French unrest spreads outside Paris Staff and agencies Friday November 4, 2005
A disabled person was badly burned in an attack on a city bus and more than four hundred cars were torched during an eighth night of rioting in Paris suburbs.
Government officials cited a falling number of direct clashes with police to claim that the situation was becoming calmer, but the violence also spread out of the capital's immediate vicinity.
Reports of unrest surfaced in Rouen in Normandy, Dijon in Burgundy and the Mediterranean port of Marseille. A bus depot was set on fire to the west of Paris in the town of Trappes, near Versailles, destroying 27 buses.
An amateur video aired on television showed them all in a row and in flames.
Gerard Gaudron, mayor of Aulnay-sous-Bois, one of the worst-hit suburbs, insisted "the peak is now behind us" but in the low-income estates on the edge of Paris the mayhem continued.
In Seine-Saint-Denis, the department between central Paris and Charles de Gaulle airport, arson attacks destroyed 187 vehicles and five buildings. Two commuter trains to the airport also came under attack.
Further east, riot police were fired on in Neuilly-sur-Marne and a group of 30 to 40 were harassing police near a synagogue in Stains, where a city bus was torched and a school classroom partially burned.
"Why a school, why a car? What can you say about such blind violence," one local mayor, Michel Beaumale, said.
The unrest started on October 27 when young people of mainly north or black African origin took to the streets over the deaths of two teenagers - Bouna Traore, 15, and Zyed Benna, 17 - who were electrocuted in a power substation where they hid thinking they were being chased by police.
Bouna's brother, Siyakah Traore, today called for the rioters to "calm down and stop ransacking everything."
"This is not how we are going to have our voices heard," he told RTL radio.
Small-scale suburban violence and car torchings are a regular though largely unreported fact of life in troubled Paris suburbs and other French cities where low-income housing estates are marked by unemployment and delinquency.
What sets the current unrest apart is its duration, and the way it rapidly ignited beyond the original flash point.
Residents in the bleak estates were fed up after eight nights of violence. "I've had enough of this," a woman of African origin in Aulnay-sous-Bois told Reuters.
Local politicians complained last night about dithering among national officials after prime minister Dominique de Villepin briefed them about an "action plan for the suburbs" which he aims to present later this month.
"Many of us told him this isn't the time for an umpteenth plan," said Jean-Christophe Lagarde, mayor of Drancy. "All we need is one death and I think it will get out of control."
The rioting has grown into a broader challenge for the French state. It has laid bare discontent simmering in suburbs that are heavily populated by poor African Muslim immigrants and their French-born children, many trapped by poverty, crime and poor education.
France's Muslim population, an estimated 5 million, is Western Europe's largest. Disaffected members claim racism makes the second class citizens.