 The Barbarians at the Gates of
Paris
Theodore Dalrymple City
Journal
Autumn 2002 | Vol. 12, No. 4
Everyone knows la douce France: the France of wonderful
food and wine, beautiful landscapes, splendid châteaux
and cathedrals. More tourists (60 million a year) visit
France than any country in the world by far. Indeed, the
Germans have a saying, not altogether reassuring for the
French: “to live as God in France.” Half a
million Britons have bought second homes there; many of
them bore their friends back home with how they order
these things better in France.
But there is another growing, and much less
reassuring, side to France. I go to Paris about four
times a year and thus have a sense of the evolving
preoccupations of the French middle classes. A few years
ago it was schools: the much vaunted French educational
system was falling apart; illiteracy was rising; children
were leaving school as ignorant as they entered, and much
worse-behaved. For the last couple of years, though, it
has been crime: l’insécurité, les violences
urbaines, les incivilités. Everyone has a tale to tell,
and no dinner party is complete without a horrifying
story. Every crime, one senses, means a vote for Le Pen
or whoever replaces him.
I first saw l’insécurité for myself about eight
months ago. It was just off the Boulevard Saint-Germain,
in  a neighborhood where a tolerably spacious
apartment would cost $1 million. Three
youths—Rumanians—were attempting quite openly
to break into a parking meter with large screwdrivers to
steal the coins. It was four o’clock in the
afternoon; the sidewalks were crowded, and the nearby
cafés were full. The youths behaved as if they were
simply pursuing a normal and legitimate activity, with
nothing to fear.
Eventually, two women in their sixties told
them to stop. The youths, laughing until then, turned
murderously angry, insulted the women, and brandished
their screwdrivers. The women retreated, and the youths
resumed their “work.”
A man of about 70 then told them to stop. They berated
him still more threateningly, one of them holding a
screwdriver as if to stab him in the stomach. I moved
forward to help the man, but the youths, still shouting
abuse and genuinely outraged at being interrupted in the
pursuit of their livelihood, decided to run off. But it
all could have ended very differently.
Several things struck me about the incident:
the youths’ sense of invulnerability in broad
daylight; the indifference to their behavior of large
numbers of people who would never dream of behaving in
the same way; that only the elderly tried to do anything
about the situation, though physically least suited to do
so. Could it be that only they had a view of right and
wrong clear enough to wish to intervene? That everyone
younger than they thought something like: “Refugees
. . . hard life . . . very poor . . . too young to know
right from wrong and anyway never taught . . . no choice
for them . . . punishment cruel and useless”? The
real criminals, indeed, were the drivers whose coins
filled the parking meters: were they not polluting the
world with their cars?
Another motive for inaction was that, had the youths been
arrested, nothing would have happened to them. They would
have been back on the streets within the hour. Who would
risk a screwdriver in the liver to safeguard the parking
meters of Paris for an hour?
The laxisme of the French criminal justice
system is now notorious. Judges often make remarks
indicating their sympathy for the criminals they are
trying (based upon the usual generalizations about how
society, not the criminal, is to blame); and the day
before I witnessed the scene on the Boulevard
Saint-Germain, 8,000 police had marched to protest the
release from prison on bail of an infamous career armed
robber and suspected murderer before his trial for yet
another armed robbery, in the course of which he shot
someone in the head. Out on bail before this trial, he
then burgled a house. Surprised by the police, he and his
accomplices shot two of them dead and seriously wounded a
third. He was also under strong suspicion of having
committed a quadruple murder a few days previously, in
which a couple who owned a restaurant, and two of their
employees, were shot dead in front of the owners’
nine-year-old daughter.
The left-leaning Libération, one of the two daily
newspapers the French intelligentsia reads, dismissed the
marchers, referring with disdainful sarcasm to la fièvre
flicardiaire—cop fever. The paper would no doubt
have regarded the murder of a single journalist—that
is to say, of a full human being—differently, let
alone the murder of two journalists or six; and of course
no one in the newspaper acknowledged that an effective
police force is as vital a guarantee of personal freedom
as a free press, and that the thin blue line that
separates man from brutality is exactly that: thin. This
is not a decent thing for an intellectual to say, however
true it might be.
