Battle of Wills

Whenever nefarious characters have heavy influence or control within a given population, they maintain their power by preying off of the weak. If, at some point, the leadership within the terrorized population decides they are fed up with this behavior, they have no choice but to brace themselves for conflict.

For four nights now, there have been riots in the suburbs of Paris. Here is the story so far:

Police clashed with angry youths in a Paris suburb for the fourth straight night, police sources said on Monday, with accusations over the use of teargas in a mosque set to exacerbate the situation further.

Six police officers were slightly injured after being hit by projectiles, the sources said.

Eleven people were arrested after the violence in which eight cars and 16 rubbish bins were torched, said departmental security spokesperson Jean-Luc Sidot.

The violence was originally triggered when two teenagers, aged 15 and 17, died by electrocution on Thursday after they scaled the wall of an electrical relay station and fell against a transformer.

The local public prosecutor said the boys wrongly thought they were being chased by police - based on questioning of a 21-year-old man who was with them and survived the electrocution.

In looking for a "root cause" to this mess, here are several reports from different sources:

News 24:

Crime policies behind tensions

Tough new French anti-crime policies are partly to blame for riots that gripped a Paris suburb at the weekend, after the accidental deaths of two teenagers who thought they were under police chase, the opposition and rights campaigners said on Sunday.

Described by the main police union as "guerrilla" violence, the nights of rioting came a week after France's fiery interior minister, Nicolas Sarkozy, vowed to wage a "war without mercy" on crime in the suburbs of Paris.

Critics say Sarkozy's tough talk is feeding tensions between youths and the police while failing to cut crime in run-down suburbs, high-immigration areas facing chronic poverty, unemployment and a lack of prospects.

CNN:

Sarkozy, whose law and order policies have been criticized by human rights groups, made his name by cutting crime figures during his first stint as interior minister from 2002 to 2004.

The popular minister returned to the job in May and has continued to be outspoken, provoking criticism from opposition politicians who say he has made things worse.

Laurent Fabius, a former Socialist prime minister and also a potential presidential candidate in 2007, said the Clichy violence marked a failure for Sarkozy and mocked his frequent visits to such areas.

"When he announces that he's going to visit such and such a commune or suburb every week, that's not how we resolve those problems," Fabius said on Europe 1 radio.

"We need to act at the same time on prevention, repression, education, housing, jobs ... and not play the cowboy."

BBC:

Local people in Clichy have accused Mr Sarkozy of heightening tensions by using inflammatory language.

During Saturday's march in memory of the dead teenagers, there were calls for the government to tackle discrimination against immigrant communities such as theirs.

Mr Sarkozy told police on Monday that "for 30 years the situation has been getting worse in a number of neighbourhoods".

"It's not a story that's three days, three weeks or three months old," he said.

Reuters UK gives us a little further look into the neighborhoods that are the center of these conflicts:

Police sources said the situation seemed to have calmed down in Clichy-sous-Bois, a neighbourhood of high-rise public housing projects, but they urged caution.

"It is like a dormant volcano. It could erupt again any time, but in general these kinds of riots don't last longer than 48 hours," said a police source who had been at the scene during the riots on Thursday night.

Many northeastern suburbs, where immigrants and families from poor backgrounds live in Soviet-style housing estates, have become notorious for youth violence.

In June, an 11-year old boy was killed by a stray bullet in the northern area of La Courneuve. The eastern suburb of Vitry-sur-Seine made headlines in 2002 when a 17-year old girl was set alight by an 18-year-old boy whose friends stood nearby.

The latest riots occurred days after Interior Minister Nicolas Sarkozy launched an offensive against crime this month, ordering specially trained police to tackle 25 tough neighbourhoods in cities across France.

"There are some gangs and traffickers who are living off the underground economy, off drug traffic, who think that these neighbourhoods are outside the authorities' reach," Sarkozy told TF1 television on Sunday.

"There is no reason why compatriots living in these neighbourhoods, the poorest ones, don't have a right to safety, too," he said, vowing to visit a sensitive neighbourhood each week and to publish monthly figures on urban violence.

The minister, who has stated his ambition to run for president in 2007, will meet the victims' families on Monday.

The tough-talking Sarkozy, whose law and order policies have been criticised by human rights groups, made his name by cutting headline crime figures during his first stint as interior minister from 2002 to 2004.

The situation in Paris is quite clear: there are young, angry and organized, mostly-Muslim men that are ruling their neighborhoods through violence and intimidation. These activities were tolerated, as they often are, for long periods of time as this behavior was localized. Sarkozy, a Presidential hopeful in 2007, has seen the opportunity to deal with not just localized crime, but a problem that is a microcosm of a pandemic that has been spreading across France and even Europe as a whole--the problem of large portions of unassimilated, poor Muslim populations maintaining their meager living off of state-funding, but also through crime.

Sarkozy has opened Pandora's box, and opinions that his tough on crime policies are partly to blame for the riots is true. But conflict (in this case, violent conflict) is the inevitable result of dealing with ruthless armed gangs who maintain their control by preying on the weak within their sphere of influence.

Sarkozy is leading the battle in just one part of the world where radical Islamism needs to be fought. This is no longer just about al-Qaeda or Sunnis or Shiites, this is a world-wide battle that is occurring where the world must demonstrate that it will no longer cow to threats and intimidation by those following an ideology that is being directly and forcefully confronted to live peacefully with its neighbors.

Now is not the time to tread lightly, or sensitively. The more we "tolerate" acts of crime, intimidation and terror, the deeper these dubious characters will be able sink their teeth into our free world. Not only do they rely on their subjects' weakness, they need for the rest of the world to roll over, blame itself and continually apologize for problems caused by them.

The free-world rose to the occassion in World War II, when they dug in their heels and successfully resisted Fascism and we finished the fight by standing up to communism for the next 50-years. Now, the free-world is being asked yet again to stand-up for itself against those that ultimately seek their demise. Just as the battle for Europe was far from decided after a successful, but bloody battle for the beaches of Normandy, our future in the fight against terror remains uncertain.

One thing that is certain, however, is that there will be conflict and it will not go away through avoidance.

Posted by 10 fingers 6 strings at October 31, 2005 08:25 AM | TrackBack