Paris: Uneasy calm as police patrol riot suburbs

An uneasy calm fell over Paris’ riot-hit suburbs today after a week of unrest by gangs of youths shooting at police and firefighters, starting fires and attacking symbols of the French state.

Riot police were out in force with some 1,300 deployed across the low-income region of Seine-Saint-Denis north east of the capital after prime minister Dominique de Villepin vowed to restore order.

More than 100 firefighters battled towering flames engulfing a warehouse in Aulnay-sous-Bois early today.

Hours earlier, in nearby Le Blanc Mesnil, another warehouse was set ablaze. Youths fired buckshot at riot police vehicles in Neuilly-sur-Marne (further east) and at a group of 30 to 40 police near a synagogue in Stains where a city bus was torched and a school classroom partially burned, said the top official of Seine-Saint-Denis, Prefect Jean-Francois Cordet.

A special interior ministry operations centre monitoring the troubles reported some 60 vehicles burned in the Seine-Saint-Denis region by 1am local time (midnight GMT) and a total of 165 throughout the Paris metropolitan area. Forty vehicles were burned in the Val d’Oise area north west of Paris.

The sporadic incidents were a scaled-back version of the ferocious rioting that erupted eight days ago in Clichy-sous-Bois and spread across the troubled area of housing projects marked by soaring unemployment, delinquency and a sense of despair.

The unrest took a dangerous turn the day before with rioters shooting at police or firefighters in three towns, ignoring an appeal for calm by President Jacques Chirac.

Facing mountng pressure, Villepin told parliament that restoring order was his “absolute priority”.

The unrest cast a cloud over the end of Ramadan, the Muslim holy month. In Clichy-sous-Bois, men filled the Bilal mosque for night prayer yesterday, but streets were subdued and shops shut early.

“Look around you. How do you think we can celebrate?” said Abdallah Hammo as he closed the tea house where he works.

From an outburst of anger over the accidental deaths of two teenagers, the rioting has grown into a broader challenge for the French state. It has laid bare discontent simmering in suburbs where African and Muslim immigrants and their French-born children are trapped by poverty, unemployment, discrimination, crime and poor education and housing.

France’s Muslim population, an estimated five million, is western Europe’s largest. But rather than being embraced as equal citizens, immigrants and their French-born children often complain of police harassment and job discrimination.

Despite the release of a preliminary investigation yesterday that appeared to exonerate police of any direct role in the teenagers’ deaths, fear of unrest remained high.

Bouna Traore, 15, and Zyed Benna, 17 – were killed on October 27 while hiding from police in a power sub-station. Youths in their neighbourhood suspect police chased them to their deaths.

But the report, released by the interior ministry, said that while police went to Clichy-sous-Bois to investigate a suspected intrusion on a building site, they did not chase the teenagers who were killed. A third teenager, seriously injured, told investigators they were aware of the dangers when they hid in the fenced-off sub-station, the report said.

Asked why the youths ran when police said they were not being chased, Benna’s father Amor told reporters: “This is what they say. We want the truth to come out.”

Benna and the other teenagers’ families have filed a lawsuit to try to determine whether “a mistake was made by security forces. We want to know the circumstances that led to his death”.

Suburban residents and opposition politicians have blamed interior minister Nicolas Sarkozy of fanning tensions with tough police tactics and talk - including calling troublemakers “scum”.

“Sarkozy’s language has added oil to the fire. He should really weigh his words,” said Mohammed Fawzi Kaci, an Algerian immigrant who saw his daughter’s gym goes up in flames.

“I’m proud to live in France, but this France disappoints me.”