It is the private complaint of everyone,
however, that the police have become impotent to suppress
and detect crime. Horror stories abound. A Parisian
acquaintance told me how one recent evening he had seen
two criminals attack a car in which a woman was waiting
for her husband. They smashed her side window and tried
to grab her purse, but she resisted. My acquaintance went
to her aid and managed to pin down one of the assailants,
the other running off. Fortunately, some police passed
by, but to my acquaintance’s dismay let the
assailant go, giving him only a warning.
My acquaintance said to the police that he would make a
complaint. The senior among them advised him against
wasting his time. At that time of night, there would be
no one to complain to in the local commissariat. He would
have to go the following day and would have to wait on
line for three hours. He would have to return several
times, with a long wait each time. And in the end,
nothing would be done.
As for the police, he added, they did not
want to make an arrest in a case like this. There would
be too much paperwork. And even if the case came to
court, the judge would give no proper punishment.
Moreover, such an arrest would retard their careers. The
local police chiefs were paid by results—by the
crime rates in their areas of jurisdiction. The last
thing they wanted was for policemen to go around finding
and recording crime.
Not long afterward, I heard of another case in which the
police simply refused to record the occurrence of a
burglary, much less try to catch the culprits.
Now crime and general disorder are making
inroads into places where, not long ago, they were
unheard of. At a peaceful and prosperous village near
Fontainebleau that I visited—the home of retired
high officials and of a former cabinet
minister—criminality had made its first appearance
only two weeks before. There had been a burglary and a
“rodeo”—an impromptu race of youths in
stolen cars around the village green, whose fence the car
thieves had knocked over to gain access.
A villager called the police, who said they could not
come at the moment, but who politely called back half an
hour later to find out how things were going. Two hours
later still, they finally appeared, but the rodeo had
moved on, leaving behind only the remains of a burned-out
car. The blackened patch on the road was still visible
when I visited.
The official figures for this upsurge,
doctored as they no doubt are, are sufficiently alarming.
Reported crime in France has risen from 600,000 annually
in 1959 to 4 million today, while the population has
grown by less than 20 percent (and many think
today’s crime number is an underestimate by at least
a half). In 2000, one crime was reported for every sixth
inhabitant of Paris, and the rate has increased by at
least 10 percent a year for the last five years. Reported
cases of arson in France have increased 2,500 percent in
seven years, from 1,168 in 1993 to 29,192 in 2000;
robbery with violence rose by 15.8 percent between 1999
and 2000, and 44.5 percent since 1996 (itself no golden
age).
Where does the increase in crime come from? The
geographical answer: from the public housing projects
that encircle and increasingly besiege every French city
or town of any size, Paris especially. In these housing
projects lives an immigrant population numbering several
million, from North and West Africa mostly, along with
their French-born descendants and a smattering of the
least successful members of the French working class.
From these projects, the excellence of the French public
transport system ensures that the most fashionable
arrondissements are within easy reach of the most
inveterate thief and vandal.
Architecturally, the
housing projects sprang from the ideas of Le Corbusier,
the Swiss totalitarian architect—and still the
untouchable hero of architectural education in
France—who believed that a house was a machine for
living in, that areas of cities should be entirely
separated from one another by their function, and that
the straight line and the right angle held the key to
wisdom, virtue, beauty, and efficiency. The mulish
opposition that met his scheme to pull down the whole of
the center of Paris and rebuild it according to his
“rational” and “advanced” ideas
baffled and frustrated him.
The inhuman, unadorned, hard-edged geometry of these vast
housing projects in their unearthly plazas brings to mind
Le Corbusier’s chilling and tyrannical words:
“The despot is not a man. It is the . . . correct,
realistic, exact plan . . . that will provide your
solution once the problem has been posed clearly. . . .
This plan has been drawn up well away from . . . the
cries of the electorate or the laments of society’s
victims. It has been drawn up by serene and lucid
minds.”
