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11/13/2005:

"Lyon burns as riots hit city centre"

Riots spread to the centre of a French city for the first time last night as police clashed with youths in Lyon.

Officers in the city's famous Place Bellecour moved in with tear gas to disperse rioters vandalising vehicles. Police said they had been attacked by groups brandishing bottles, stones and dustbins.

The confrontation, which led to two arrests, happened shortly after the local prefect had announced a weekend curfew on minors.

Meanwhile, Paris was under siege yesterday as thousands of police guarded key tourist sites such as the Eiffel Tower and the Champs-Elysées and enforced emergency laws, including a ban on groups of people gathering.

The capital's prefect of police, Pierre Mutz, said the record deployment of some 3,000 officers was in response to a barrage of text messages and weblogs thought to have come from youths linked to the previous 16 nights of unrest in the city's suburbs. They called for 'the biggest riot ever seen'.
observor.guardian.co.uk

The Real Difference Between America and France

...The result of our conversation was that though the core issues among ethnic and racial minorities in the United States and France are the very similar, the French response would never work here. This is because the United States flatly refuses to address the core issues and denies the humanity of our urban poor. Despite the terrible nature of the French riots, ignoring the radical Right of Le Pen, it seems likely that many of the core issues will be addressed to one extent or another in France since they have been recognized. To quote Chirac, "We need to respond in a strong and quick way to the unquestionable problems that many inhabitants of the deprived neighborhoods surrounding our cities are facing."

In the United States, on the other hand, the urban poor are simply denied any attributes of humanity. They can be killed and maimed with impunity, pushed deeper in debt and poverty without recourse, and by their very nature all their grievances can be written off as laziness and dependency on the "welfare state." Make no mistake about it, my friends - who in of themselves are reasonably well off - made it crystal clear that the same anger and frustration is churning here but experience has shown them to expect no mercy from our government.

The main difference between France and the United States is that in France the youths recognized that their government might actually heed their plight, whereas here the people facing the same frustration know full well that our government will go to extreme measures to avoid doing so. The real difference is that in France the minorities are still human beings even if facing discrimination and poverty, whereas in the United States, those in poverty effectively lose their humanity as far as the powers-that-be are concerned. Despite this reality, repression of the downtrodden and ignoring fundamental problems is not a sustainable solution and given the right impetus the United States is moving toward a crisis that will make France's current problems seem trivial in comparison.