Home > Racism: Guerrilla on Paris’ Doorstep
Edito Demos-Actions Police - Repression France
By Claude Ribbe
translation : Idriss Stelley Foundation (ISF)
The north of Paris’ suburbs currently lives an unprecedented explosion. There has not been any precedents to compare to this time, the violence expressed towards the police is extreme and the Youth are seeking all the local politicians to lynch them.
Abruptly, the police chief of Sarcelles, a nearby city, was seriously struck in the face and sixty policemen were injured (five of them critically) last night. It would seem that the use of firearms forbids them to enter the city. It is matter of True Guerrilla.
I know Villiers-le-Bel very well, where I was just a candidate in the legislative elections - without nomination and without means - and where nothing forbids me to run again - why not with means, this time? - Since a new election must take place in a few weeks, following the resignation of Dominique Strauss-Kahn, the "leftist" Parisian millionaire who was elected instead of me on last June, 17.
Because no one - no - no one says that the sole politician responsible for this zone deprived of all rights, and the insurrectional climate that reigns herein, is called Dominique Strauss-Kahn and that he fled his district two months ago to become General Director of the IMF. The best-paid official of Washington.
The "Black" Youth of Villiers-le-Bel, where he nevertheless held office as President of the communal towns of Le Val DE France, henceforth is well behind his concern. Strauss-Kahn handed out his powers to François Pupponi, Mayor of Sarcelles, a partisan of "communitarism", who also claims to be a leftist, but spends his time partying in Paris, while spending in restaurants and chic hotels with a credit card bearing his name, and whose bills are covered by the SEM Chaleur, the corporation in charge of heating the buildings of Sarcelles...
Impressing for a top ranking Internal Revenue official. When my campaign began - a year ago - the heating system, as a matter of fact, had broken down for three days while we froze. People, shivering with cold, stood outside. Young children were sobbing. Then, some city residents went to see the Mayor to ask him to intervene. He had his staff reply that he was not competent in the matter. Likely, he was busy in Paris teasing the pretty girls of the Café DE Flore, as I saw it with my very eyes, or hosting dinners at the Restaurant, DE L’Etoile. When one asks Pupponi what he does in Paris, drinking champagne at the Café DE Flore, while he is the mayor of the one of the poorest cities of France, he replies that he never sets foot in Paris. Because François Pupponi, is not only a hedonist, but above all a liar. And it is this man, listed among the regular patrons of the Café DE Flore, invited by the owner to come and celebrate the victory of Nicolas Sarkozy last June, who was invested by the French Socialist Party to become deputy of Villiers-le-Bel!
One may understand, in these conditions, that the city residents, disgusted with politics, instead of going to vote, are driven to despair and that we border a true civil war situation.
What did actually happen in Villiers-le-Bel?
According to the mainstream press, some "youth" accidentally hit a police car, but no police responsibility would be presumably involved. Nevertheless, some of the victims’ close families members or witnesses of the tragedy, recount a very different version.
Sunday, November 25, in the afternoon, French Youth of African descent are playing with motorbikes. I often times saw see them do so. What else could they do on a Sunday afternoon in a city such as Villiers-le-Bel? The police intervenes and ask them to stop. In Villiers-le-Bel, as in so many other cities of the World, "Black" Youth are afraid of "white" policemen. Two kids, frightened, speed away on their small bikes. They do not wear helmets. The driver is a French Youth of Malian descent. The passenger is of Moroccan descent. They are fifteen year old and they are about to die.
Usually, French newspapers as Le Monde or Liberation, of which certain journalists declare to be in favor of racist census of the French population would say: "A black Youth" but in this case, they will say nothing.
A high-speed chase follows. The kids accelerate, accelerate again. A second police car positions itself in front of them to block their passage. The young pilot cannot decelerate and hits it heads on. The shock is extremely violent. The two bodies are torn to pieces. Some people say that the policemen would have abandoned their car. and the lifeless bodies of the two teenagers. Others contend that the firemen would have taken over an hour to intervene. Among the friends of the two Youth, anger rises, there goes explosion.
Villiers-le-Bel... it is the French version of Cité Soleil. Villiers-le-Bel... it is the typical example of the racist politics headed for a number of years by most French politicians, right or left, who patronize the same restaurants, have sex with the same mistresses, share the same jargon, the same scorn, the same loathing for "Blacks" and "Arabs." Villiers-le-Bel...it is a true ghetto, designated Trash City, like Sarcelles or Garges-les-Gonesse, with its black-skinned residents and French Muslims, those that are unwanted elsewhere, those who frighten the racists, who are non-entities, who have no rights to anything. When they sees them in Paris, the journalists talk about "ethnic gangs."