But what is the problem to which these
housing projects, known as cités, are the solution,
conceived by serene and lucid minds like Le
Corbusier’s? It is the problem of providing an
Habitation de Loyer Modéré—a House at Moderate
Rent, shortened to HLM—for the workers, largely
immigrant, whom the factories needed during France’s
great industrial expansion from the 1950s to the 1970s,
when the unemployment rate was 2 percent and cheap
labor was much in demand. By the late eighties, however,
the demand had evaporated, but the people whose labor had
satisfied it had not; and together with their descendants
and a constant influx of new hopefuls, they made the
provision of cheap housing more necessary than ever.
An apartment in this publicly owned housing is also known
as a logement, a lodging, which aptly conveys the social
status and degree of political influence of those
expected to rent them. The cités are thus social
marginalization made concrete: bureaucratically planned
from their windows to their roofs, with no history of
their own or organic connection to anything that
previously existed on their sites, they convey the
impression that, in the event of serious trouble, they
could be cut off from the rest of the world by switching
off the trains and by blockading with a tank or two the
highways that pass through them, (usually with a concrete
wall on either side), from the rest of France to the
better parts of Paris. I recalled the words of an
Afrikaner in South Africa, who explained to me the
principle according to which only a single road connected
black townships to the white cities: once it was sealed
off by an armored car, “the blacks can foul only
their own nest.”
The average visitor gives not a
moment’s thought to these Cités of Darkness as he
speeds from the airport to the City of Light. But they
are huge and important—and what the visitor would
find there, if he bothered to go, would terrify him.
A kind of anti-society has grown up in them—a
population that derives the meaning of its life from the
hatred it bears for the other, “official,”
society in France. This alienation, this gulf of
mistrust—greater than any I have encountered
anywhere else in the world, including in the black
townships of South Africa during the apartheid
years—is written on the faces of the young men, most
of them permanently unemployed, who hang out in the
pocked and potholed open spaces between their logements.
When you approach to speak to them, their immobile faces
betray not a flicker of recognition of your shared
humanity; they make no gesture to smooth social
intercourse. If you are not one of them, you are against
them.
 Their hatred of official France manifests
itself in many ways that scar everything around them.
Young men risk life and limb to adorn the most
inaccessible surfaces of concrete with
graffiti—BAISE LA POLICE, fuck the police, being the
favorite theme. The iconography of the cités is that of
uncompromising hatred and aggression: a burned-out and
destroyed community-meeting place in the Les Tarterets
project, for example, has a picture of a science-fiction
humanoid, his fist clenched as if to spring at the person
who looks at him, while to his right is an admiring
portrait of a huge slavering pit bull, a dog by
temperament and training capable of tearing out a
man’s throat—the only breed of dog I saw in the
cités, paraded with menacing swagger by their owners.
There are burned-out and eviscerated carcasses of cars
everywhere. Fire is now fashionable in the cités: in Les
Tarterets, residents had torched and looted every
store—with the exceptions of one
government-subsidized supermarket and a pharmacy. The
underground parking lot, charred and blackened by smoke
like a vault in an urban hell, is permanently closed.
When agents of official France come to the
cités, the residents attack them. The police are hated:
one young Malian, who comfortingly believed that he was
unemployable in France because of the color of his skin,
described how the police invariably arrived like a
raiding party, with batons swinging—ready to beat
whoever came within reach, irrespective of who he was or
of his innocence of any crime, before retreating to
safety to their commissariat. The conduct of the police,
he said, explained why residents threw Molotov cocktails
at them from their windows. Who could tolerate such
treatment at the hands of une police fasciste?
Molotov cocktails also greeted the president of the
republic, Jacques Chirac, and his interior minister when
they recently campaigned at two cités, Les Tarterets and
Les Musiciens. The two dignitaries had to beat a swift
and ignominious retreat, like foreign overlords visiting
a barely held and hostile suzerainty: they came, they
saw, they scuttled off.
