Chirac meets youths from disadvantaged neighbourhoods

Disadvantaged youths “deserve to be helped, recognised and encouraged,” French President Jacques Chirac said as he met today with a group of successful young entrepreneurs from the low-income neighbourhoods where rioting broke out this month.

As the country’s worst civil unrest in decades has waned, Chirac turned his attention away from security to finding ways to target the roots of the problems faced by people in tough suburbs, including high unemployment and racial discrimination.

Many youths have complained that the rioting stigmatised their neighbourhoods as dangerous and squalid. Chirac was careful to paint a more positive picture.

“In a lot of housing projects, there is a wonderful dynamic of solidarity, creation, dynamism, generosity and energy, of which we can be proud,” Chirac said, meeting with the winners of a contest for talented young entrepreneurs. “People can succeed there, if they want to.”

Young people from low-income neighbourhoods “must be helped, recognised and encouraged,” he said.

Many of the rioters were the French-born children of North and West African immigrant families. The three weeks of violence sparked intense debate over France’s failure to integrate minorities and forced the government to confront problems of racism and poverty that are deeply entrenched but usually ignored.

Louisa Benzaid, a 33-year-old who opened a tearoom, told Chirac that an employer once asked her to introduce herself on the phone “as Claude Durand, not as Louisa Benzaid.”

She said she recounted the conversation to Chirac and he was stunned. “He was aware of discrimination during hiring, he didn’t expect that this kind of problem existed for people inside a company,” Benzaid said.

Visiting Strasbourg, Prime Minister Dominique de Villepin encouraged people to keep an open mind about the suburbs. Those who live there “do not want to be stigmatised for belonging to these neighbourhoods,” he said.

The conservative government has announced speeded-up spending to improve housing, education and employment. Chirac met this week with his key Cabinet ministers to lay the groundwork for a new programme he announced on Monday that would involve job and civic training for 50,000 underprivileged youths by 2007.

Medef, France’s main employers’ organisation, also urged companies to make sure minorities do not face discrimination.

Some young graduates “have a harder time than others, because they are from difficult neighbourhoods, because they are from an area that wrongly has a bad reputation, because they have a look or a sociological origin that doesn’t belong to the norm,” Medef President Laurence Parisot told France-2 television.

Medef has a responsibility to “give them a hand,” Parisot said. While unemployment in France is just under 10%, it climbs as high as 40% for youths in housing projects.

The unrest was set off by the accidental electrocution of two teenagers as they hid from police in a power substation in Clichy-sous-Bois, northeast of Paris.

At its worst, the rioting spread to nearly 300 towns and cities and involved violent exchanges of stones and tear gas between youths and police. Rioters fired live bullets and birdshot at officers and, at the peak, incinerated 1,408 vehicles in a single night.

From Thursday to Friday, only 93 cars were burned nationwide – a near-normal figure in France, where torching cars is a common form of delinquency.

Though the violence has subsided, parliament approved a three-month extension of the state of emergency on Wednesday at the government’s request. First imposed for 12 days on November 9, the extended emergency means local authorities can impose curfews and police can conduct searches of homes when deemed necessary through mid-February.