Further down, under the landing tracks of Roissy and Le Bourget, the buildings, inhuman, are in a state of notorious decay. But in Villiers-le-Bel lays another specificity: the nearby city of Arnouville, a quaint suburb composed of villas, often guarded by dogs and in majority inhabited by "pure white" French, as stated in their files by the corporations in favor of racist census. The police role, and the role of Gonesse’ nearby police precinct is, as one may suspect, to Protect Arnouville’s "pure whites" from the "savages" of the ghetto.
The sole relationship I had – indirectly - with this precinct is eloquent. During the electoral campaign, one of my supporters, in charge of posting my flyers in Arnouville at night, was deliberately followed by a Gonesse police car that had spotted him because of the color of his skin. During electoral campaigns, one often sticks posters outside of electoral designated panels. My supporter therefore stops at a location where posters of all other candidates had just been affixed.
The police, who surely would not have said anything to the supporters of Dominique Strauss Kahn, asks him for his identification. No luck, not only his papers are in order, but he is French. He is a Data Processing Engineer who expresses himself better than they do in French. Nitpicking check on the vehicle. The policemen are happy, his registration is expired. It is benign, but they confiscate it from him. He is accused of having affixed a poster in a forbidden location. It is ludicrous since he has not even started doing it. But, for them, he is a "Black" who posts the flyers of another "Black." They are "white," they are pre-justified. The policemen, in all illegality take a poster that portrays me from him and leave. To post it in their office and throw darts at my photo while drinking beers? Although there is no motive for prosecution, harassment and summons from the Gonesse’ Precinct are yet to subside against the unfortunate postering worker.
During the last elections, the UMP, party of the current President, had presented Sylvie Noachovitch, an attorney and television anchor whose profile did not reflect the district’s reality. According to a weekly magazine, Sylvie Noachovitch would have expressed in Paris, in close chambers, her deep aversion towards "Blacks and Arabs." This information was revealed a few days before the second turn of the elections. Noachovitch lets it known that it is her own party that fomented it. At any rate, this "revelation" allowed Strauss-Kahn to be reelected. Sylvie Noachovitch definitely denies to have made such statements. Maybe, in fact, she never did. But still: the Strauss-Kahn nomination to the IMF just forced the deputy of Sarcelles and Villiers-le Bel to resign from the National Assembly. There will be a new ballot in January. The UMP would have hurriedly, once more, designated Sylvie Noachovitch as candidate. Whether or not she made the comments attributed to her, she is viewed as a racist emblem in the eyes of a good proportion of Villiers-le-Bel’s population and of the nearby areas. This appointment of Sylvie Noachovitch by the party of the President of the Republic, if she is confirmed, is similar a barrel of gasoline spread over a fire. For this reason alone, things can only worsen.
Part of the French press seems, due to fear of the Power at hands, to want to conceal what is really happening in Villiers-le-Bel.
Whatever the responsibility of the policemen who killed two Youth, while hitting them with their car may be, the events that ignite the suburbs, again, are unquestionably linked to the racism that, in Villiers-le-Bel as elsewhere, opposes a police perceived as Serving "white communitarism" against the African Immigration Youth for which France did not foresee any proper living space, except for the Ghettos, the Prisons or the Charters of Expulsion.
Because there is yet, a truth that no French journalist dares to write about: the two Youth killed by the policemen were not white- skinned, as most of the journalists and policemen are.
When, beginning of the year 2006, the motorcycle of Young Cédric Annicette accidentally hit Officer Wink sur l’’île DE Saint-Martin (Guadeloupe) and caused his death, racist intellectual Finkielkraut, who supports and exacerbates the prejudices of the elite, accused the onlookers at the scene at the time of the tragedy, because they were "Black," to have rejoiced at the death of a "white," and thus to have committed a "passive lynching worthy of the Ku Klux Klan." The same Finkielkraut accused me of being responsible of this "lynching" because, in a book, I had compared Napoléon to Hitler.
And today, when a police car kills two "Nonwhite" Youth, if it is true, as some whisper, that the "white" policemen fled the scene without attending to the bodies, torn to pieces, of two teenagers,
what should one say about what happened in Villiers-le-Bel?
27 novembre