Antagonism toward the police might appear
understandable, but the conduct of the young inhabitants
of the cités toward the firemen who come to rescue them
from the fires that they have themselves started gives a
dismaying glimpse into the depth of their hatred for
mainstream society. They greet the admirable firemen
(whose motto is Sauver ou périr, save or perish) with
Molotov cocktails and hails of stones when they arrive on
their mission of mercy, so that armored vehicles
frequently have to protect the fire engines.
Benevolence inflames the anger of the young men of the
cités as much as repression, because their rage is
inseparable from their being. Ambulance men who take away
a young man injured in an incident routinely find
themselves surrounded by the man’s
“friends,” and jostled, jeered at, and
threatened: behavior that, according to one doctor I met,
continues right into the hospital, even as the friends
demand that their associate should be treated at once,
before others.
Of course, they also expect him to be
treated as well as anyone else, and in this expectation
they reveal the bad faith, or at least ambivalence, of
their stance toward the society around them. They are
certainly not poor, at least by the standards of all
previously existing societies: they are not hungry; they
have cell phones, cars, and many other appurtenances of
modernity; they are dressed fashionably—according to
their own fashion—with a uniform disdain of
bourgeois propriety and with gold chains round their
necks. They believe they have rights, and they know they
will receive medical treatment, however they behave. They
enjoy a far higher standard of living (or consumption)
than they would in the countries of their parents’
or grandparents’ origin, even if they labored there
14 hours a day to the maximum of their capacity.
But this is not a cause of gratitude—on the
contrary: they feel it as an insult or a wound, even as
they take it for granted as their due. But like all human
beings, they want the respect and approval of others,
even—or rather especially—of the people who
carelessly toss them the crumbs of Western prosperity.
Emasculating dependence is never a happy state, and no
dependence is more absolute, more total, than that of
most of the inhabitants of the cités. They therefore
come to believe in the malevolence of those who maintain
them in their limbo: and they want to keep alive the
belief in this perfect malevolence, for it gives
meaning—the only possible meaning—to their
stunted lives. It is better to be opposed by an enemy
than to be adrift in meaninglessness, for the simulacrum
of an enemy lends purpose to actions whose nihilism would
otherwise be self-evident.
That is one of the reasons that, when I
approached groups of young men in Les Musiciens, many of
them were not just suspicious (though it was soon clear
to them that I was no member of the enemy), but hostile.
When a young man of African origin agreed to speak to me,
his fellows kept interrupting menacingly.
“Don’t talk to him,” they commanded, and
they told me, with fear in their eyes, to go away. The
young man was nervous, too: he said he was afraid of
being punished as a traitor. His associates feared that
“normal” contact with a person who was clearly
not of the enemy, and yet not one of them either, would
contaminate their minds and eventually break down the
them-and-us worldview that stood between them and
complete mental chaos. They needed to see themselves as
warriors in a civil war, not mere ne’er-do-wells and
criminals. 
The ambivalence of the cité dwellers matches
“official” France’s attitude toward them:
over-control and interference, alternating with utter
abandonment. Bureaucrats have planned every item in the
physical environment, for example, and no matter how many
times the inhabitants foul the nest (to use the
Afrikaner’s expression), the state pays for
renovation, hoping thereby to demonstrate its compassion
and concern. To assure the immigrants that they and their
offspring are potentially or already truly French, the
streets are named for French cultural heroes: for
painters in Les Tarterets (rue Gustave Courbet, for
example) and for composers in Les Musiciens (rue Gabriel
Fauré). Indeed, the only time I smiled in one of the
cités was when I walked past two concrete bunkers with
metal windows, the École maternelle Charles Baudelaire
and the École maternelle Arthur Rimbaud. Fine as these
two poets are, theirs are not names one would associate
with kindergartens, let alone with concrete bunkers.
But the heroic French names point to a
deeper official ambivalence. The French state is torn
between two approaches: Courbet, Fauré, nos ancêtres,
les gaullois, on the one hand, and the shibboleths of
multiculturalism on the other. By compulsion of the
ministry of education, the historiography that the
schools purvey is that of the triumph of the unifying,
rational, and benevolent French state through the ages,
from Colbert onward, and Muslim girls are not allowed to
wear headscarves in schools. After graduation, people who
dress in “ethnic” fashion will not find jobs
with major employers. But at the same time, official
France also pays a cowering lip service to
multiculturalism—for example, to the
“culture” of the cités. Thus, French rap music
is the subject of admiring articles in Libération and Le
Monde, as well as of pusillanimous expressions of
approval from the last two ministers of culture.
