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Allegations of French apartheid

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Template:Allegations of apartheid Allegations of French apartheid draw analogies between France and apartheid-era South Africa. The term "apartheid" has been used to describe French treatment of Arab and African communities in Algeria and in France.

Algerian apartheid

See also: French rule in Algeria

Following its conquest of Ottoman controlled Algeria in 1830, for well over a century France maintained colonial rule in the territory which has been described as "quasi-apartheid".

This "internal system of apartheid" met with considerable resistance from the Muslims affected by it, and is cited as one of the causes of the 1954 insurrection.

Urban apartheid

In 1962, the thousands of Pied-noirs coming back to France because of the Algerian War forced the governement to launch a wide urbanization plan, to create housings. The urging need of these resulted into the building of Grands Ensembles, huge complexes of apartement buildings and towers in the suburbs of the major cities. After the return of the Pied-noirs, immigrants from other French former colonies settled in these HLMs, and nowadays, the social status of these suburbs has not changed : It is still the place where immigrants usually find their first French home.

Tariq Ramadan, a swiss Muslim and theologian, alleges that France is disintegrating into a "territorial and social apartheid" because "certain French citizens are treated as second-class citizens, if not the leprous members of the national community". He points to divisions between the wealthy urban areas and the poorer suburban areas in French cities, as well as an ethnic division between European French and non-European (primarily North-African, Muslim) immigrant French. Protesters of this division, who argue that the problem is exacerbated by the government, refer to it as a unique form of "urban apartheid."

During the heavy-covered riots of 2005, some American journalists compared the French system to the South-African one. Ralph Peters, in a sardonic article about the riots wrote that France's apartheid has a distinctly racial aspect. In his view, France's "5 million brown and black residents" have "failed to appreciate discrimination, jobless rates of up to 50 percent, public humiliation, crime, bigotry and, of course, the glorious French culture that excluded them through an informal apartheid system."

The issue of "educational apartheid" is also of great concern to George Mason University law professor Harry Hutchison, who has warned that France's refusal to implement its 2006 First Employment Contract law will disproportionally harm poor youth, particularly immigrants; in his view, "France will continue to mirror apartheid-era South Africa".

Criticism

Some have argued that the claims of apartheid in France are a consequence of the rise of Islamic fundamentalism among some French Muslims, and not just government policy. This argument has been made in debates about the 2005 French law on secularity and conspicuous religious symbols in schools, which was formulated primarily to prohibit girls from wearing the hijab in schools. Gilles Kepel, who co-authored this law, argued that it was not "acceptable" for members of different religions groups to primarily identify themselves as members of their faith (and secondarily as French) by wearing conspicuous religious symbols, as the end result would be "a sort of apartheid".

These debates also mirror earlier crises, particularly the "headscarf affair" of 1989, when three Muslim girls were excluded from schools for wearing headscarves. The affair triggered national debate in France, revealed previously unusual alliances between the left, feminists, and the right, and exposed differing views of and visions for the nature of French society. According to Maxim Silverman:

In the headscarf affair this 'vision', in its most extreme form, was often polarised in terms of the Republic or fundamentalism (secularism or fanaticism), the Republic or separate development (integration or apartheid). The problem for large parts of the Left was that they were often sharing the same discourse as Le Pen who used the affair to warn against 'the islamicisation of France'... in a splended example of the either/or choice facing France, in which there was is a convergence of many of the discursive elements mentioned above, the Prime Minister Michel Rocard announced on 2 December 1989, that France cannot be 'a juxtaposition of communities', must be founded on common values and must not follow the Anglo-Saxon model which allows ethnic groups to barricade themselves inside geographical and cultural ghettos leading to 'soft forms of apartheid' (quoted in Le Monde, 7 December 1989).

A 2005 article in Arab News by Amir Taheri argued that Islam was actually causing self-segregation:

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 ever encountering the need to speak French let alone familiarize himself with any aspect of the famous 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 re-organized on the basis of the “millet” system that was in force in the Ottoman Empire. Under that system each religious community is regarded as ”millet” and enjoys 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 dancing halls, cinemas and theaters to close down and, seized control of much of the local administration often through permeation.

Minette Marrin of The Sunday Times, while recognizing that "poverty and rejection" have "played a significant part" in the problem, also believes that some French Muslims have "retreat into more extreme forms of Islam and into the arms of fundamentalists", and that Westerners have been unwilling to recognize this as "deliberate separatism — apartheid."

French Muslim women also see the "apartheid" as being internally imposed by the French Muslim community, and the issue as not one about religious freedom, but rather "about saving schoolgirls from a kind of apartheid that was increasingly imposed by men in their community".

The French periodical Le Monde Diplomatique, however, disagrees with this assessment, and devoted two entire articles to the discussion of "urban apartheid" and "educational apartheid" in France, citing them as the two main factors in the the explosive 2005 French youth riots. Stating that the controversy of Islamic headscarves was a "smokescreen", it argues that " few villains or a handful of Muslim “brothers”" cannot be held responsible for "the ghettoization of more than 700 zones urbaines sensibles (ZUS, government-designated problem areas) and their 5 million inhabitants." The authors agree with Laurent Bonelli that the violence was the result of "a process of urban apartheid" as well as "discrimination and racism that afflict young Arabs and blacks".

Writing in The Weekly Standard, Robert S. Leiken actually credits French apartheid with reducing Islamist sentiment. In his view:

The modernist housing experiments of the sixties have produced apartheid du Corbusier. Together with government monitoring and stiff hate crime punishments, that French apartheid helps explain why its Muslim slums are less Islamist than the British. Walled off by cavernous superhighways, the quartiers in a supreme irony have turned into homelands, the source of a sort of stunted nationalism aroused once in places like Belfast.

