French Riot Update

First, from the Beeb:

Local authorities in France have been allowed to impose curfews in an attempt to end 11 days of riots, Prime Minister Dominique de Villepin says.

Speaking in a television interview, he called the violence "unacceptable" and outlined measures to curb the unrest that has hit 300 towns and cities.

He ruled out army intervention for the moment, but said an extra 1,500 police officers are to be deployed.

Which also included these figures:

One man killed

4,700 cars torched

1,200 people arrested

17 people sentenced

108 police and firefighters injured

And here's some more analysis of how the European Dream seems to be breaking down, via the Christian Science Monitor:

"Working class suburbs have become ethnic ghettos," says Marc Cheb Sun, who edits "Respect," a magazine aimed mostly at young black and North African readers. "That is the origin of the problem."

And it is not easy for even ambitious young people to break out if they come from a district with a bad reputation, as Jean-Francois Amadieu, a university professor who founded the "Discrimination Observatory" discovered in experiments over the past year.

He sent out fictitious applications for sales jobs, allegedly coming from six different sorts of applicant, ranging from a white male to a woman of North African origins, all with the same résumé.

Applicants writing from addresses known to be in "difficult" areas received half as many invitations to an interview as those from less notorious districts. The "North African" male candidate received five times fewer invitations than his white counterpart, says Prof. Amadieu.

At the same time, complains Michèle Lereste, who runs the "Green Light" social-work agency in Villetaneuse, just North of Paris, where the projects are almost entirely inhabited by immigrant-descended families, government funding cuts have closed a number of job-training institutes, "and we are finding it harder and harder to get employers to take apprentices from our district."

"The kids learn all the French republican values such as equality in school, and then they find in practice that it's an illusion," says Ms. Bouzar, who was recently named one of Time magazine's 50 "European Heroes" as a role model for those seeking to be good Muslims and good French citizens. "There is an enormous gap between theory and practice."

Nowhere is that gap clearer, say young men in Clichy-sous-Bois and adults who work with them, than in the behavior of the police. "They check our papers everywhere, all the time, for no reason," complains one youth in Clichy who did not want to be identified. "And the checks are getting rougher and rougher."

Those sorts of experiences "delegitimize the state" in young peoples' eyes, worries Bouzar, which helps explain why authority figures such as firemen and doctors have been stoned on recent nights even as they tried - with police protection - to save lives and property.

Taïb Ben Thabet, who has been a social worker in the projects north of Paris for 35 years, fears that the kind of discrimination his young wards face undermines his patient efforts to help them find their place in society.

"I teach them that the state is for everybody, that it treats everybody the same," he says. "But what credibility do I have when everything I say is contradicted by experience? The kids say it's all lies."