One rap group, the Ministère amer (Bitter Ministry), won
special official praise. Its best-known lyric:
“Another woman takes her beating./ This time
she’s called Brigitte./ She’s the wife of a
cop./ The novices of vice piss on the police./ It’s
not just a firework, scratch the clitoris./ Brigitte the
cop’s wife likes niggers./ She’s hot, hot in
her pants.” This vile rubbish receives accolades for
its supposed authenticity: for in the
multiculturalist’s mental world, in which the
savages are forever noble, there is no criterion by which
to distinguish high art from low trash. And if
intellectuals, highly trained in the Western tradition,
are prepared to praise such degraded and brutal
pornography, it is hardly surprising that those who are
not so trained come to the conclusion that there cannot
be anything of value in that tradition. Cowardly
multiculturalism thus makes itself the handmaiden of
anti-Western extremism.
Whether or not rap lyrics are the authentic
voice of the cités, they are certainly its authentic
ear: you can observe many young men in the cités sitting
around in their cars aimlessly, listening to it for hours
on end, so loud that the pavement vibrates to it 100
yards away. The imprimatur of the intellectuals and of
the French cultural bureaucracy no doubt encourages them
to believe that they are doing something worthwhile. But
when life begins to imitate art, and terrible gang-rapes
occur with increasing frequency, the same official France
becomes puzzled and alarmed. What should it make of the
18 young men and two young women currently being tried in
Pontoise for allegedly abducting a girl of 15 and for
four months raping her repeatedly in basements,
stairwells, and squats? Many of the group seem not merely
unrepentant or unashamed but proud.
Though most people in France have never visited a cité,
they dimly know that long-term unemployment among the
young is so rife there that it is the normal state of
being. Indeed, French youth unemployment is among the
highest in Europe—and higher the further you descend
the social scale, largely because high minimum wages,
payroll taxes, and labor protection laws make employers
loath to hire those whom they cannot easily fire, and
whom they must pay beyond what their skills are worth.
Everyone acknowledges that unemployment,
particularly of the permanent kind, is deeply
destructive, and that the devil really does find work for
idle hands; but the higher up the social scale you
ascend, the more firmly fixed is the idea that the
labor-market rigidities that encourage unemployment are
essential both to distinguish France from the supposed
savagery of the Anglo-Saxon neo-liberal model (one soon
learns from reading the French newspapers what
anglo-saxon connotes in this context), and to protect the
downtrodden from exploitation. But the labor-market
rigidities protect those who least need protection, while
condemning the most vulnerable to utter hopelessness: and
if sexual hypocrisy is the vice of the Anglo-Saxons,
economic hypocrisy is the vice of the French.
It requires little imagination to see how, in the
circumstances, the burden of unemployment should fall
disproportionately on immigrants and their children: and
why, already culturally distinct from the bulk of the
population, they should feel themselves vilely
discriminated against. Having been enclosed in a physical
ghetto, they respond by building a cultural and
psychological ghetto for themselves. They are of France,
but not French.
The state, while concerning itself with the
details of their housing, their education, their medical
care, and the payment of subsidies for them to do
nothing, abrogates its responsibility completely in the
one area in which the state’s responsibility is
absolutely inalienable: law and order. In order to
placate, or at least not to inflame, disaffected youth,
the ministry of the interior has instructed the police to
tread softly (that is to say, virtually not at all,
except by occasional raiding parties when inaction is
impossible) in the more than 800 zones
sensibles—sensitive areas—that surround French
cities and that are known collectively as la Zone.