Terminology

Montpellier's socialist mayor, Hélène Mandroux objects to the term "apartheid" in relation to France's treatment of African minorities, arguing that "Terms like urban apartheid are over-dramatic We recognize the problem and we are trying to deal with it, but this is not Johannesburg in the 1980s."

Notes

  1. ^ "Algeria was in fact a colony but constitutionally was a part of France and not thought of in the 1950s (even by many on the left) as a colony. It was a society of nine million or so 'Muslim' Algerians who were dominated by the million settlers of diverse origins (but fiercely French) who maintained a quasi-apartheid regime." Bell, David Scott. Presidential Power in Fifth Republic France, Berg Publishers, 2000, p. 36.
  2. ^ "In contrast with the Moroccan and Tunisian protectorates, Algeria was made an integral part of France and became a colony of settlement for more than one million Europeans... under colonial rule, Algerians encountered France's 'civilising mission' only through the plundering of lands and colonial apartheid society..." Bonora-Waisman, Camille. France and the Algerian Conflict: Issues in Democracy and Political Stability, 1988-1995, Ashgate Publishing, 2003, p. 3.
  3. ^ "As a settler colony with an internal system of apartheid, administered under the fiction that it was part of metropolitan France, and endowed with a powerful colonial lobby that virtually determined the course of French politics with respect to its internal affairs, it experienced insurrection in 1954 on the part of its Muslim population." Wall, Irwin M. France, the United States, and the Algerian War, University of California Press, 2001, p. 262.
  4. ^ Peters, Ralph. "France's Intifada", The New York Post, November 8, 2005.
  5. ^ Taheri, Amir. "France’s Ticking Time Bomb", Arab News, November 5, 2005.
  6. ^ "A few villains or a handful of Muslim “brothers” can hardly be held responsible for the ghettoization of more than 700 zones urbaines sensibles (ZUS, government-designated problem areas) and their 5 million inhabitants. As Laurent Bonelli points out (see page 2), it makes more sense to attribute the recent violence to a process of urban apartheid - a stark contradiction of the French integrationist model - and to the discrimination and racism that afflict young Arabs and blacks. The smokescreen generated by the controversy over Islamic headscarves has blown away, revealing a brutal reality." Vidal, Dominique. "The fight against urban apartheid", Le Monde diplomatique, December, 2005.
  7. "The truth is that certain French citizens are treated as second-class citizens, if not the leprous members of the national community. Their children are sent to ghetto schools and taught by inexperienced teachers, they are crammed into inhumane public housing developments, and they are confronted with an essentially closed job market. In short, they live in a bleak, devastated universe. France is disintegrating before our eyes into socioeconomic communities, into territorial and social apartheid. The rich live in their own ghettos. Institutionalized racism is a daily reality." Follath, Erich. "Tariq Ramadan on the crisis in France", Salon.com, November 16, 2005.
  8. "not some repeat of the white-kids' tantrum of 1968, when spoiled brats rebelled against their parents." althought May_1968 was a major turn in french politics
  9. "Paralyzed French officials complain of "unfair" media attention (welcome to the reality club, Pierre). Yet, hardly two months ago the French media celebrated the suffering in New Orleans — ignoring the brave response of millions of Americans to Hurricane Katrina to concentrate exclusively on the Crescent City's lower 9th ward and one nutty, incompetent mayor."
  10. "There is no Western country more profoundly racist than France. There's nothing resembling equal-opportunity programs or affirmative action"
  11. "Does anyone really believe that the country that enthusiastically handed over more of its Jewish citizens to the Nazis than the Nazis asked for is going to treat brown or black Muslims as equals?"
  12. "Meanwhile, every American who believes in racial equality and human dignity should sympathize with the rioters, not with the effete bigots on the Seine."
  13. "France Will Continue to Mirror Apartheid-Era South Africa", DiverseEducation.com May 4,2006. Accessed June 25, 2006.
  14. "We will have a sort of apartheid. Everyone will be proud to defend his own identity — I am a Muslim, I am a Christian, I am a Jew first. And then a Frenchman, second. This is not acceptable." Maceda, Jim. "France divided by headscarf debate", NBC News, February 9, 2004.
  15. Silverman, Maxim. Deconstructing the Nation: Immigration, Racism, and Citizenship in Modern France, Routledge, 1992, p. 116.
  16. However, we might at least recognise the problem. As usual a great many people are deliberately avoiding it, in particular by editing the word Muslim out of their debates, as if Islam had nothing to do with the dangerous mood sweeping Europe. Poverty and rejection have played a significant part, but there is an unmistakable sense in which the riots are Muslim, consciously so.

    Muslims vary and their beliefs vary. But the response of some Muslims to frustration — whether or not the fault of westerners — has been to retreat into more extreme forms of Islam and into the arms of fundamentalists. Yet although we know this, and despite the Salman Rushdie affair, despite the bombs and assassinations that led up to 9/11, despite the recent atrocities, we seem unwilling to recognise that what this can mean is deliberate separatism — apartheid." Marrin, Minette. "Muslim apartheid burns bright in France", The Sunday Times, November 13, 2005.

  17. McGoldrick, Dominic. Human Rights and Religion: The Islamic Headscarf Debate in Europe, Hart Publishing, 2006, p. 272.
  18. Felouzis, Georges and Perroton, Joëlle. "The trouble with the schools", Le Monde diplomatique, December, 2005.
  19. Leiken, Robert S. "Revolting in France; The labor-law protests pitted the privileged young against disaffected immigrants", The Weekly Standard, 5/1/2006.
  20. Gentleman, Amelia. "France wakes up to plight of its forgotten cities", The Guardian, August 6, 2004.

References

See also

External links

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