Rioting in Paris Suburbs Continues for a Ninth Night
By CRAIG S. SMITH

AULNAY-SOUS-BOIS, France, Nov. 4 - France's worst urban violence in a decade exploded for a ninth night on Friday as bands of youths roamed the immigrant-heavy, working-class suburbs of Paris, setting fire to dozens of cars and buildings as the government struggled over the violence and the underlying frustrations fueling it.

The unrest, which has also spread to other parts of France with large North African and Arab populations, prompted the American and Russian governments to warn citizens visiting the French capital to avoid its poor, outlying neighborhoods. The government reduced train service from Paris to Charles de Gaulle International Airport after two trains became targets of rioters earlier in the week.

A handicapped woman riding a bus in the suburb of Sevran suffered burns over 20 percent of her body after two youths doused the inside of the bus with a flammable liquid and set it on fire. Youths have also burned cars in the eastern city of Dijon and the southern city of Marseille.

The violence has isolated the country's tough-talking anticrime interior minister, Nicolas Sarkozy, whom some people blame for having made the situation worse with his blunt statements about "cleaning out" the "thugs" from these neighborhoods.

France has been grappling for years with growing unrest among its second- and third-generation immigrants, mostly North African Arabs, who have faced decades of high unemployment and marginalization. Critics say Mr. Sarkozy's confrontational approach has polarized the communities and the government.

"It's a game that has been started between the youth and Sarkozy," said a French-Algerian man wearing Chanel sunglasses outside of Aulnay's converted-warehouse mosque. He would only give his name as Nabil. "Until he quits," he said. "it's not going to get better."

Prime Minister Dominique de Villepin met with more than a dozen youths from troubled neighborhoods at his palatial offices in central Paris Friday afternoon, hoping to find a solution to the unrest. He has vowed to put in place an "action plan" before the end of the month to improve conditions in the country's poor neighborhoods.

France's foreign minister, Philippe Douste-Blazy, warned Thursday that France risks losing the integration battle in its immigrant neighborhoods to the radicalization of religious-based movements, shorthand for Islamic extremism.

For now, the violence seems to have been the work of unfocused teenagers and young adults without a clear political agenda.

"We see among the rioters kids of 13 to 15, who are swept along, who are encouraged to take all the risks, and the others, the ringleaders, who are used to creating trouble, they terrorize everyone, and don't want to stop," said Franck Cannarozzo, a deputy mayor of Aulnay. "Rather than playing on their Playstations, they attack the police."

The rioting erupted last week in the suburb of Clichy-sous-Bois after two teenagers were electrocuted when they hid in an electrical substation from police. Local youths, who believed the police had chased the boys into the substation enclosure, took to the streets, setting cars on fire in protest.

This incident occurred shortly after Mr. Sarkozy's populist anti-crime campaign gathered speed when he declared a "war without mercy" on violence in the working-class suburbs, which were built up during the postwar period to move workers out of the city center and closer to the industrial zones that employ them.

Over the succeeding decades, North African and sub-Saharan immigrants replaced the working-class French who initially populated the neighborhoods. But jobs have dried up as the economy slowed - unemployment in some of the zones is as high as 30 percent - and the suburbs have become the French equivalent of America's inner cities.

While labor immigration tightened in the 1980's, illegal immigration and asylum seekers have kept many of the neighborhoods growing. In 2003, France became the world's leading destination for asylum seekers, surpassing the United States.

Immigration analysts say the current segregation is precursor to an inevitable reshaping of European societies as they are forced to reopen their borders to increase the tax rolls and balance their aging, shrinking populations with immigrants.

Demographic pressures mean North African and sub-Saharan Africans will probably be at the forefront: by many estimates, the majority of the 300 million Muslims already living along the Mediterranean's southern rim are under age 20.

Many in these neighborhoods say they are being stigmatized by the interior minister's campaign and that the increased police presence results in harassment. Even before the deaths that set off the unrest last week, Mr. Sarkozy was pelted with stones and bottles during a highly publicized visit to the Parisian suburb of Argenteuil, where he had gone to outline a new plan to fight crime.

But Mr. Sarkozy has refused to back down, calling for "firmness and justice" in the face of the violence.

Mr. Sarkozy's stance has worsened a split in the governing party, the Union for a Popular Majority, between his supporters and those of Mr. Villepin. Both men are vying to become the party's presidential candidate in 2007.

The opposition Socialists, deeply divided since an internal split over a failed effort to ratify a European constitution earlier this year, have been quick to capitalize on the unrest, criticizing the governing party for neglecting the plight of the increasingly disenfranchised French-Arab and French-African youth.

Mishandling of street violence has tainted France's political right before. The death of a young French-Algerian man after a beating by police during student demonstrations in December 1986 led to the resignation of one government minister under then-Prime Minister Jacques Chirac, now France's president, and re-energized the Socialists who subsequently won the presidential elections in 1988.

On Thursday, the interior ministry released a report of the current rioting that asserted a third boy who survived the incident said he and his friends were not being chased and were aware of the danger when they entered the substation enclosure. The report suggested that the boys were hiding from police because one of those who died had a record of armed robbery and the other was among a group that had broken into a construction site earlier that evening.

But those points have been lost amid the ensuing violence.

"It's the police who are provoking us," said a bearded man in a white cap and North African robe in Aulnay. He would only give his name as Mohamed. "They don't like foreigners."

He said he had moved to France from Algeria in 1971 and has lived in the neighborhood for 30 years. All four of his children were born in France and though he is unemployed, they have all found jobs. He recently returned from a month-long pilgrimage to Mecca.

"They say integrate, but I don't understand, I'm already French, what more do they want?" Mohamed said. "They want me to drink alcohol?"

Though France has a policy of officially ignoring ethnic differences in favor of French identity, its people have been slow to open their arms to newcomers who are told that they should enjoy the same rights.

"On paper we're all the same, but if your name is Mohammad, even with a good education you can only find a job as a porter at the airport," said Kader, 23, who works at the airport. He complained that the immigrant suburbs have been neglected by the current government.

While the vast majority of the young people behind the nightly attacks are Muslim, experts and residents warned against seeing the violence through the prism of religion. The cultural divide between these second- and third-generation immigrants and the native French is deeper because they come from Muslim families, but to date the violence has had nothing to do with Islam.

But Islamic radicals recruit in France's troubled neighborhoods and there is clearly a risk of deepening alienation and anger with the French state that could breed more extremism.

Manuel Valls, the mayor of Evry, where dozens of cars have been set alight, said the spreading unrest is more a game of copycatting than coordinated action as young people vie to make the evening news. "It's a kind of hit parade by the neighborhoods," he said.

"They are little groups of very young kids, 13 and 15 years old, so we have to act with caution," he said. "All we need is one incident, one careless word" for things to get much worse.

But Mr. Valls said the deeper symptoms of the neighborhoods must be addressed. "Each crisis is bigger, harsher and deeper, more revealing of the failure of our integration model," he said.

Ariane Bernard contributed reporting from Paris for this article.