But human society, like nature, abhors a vacuum, and so
authority of a kind, with its own set of values, occupies
the space where law and order should be—the
authority and brutal values of psychopathic criminals and
drug dealers. The absence of a real economy and of law
means, in practice, an economy and an informal legal
system based on theft and drug-trafficking. In Les
Tarterets, for example, I observed two dealers openly
distributing drugs and collecting money while driving
around in their highly conspicuous BMW convertible,
clearly the monarchs of all they surveyed. Both of
northwest African descent, one wore a scarlet baseball
cap backward, while the other had dyed blond hair,
contrasting dramatically with his complexion. Their faces
were as immobile as those of potentates receiving tribute
from conquered tribes. They drove everywhere at maximum
speed in low gear and high noise: they could hardly have
drawn more attention to themselves if they tried. They
didn’t fear the law: rather, the law feared them.
I watched their proceedings in the company
of old immigrants from Algeria and Morocco, who had come
to France in the early 1960s. They too lived in Les
Tarterets and had witnessed its descent into a state of
low-level insurgency. They were so horrified by daily
life that they were trying to leave, to escape their own
children and grandchildren: but once having fallen into
the clutches of the system of public housing, they were
trapped. They wanted to transfer to a cité, if such
existed, where the new generation did not rule: but they
were without leverage—or piston—in the giant
system of patronage that is the French state. And so they
had to stay put, puzzled, alarmed, incredulous, and
bitter at what their own offspring had become, so very
different from what they had hoped and expected. They
were better Frenchmen than either their children or
grandchildren: they would never have whistled and booed
at the Marseillaise, as their descendants did before the
soccer match between France and Algeria in 2001, alerting
the rest of France to the terrible canker in its midst.
Whether France was wise to have permitted the mass
immigration of people culturally very different from its
own population to solve a temporary labor shortage and to
assuage its own abstract liberal conscience is
disputable: there are now an estimated 8 or 9 million
people of North and West African origin in France, twice
the number in 1975—and at least 5 million of them
are Muslims. Demographic projections (though projections
are not predictions) suggest that their descendants will
number 35 million before this century is out, more than a
third of the likely total population of France.
Indisputably, however, France has handled
the resultant situation in the worst possible way. Unless
it assimilates these millions successfully, its future
will be grim. But:-
- it has separated and
isolated immigrants and their descendants
geographically into dehumanizing ghettos;
- it has pursued
economic policies to promote unemployment and
create dependence among them, with all the
inevitable psychological consequences;
- it has flattered the
repellent and worthless culture that they have
developed; and
- it has withdrawn the
protection of the law from them, allowing them to
create their own lawless order.
No one should
underestimate the danger that this failure poses, not
only for France but also for the world. The inhabitants
of the cités are exceptionally well armed. When the
professional robbers among them raid a bank or an armored
car delivering cash, they do so with bazookas and rocket
launchers, and dress in paramilitary uniforms. From time
to time, the police discover whole arsenals of
Kalashnikovs in the cités. There is a vigorous informal
trade between France and post-communist Eastern Europe:
workshops in underground garages in the cités change the
serial numbers of stolen luxury cars prior to export to
the East, in exchange for sophisticated weaponry.
A profoundly alienated population is thus
armed with serious firepower; and in conditions of
violent social upheaval, such as France is in the habit
of experiencing every few decades, it could prove
difficult to control. The French state is caught in a
dilemma between honoring its commitments to the more
privileged section of the population, many of whom earn
their livelihoods from administering the dirigiste
economy, and freeing the labor market sufficiently to
give the hope of a normal life to the inhabitants of the
cités. Most likely, the state will solve the dilemma by
attempts to buy off the disaffected with more benefits
and rights, at the cost of higher taxes that will further
stifle the job creation that would most help the cité
dwellers. If that fails, as in the long run it will,
harsh repression will follow.
