Mark Townsend in Marseille
Little more than 12 hours before the police killing of a 17-year-old boy 500 miles north in Nanterre would convulse the country, scores of officers clutching assault rifles and bulletproof riot shields clashed with teenagers of north African descent, trading insults as officers profiled potential troublemakers.
Wassida Kessaci had decided not to join the crowd monitoring the French president’s trip to Marseille last week. Partly because Macron disappointed her; partly because she had been visiting Busserine too often of late.
Most recently on 24 April, when she met a mother whose teenage son was shot in the head as he sat on a sofa, metres from where the French president now held court. Weeks earlier, she comforted another mother of a young man whose blackened body was found in the locked boot of a torched car. “All this in the same place where Macron was speaking,” she said….
France has ignored racist police violence for decades. This uprising is the price of that denial
Since the video went viral of the brutal killing by a police officer of Nahel, a 17-year-old shot dead at point-blank range, the streets and housing estates of many poorer French neighbourhoods have been in a state of open revolt. “France faces George Floyd moment,” I read in the international media, as if we were suddenly waking up to the issue of racist police violence. This naive comparison itself reflects a denial of the systemic racist violence that for decades has been inherent to French policing.
I first became involved in antiracist campaigning after a 2005 event that had many parallels with the killing of Nahel. Three teenagers aged between 15 and 17 were heading home one afternoon after playing football with friends when they were suddenly pursued by police. Although they had done nothing wrong (and this was confirmed by a subsequent inquiry) these terrified youngsters, these children, hid from the police in an electricity substation. Two of them, Zyed Benna and Bouna Traoré, were electrocuted. The third, Muhittin Altun, suffered appalling burns and life-changing injuries…
https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2023/jun/30/france-racist-police-violence-riots-nahel
In the suburbs, too many feel France’s founding ideals don’t apply to them
The language of war is not, however, confined to the political right. Not far from where I had chatted to the two police officers, I spoke to Bashir Mokrani, who lives in an apartment in one of the grey tower blocks overlooking the small, scrubby park where we were sitting.
Unprompted, Bashir said: “It doesn’t just feel a war. It is a war. It is a war against us, the people who live in places like this,” he said, gesturing to the housing estate behind us. “I am now 40 years old, I have a master’s degree and a family, but all of my life I have been discriminated against and humiliated, always by the police. And now this has happened. People can’t take any more.”
If there is a war in France it is being fought, for now at least, in symbolic rather than military terms. Amid all the chaos, it has been noticeable that rioters have attacked not only police stations, but town halls, tax offices, schools – any public institution that belongs to the French republic….
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2023/jul/01/france-suburbs-emmanuel-macron-anger-communities
After the truth-shower 