deliver the money to equiped them or to educated them.
The teachers are ill or depressives, therefore absent.
So you need to have a good parental environnement if you want to succeed in these aeras. Some do, we see this generation in Sarkozy government… but the medias like to talk about what’s going wrong, that sells more papers and brings more advertising… the biggest percentage of them are quiet people, don’t want any trouble, though they are overwelmed by what is new here : the gangs fights !
These persons, when they can afford it, move away from the surburbs, they buy a condo or a house…
January 23rd, 2008 at 4:31 amSure its a great idea to try and make peoples lives better. But lets face facts here, some people just dont give a shit what you do for them. You know the next time something happens they will probably just riot again. If i was President of a country with tons of illegals i would make very strict guidelines and when someone didnt live up to them i would say you’re out of here.
January 23rd, 2008 at 4:35 am