Shaking France awake

“There’s racism in everything in France, in housing, jobs, school — everything.” Harsh sentiments, those. Perhaps unfair ones. But they reflect the grief of Bana Traore, the sister of Bouna Traore, 15, one of the two French teenagers whose deaths plunged France into weeks of rioting in minority neighbourhoods. As the Star’s Sandro Contenta reported yesterday in a world exclusive, President Jacques Chirac’s police, curfews and emergency decrees may calm the crisis, but they will not cure what ails his country. Prime Minister Dominique de Villepin has tacitly acknowledged the grievances of the largely non- white rioters, vowing to improve conditions in France’s angry ghettoes. “ France is wounded,” he says. “ The effectiveness of our integration model is in question.” That model rejects multiculturalism and affirmative action and prefers assimilation and the myth of equal citizenship. But as Bana Traore rightly noted through her tears, citizens like her of African and Asian descent face government neglect and economic discrimination. Many labour at poorly paying jobs and live in sterile housing estates. Few programs exist to help immigrants participate more fully in French economic and political life. The result has been painfully high unemployment, poor housing, weak schools, gangs and hopelessness, the usual toxic urban brew. And now widespread violence.

Belatedly, Villepin promises to speed urban renewal, to improve schools and to create jobs. He must also combat discrimination in the job market. And curb police harassment of young people. Above all, French leaders must not go on pretending France is a homogeneous nation with equal opportunity for all, while cynically tolerating a form of social apartheid that relegates far too many of its citizens to lives of poverty and despair.