[ANN]Radicals call for new apartheid

As night falls, the "troubles" start, and the pattern is always the same. Gangs of youths in balaclavas set fire to parked cars, break shop windows with baseball bats, wreck public telephones and go on to ransack cinemas, libraries and schools.

Once police have arrived on the scene, the rioters attack them with stones, knives and baseball bats. The police respond by firing tear-gas grenades and, on occasion, blank shots into the air. Sometimes, the youths fire back - with real bullets.

The scenes described above are not from the West Bank but from any one of 16 French cities, most of them close to the capital Paris, that have been plunged into a European version of the intifada.

When the troubles first began just over a week ago in Clichy-sous-Bois, an underprivileged suburb east of Paris, bombastic French Interior Minister Nicholas Sarkozy responded by sending more than 400 heavily armed police to "impose the laws of the republic" in the strife-torn suburb.

He promised to crush "the louts and hooligans within the day." Within a few days, however, it had dawned on anyone who wanted to know that this was no "outburst by criminal elements" that could be handled with a mixture of braggadocio and batons.

By last Monday, everyone in Paris was speaking of an "unprecedented crisis." Both the Interior Minister and his boss, Prime Minister Dominique de Villepin, had to cancel foreign trips to deal with the riots.

How did it all start? The accepted account is that sometime last week a group of young boys in Clichy were engaged in one of their favorite sports - stealing parts from parked cars. Normally, nothing dramatic would have happened as the police have not been present in that suburb for years.

The problem occurred when one of the inhabitants, a female busybody, telephoned the police and reported the thieving spree taking place opposite her building. The police were thus obliged to do something, which meant entering a city that had been a no-go area for them. Once the police arrived on the scene, the youths, who had been reigning over Clichy pretty much unmolested for years, became angry.

A brief chase took place in the street and two of the youths, who were not actually being chased by police, hid in a cordoned-off area housing a power pylon. Both were electrocuted.

Once news of their deaths was out, Clichy was up in arms. With cries of "God is great," gangs of youths armed with whatever they could get hold of went on the rampage and forced the police to flee.

The French authorities, however, could not allow a gang of mere youths to expel the police from part of French territory. So, they hit back by sending in special forces, known as the CRS, with armored cars and tough rules of engagement.

Within hours, the original cause of the incidents was forgotten and the focus of the issue became a demand by representatives of the rioters that the French police leave the "occupied territories."

By midweek, the riots had spread to three of the provinces bordering Paris with a total population of 5.5 million.

Who lives in the affected areas?

In Clichy itself, more than 80 percent of the inhabitants are Muslim immigrants or their children, mostly of Arab and North African descent. In other affected towns, the Muslim immigrant community accounts for between 30 and 60 percent of the population.

But these are not the only figures that matter. Average unemployment in the affected areas is estimated at around 30 percent and, when it comes to young would-be workers, reaches 60 percent.

In these suburban towns, built in the 1950s in imitation of the Soviet social housing of the Stalinist era, people live in cramped conditions, sometimes several generations in one tiny apartment, and they see "real" French life only on television.

The French used to flatter themselves for the success of their policy of "assimilation" which was supposed to turn immigrants from any background into "proper Frenchmen" within a generation at most. The policy of assimilation worked as long as immigrants came to France in dribs and drabs and thus could merge into a much larger mainstream.

Assimilation, however, cannot work when in most schools in the affected areas, fewer than 20 percent of students are native French speakers.

France has also lost another powerful mechanism for assimilation - obligatory military service, which was abolished in the 1990s.

As the number of immigrants and their descendants increases in a particular locality, more and more of its native French inhabitants leave for "calmer places," thus making assimilation still more difficult.

In some areas, it is possible for an immigrant or his descendants to spend a whole life without needing to speak French, let alone having to familiarize themselves with French culture.

The result is often alienation. And that, in turn, gives radical Islamists an opportunity to propagate their message of religious and cultural apartheid.

Some are even calling for the areas where Muslims form a majority of the population to be reorganized on the basis of the millet system, which was in force in the Ottoman Empire.

Under that system, each religious community was deemed a millet - a legally protected religious minority - and enjoyed the right to organize its social, cultural and educational life in accordance with its religious beliefs.

In some parts of France, a de facto millet system is already in place. In these areas, all women are obliged to wear the standardized Islamist hijab while most men grow their beards to the length prescribed by the sheikhs.

The radicals have managed to chase away French shopkeepers selling wine and alcohol and pork products, forced "places of sin" such as dance halls, cinemas and theaters to close down and seized control of much of the local administration, often through permeation.

A reporter who spent last weekend in Clichy and its neighboring towns of Bondy, Aulnay-sous-Bois and Bobigny heard a single message: The French authorities should keep out.

"All we demand is to be left alone," said Mouloud Dahmani, one of several "emirs" engaged in negotiations to persuade the French to withdraw the police and allow a committee of sheikhs, mostly from the Muslim Brotherhood, to negotiate an end to the hostilities.

President Jacques Chirac and Premier Dominique de Villepin are especially sore because they had believed that their opposition to the toppling of Saddam Hussein in 2003 would give France a heroic image in the Muslim community.

That illusion has now been shattered and the Chirac administration, already in a deepening political crisis, appears to be clueless about how to cope with what the Parisian daily France Soir has called a "ticking time bomb."

It is now clear that many of France`s Muslims not only refuse to assimilate into "the superior French culture" but firmly believe that Islam offers the highest forms of life to which all mankind should aspire.

So what is the solution? Gilles Kepel, an adviser on Islamic affairs to President Chirac, suggests the creation of "a new Andalusia" in which Christians and Muslims would live side by side and cooperate to create a new cultural synthesis.

The problem with Kepel`s vision, however, is that it does not address the issue of who would rule this new Andalusia: Muslims or the largely secularist Frenchmen?

Suddenly, French politics has become worth watching again, albeit for the wrong reasons.

By Amir Taheri The Straits Times, Singapore Asia News Network