Manuel Valls, France's Prime Minister.
Two weeks after the country was hit by the worst terrorist attacks in more than half a century and just days after Fox News made headlines reporting that parts of Paris were off bounds to non-Muslims -- coverage it later retracted as false -- Valls yesterday had his own take on what ails France.
The French premier said in his New Year’s address to the press that he sees ghettos in France, with “territorial, social, ethnic apartheid.”
As France tries to make sense of the three home-grown Islamist terrorists who claimed 17 lives in three attacks, the government is struggling to work out where the country might have gone wrong. Valls’s analysis that France hasn’t done a good job integrating its immigrants and their French-born children drew the ire of some lawmakers -- especially the word apartheid.
“One must be precise with words,” Guillaume Larrive, a lawmaker for the opposition UMP party told BFM Television. “France doesn’t live in the situation faced by South Africa.”
The three gunmen -- who were eventually killed by the police -- were all in their 30s, born and raised in France. They were poor and were Muslims who had been
drawn by the lure of radical Islam. At almost 10 percent of its 65 million population France has the largest proportion of Muslims in Europe.
After the initial shock of this month’s Paris attacks, or after French suburbs were torn by the country’s worst riots that drew the world’s attention a decade ago, “we tend to forget... but the stigma remains,” Valls said yesterday. In a 2005 interview with The Economist, Valls, then mayor of Evry, had already drawn attention to what he called “territorial apartheid” and discrimination in impoverished neighborhoods.
Facing Facts
“Valls is to be applauded for facing the facts squarely but it cannot be said that this problem was a priority for his or his predecessor’s government prior to the events of Jan. 7,” said Arthur Goldhammer, co-chairman of the French Study Group at Harvard University.North African immigrants and their descendants need “ a civil rights movement,” but this “would be immediately denounced as communitarian by the more zealous defenders of republican values,” he said in his blog.
France doesn’t officially collect data on ethnic minorities or by religion. While it has minorities from all over the world, a vast majority of people who emigrated to France in the past two or three generations are from its former colonies in Africa. These immigrants and their children and even grandchildren often live in relatively homogeneous, impoverished neighborhoods.
The killers in the attacks in and near Paris between Jan. 7 and Jan. 9 came from such neighborhoods.
The Gunmen
The Kouachi brothers, Said and Cherif, were children of Algerian immigrants. They were put in foster homes as teenagers and later tried to eke out a livelihood from small jobs and living off welfare. They killed 12 people, mainly cartoonists, at the headquarters of the satirical weekly Charlie Hebdo.Amedy Coulibaly, a French citizen whose parents were from Mali, grew up in the impoverished suburb of Grigny, in projects called La Grande Borne. He killed a female police officer and four Jewish shoppers at a kosher grocery.
As French authorities work through the trauma of the attacks, they are launching on an introspective journey to analyze why the nation’s education and social system failed the self-proclaimed jihadists.
“We must look at reality in the eyes,” Valls said yesterday. “There are daily discriminations because one doesn’t have the right name, the right skin color or because one is a woman. We must fight this terrible feeling that there could be second-class citizens with less of a say than others.”
Bill De Blasio
The anti-immigrant National Front party called Valls’s comments “irresponsible and insulting,” saying they added “oil to the fire.”
Separately yesterday, New York City Mayor Bill De Blasio paid a one-day visit to Paris to show support and pay tribute to the victims of the attacks, including a stop at the Hyper Cacher store where the four hostages were killed.
He made a visit to a northern neighborhood of the French capital where the Kouachi brothers lived as young adults. He said he wanted to see for himself whether the 19th arrondissement was, as identified by Fox News, a “no-go zone” and a dangerous area.
“There is no ’no-go zone,’ de Blasio told Bloomberg News. ‘‘It’s a myth in Paris, obviously. The different communities are handled in the same way. And the city government is firmly in control of the situation. I think some people are being divisive and painting an unfair picture by suggesting this.”
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