Elections could kill unique ’culture‘ of French slums

Elaine Ganley

MONTFERMEIL, France — Ragged pants and T-shirts dangle from a tree outside an apartment block. Pigeons feast on garbage dumped from windows. Streaks of graffiti blacken dank entryways like screams.

“Welcome to our culture,” says a sardonic sign stuck on a lamppost.

As France heads into a fateful presidential election April 22, the candidates are full of promises and plans for fixing the slums that erupted in violence two years ago. Here in the decaying concrete housing project of Les Bosquets, 10 miles northeast of Paris, a half-dozen apartment blocks are to be razed in a $600 million renovation.

But not everyone seems pleased. Distrust runs so deep that many in Les Bosquets fear change will deprive them of the only certainty they have — the comfort of social structures formed in their ancestral homelands.

“The buildings are dirty. But look at the people inside. They’re nice,” said Sabrina Bel Bachir, 21, who has lived all her life in Les Bosquets.

“People never go out,” said Karim Bousseba, a 33-year-old electrician. Their French is poor, and all they know is welfare, he said, sipping coffee in a cafe where men and boys play rummy. “What are they going to do somewhere else?”

Les Bosquets — “the Groves” — was carved from a forest in a corner of Montfermeil, described by Victor Hugo in “Les Miserables” as a “charming and peaceful village on the road to nowhere.”

This project and others sprang up after World War II, envisioned as functional French utopias with streets named Utrillo and Picasso. But they have gradually adapted to the immigrant influx — with a halal butcher, Middle Eastern supermarket, mosque and satellite dishes beaming in Arabic, Turkish or African TV.
Les Bosquets is home to 7,500 people, 60 percent of foreign origin, town officials say. Here family values are apt to include polygamy and even forced marriage. Delinquency is rampant, and youths accuse police of humiliating them with gratuitous identity checks.

The projects are largely self-sufficient ghettos that lie out of sight and mind of French society. Les Bosquets exists in a separate universe from Montfermeil, the mostly white, middle-class town that for 24 years has elected mayors avowedly hostile to immigration.

Mayor Xavier Lemoine acknowledges conflicts with project youth, many of whom “don’t give a damn about French society.”

“They are reproducing their society of origin … They want their own system,” Lemoine said. “The real challenge today in the suburbs is a cultural challenge.”

Christian Roussail, director of Arrimages, an association of street educators working in Les Bosquets, traces the establishment attitude to France’s imperial era, when it ruled the countries from which the immigrants would later arrive.

“I think we are still administering the suburbs as though they were colonies,” he said. Without radical change, he warned, “in 20 years, Les Bosquets will be in the same state as now.”

With the exception of conservative front-runner Nicolas Sarkozy, leading candidates for president — including the left’s Segolene Royal and centrist Francois Bayrou — have campaigned in housing projects, offering moral support and ideas for change. But none has come up with what critics say is needed most — a Marshall Plan to fix decades of discrimination, mismanagement and neglect.

Instead, they all propose partial fixes.

Royal advocates boot camp for delinquents. Sarkozy promises a year’s job training, an affirmative action program and a ministry of immigration and national identity — though he hasn’t defined its functions.

Bayrou wants to post a representative of the state in each “sensitive neighborhood” to ensure against neglect.

In Les Bosquets, such proposals are dismissed with a jaded shrug. Good intentions unravel against the cold facts of unemployment. Les Bosquets’ jobless rate is 35 to 40 percent — more than double Montfermeil’s 17 percent and more than four times the national rate. Many job seekers, poorly educated or unable to speak French, are simply unemployable, jobs counselors say.

“We teach people how to read ads … decode the system,” said Marie-Anne Galazka of Defi, an employment agency. But some applicants don’t even qualify for construction or housekeeping jobs.

Henri-Philippe Congar heads Local Mission, which is working to place some 1,500 area youths in training or jobs, often short-term. It succeeds in about one in three cases.

“There is no family model here in which the father works, the mother works. Sometimes these young are the only ones who get up in the morning,” he said.

The economy runs on a thriving black market and millions of dollars in state, regional and local aid, which critics say only deepens the disconnect from French society.

But the election is having a galvanizing effect in poor neighborhoods where some 5 million people live and where turnout is traditionally low. A voter turnout drive there has ratcheted up the number of potential voters, and 96 percent of those indicated in a January poll said they would vote.

Sarkozy and Royal have noticed, and have appointed counselors of North African origin. Royal is likely to benefit most from the project vote, largely because Sarkozy is hated in the projects for having called troublemakers there “scum.”

The renovation plan calls for replacing Les Bosquets’ apartment blocks with smaller buildings, a commercial center and perhaps a tramway. But like dozens of youths questioned, Bel Bachir is skeptical, believing the authorities will seize the opportunity to expel troublemakers from the neighborhood.

“They want to eliminate the ‘scum,’” she said.

(Associated Press)