But among the third of the population of the cités that
is of North African Muslim descent, there is an option
that the French, and not only the French, fear. For
imagine yourself a youth in Les Tarterets or Les
Musiciens, intellectually alert but not well educated,
believing yourself to be despised because of your origins
by the larger society that you were born into,
permanently condemned to unemployment by the system that
contemptuously feeds and clothes you, and surrounded by a
contemptible nihilistic culture of despair, violence, and
crime. Is it not possible that you would seek a doctrine
that would simultaneously explain your predicament,
justify your wrath, point the way toward your revenge,
and guarantee your salvation, especially if you were
imprisoned? Would you not seek a “worthwhile”
direction for the energy, hatred, and violence seething
within you, a direction that would enable you to do evil
in the name of ultimate good? It would require only a
relatively few of like mind to cause havoc. Islamist
proselytism flourishes in the prisons of France (where 60
percent of the inmates are of immigrant origin), as it
does in British prisons; and it takes only a handful of
Zacharias Moussaouis to start a conflagration.
The French knew of this possibility well
before September 11: in 1994, their special forces
boarded a  hijacked aircraft that landed in Marseilles
and killed the hijackers—an unusual step for the
French, who have traditionally preferred to negotiate
with, or give in to, terrorists. But they had
intelligence suggesting that, after refueling, the
hijackers planned to fly the plane into the Eiffel Tower.
In this case, no negotiation was possible.
A terrible chasm has opened up in French society,
dramatically exemplified by a story that an acquaintance
told me. He was driving along a six-lane highway with
housing projects on both sides, when a man tried to dash
across the road. My acquaintance hit him at high speed
and killed him instantly.
According to French law, the participants in
a fatal accident must stay as near as possible to the
scene, until officials have elucidated all the
circumstances. The police therefore took my informant to
a kind of hotel nearby, where there was no staff, and the
door could be opened only by inserting a credit card into
an automatic billing terminal. Reaching his room, he
discovered that all the furniture was of concrete,
including the bed and washbasin, and attached either to
the floor or walls.
The following morning, the police came to collect him,
and he asked them what kind of place this was. Why was
everything made of concrete?
“But don’t you know where you are,
monsieur?” they asked. “C’est la Zone,
c’est la Zone.”
La Zone is a foreign country: they do things differently
there.
Forwarded by Pamela
Valenti/Neil Baird The
News Report,Issue 625
nbaird@goanna.net.au
Arrested in Italy
after the Peaceful Anti-global Marches
In the night between thursday 14 November and
friday 15 november, twenty globalisation activists were
rudely woken up and taken to jail. They are all being
held, some of them in top-security jails that are usually
reserved for murderers and supermafiosi, for heavy
charges including : "Subversive association and
political conspiracy in order to disrupt government
functions; subversive propaganda; and violent subversion
of the state."
Those arrested include Francesco Caruso, who had just
been congratulated with the success of the European
Social Forum.
The charges are based upon a 900 pager prepared by the
ROS, a special force within the Carabinieri. Their report
has successively been refused by the examining
magistrates of three different courts before it was taken
on by a magistrate in Cosenza.
It total, 42 people are being persecuted. They are
suspected of having been involved with organising actions
and demonstrations against the OCSE summit in Napoli, and
against the G8 summit in Genoa last year.
Practically everyone in Italy recognises the absurdity of
the arrests. Clearly, those concerned are being appended
because of what they think and express, not because they
have engaged in criminal acts. No trace of the latter can
be found back in the mentioned report that was prepeared
by the ROS Carabinieri. The whole thing is a campaign to
intimidate and criminalise the strong and growing
globalisation movement of those that dare to critisise.
"It could happen to you", is the message of the
Carabinieri.
The charges are a clear attempt to link the globalisation
movement to violent groups that operated in the 1970s.
The laws used date back to the 1930s of Mussolini. For
obvious reasons, many spontaneous protests against the
outgareous arrests have taken place in Italy already.
The biggest scandal is that at the end of the day, those
who did commit violent crimes at summits in Italy,
notably the G8, came from police forces. During the G8
summit hundreds of people were wounded and one protestor
even was shot dead. Those arrested were in many cases
tortured in jail.
An exhibition opened today in Amsterdam in solidarity,
will move on to the Italian Embassy in The Hague.
Meanwhile, the exhibition is open to the public at XminY
Solidarity Fund, De Wittenstraat 43, Amsterdam. The
documentary mentioned above will be shown on request.
Visitors are advised that the images displayed can be
shockingly violent.
Sherwood Tribune.
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