[Surely you can translate this? - REL editorial team]
It's a familiar story. The member of a 'minority' group in society gets killed (this time by an drug dealing ex-soldier). The man, Mohamed D was in the wrong place at the wrong time (according to reports cited in Humanité) and gets shot in the head. Immediately, riots break out throughout Rome-Saint-Charles. The neighbourhood itself is disadvantaged, isolated from the rest of Vitry-le-François, with a 32% unemployment and 33% poverty rate and the local political situation is described as one of a "social and ethnic apartheid".
Three things about this episode stand out. Firstly, that social tensions in France remain extremely high. True, this was a horrible incident and people are right to be angry about it. However, the scale and ferocity of the rioting reveals the profound political, social and economic problems of inner-city life, not just in France but in the rest of Europe (riots and shootings have been part of the English social landscape for a number of years now, for example - eg the riots in Oldham and Bradford, and the recent bout of poor working class people gunning down other poor working class people in London this year). People are bitter about deeply entrenched inequalities that grind into their faces every minute of every day. They get harassed by the police, they feel they have failed in advance for that job interview and get bored and frustrated. It's not rocket science. Add to that the glitzy showbiz politics continuum that surrounds them/us, with its emphasis its boring boring emphasis on 'success' 'profit' winning money wealth all epitomised by the lizard politicians and their corporate backers and its relatively straightforward to see from whence the nihilism originates. For these lonely deaths in roads and streets and ambulances are definite signs of the political nihilism that has grown and festered in the mechanism of neoliberal politics for the last thirty years.
Secondly, and relatedly, the media response to this incident shows where its true concerns lie. Sure, if you get your car torched you're going to be upset, even taking into account the price of petrol these days. However, the standard response in the news articles, radio pieces and (rare) TV analysis concentrated exclusively on the damage to cars and police. Poperty is important. The police serve and protect. Supermarket shouldn't get smashed up. What's the problem there you might think. Well you fucking shouldn't. Notice the picture below. That's the image the MSM wants to enforce and reinforce in people's minds. That's what the Interior minister wants to reduce this affair to. She gets to look hard and tough and can mouth off about voyous and yobbos to her glassy heart's content. In doing so, she can minimise the story and criminalise the area (and the social explanations of it) and hence, (in her mind at least) absolve the state's role in producing the toxic social circumstances that create the riot conditions in the first place. Waving the pictures of burnt out cars and trashed trucks (they're only fucking cars for fucks sake - it's not that bloody tragic) is pure diversionary politics. Even (even?!) Humanité got sucked in or tried to suck its readership in with this tactic.
The aftermath and destruction take on an unduly prominent place in the narrative. There is no picture of the Mohamed D. (whose name wasn't even mentioned on the BFM TV bulletin coverning the story) who is erased from the scene for a second time. All that remains for the average viewer is that some yobbos attacked the police and burnt some cars - no story. The media's role is so embedded in the state's political projection that we might have to start studying Sovietology.
Finally, the story contrasts markedly with the fate of another youth on the receiving end of some violence recently.
"A Jewish teenager savagely beaten by a gang wielding metal bars in an apparently anti-Semitic attack in Paris came out of a coma Monday, hospital officials said. The 17-year-old had been in a coma after the attack Saturday evening by youths in Paris' multi-ethnic 19th district. The hospital treating him said Monday his condition was "improving." President Nicolas Sarkozy, in Israel for a state visit, led condemnation of the attack, expressing his "profound indignation" and reaffirming his "total determination to combat all forms of racism and anti-Semitism." Anti-Semitism is a sensitive issue in France, where the 600,000-strong Jewish community is western Europe's largest, and which is also home to a five-million strong Muslim population."
This story has received a lot of coverage over the last ten days or so even as it became clear that the anti-semitic element was not as clear cut as first appeared and when it came to light that the youth himself was known to police for racial violence himself. What is important though, is that the President himself condemned this act whilst remained silent on the murder of Mohamed D. It is interesting to note too, the nod and the hint contained in the last line of the AFP report and the fact (ok not at all sceintific) that if you hunt fot the Mohamed D story you get about 12000 hits on google but for the anti'semitic beatng, twice as many. This would be true if it was a 'white' boy getting a kicking of Chinese youth or a 'white' gang getting beaten up by 'black' gangs. The reporting shows the hierarchy and the types of social and ethnic apartheid that, as London celebrates Nelson Mandela's 90th birthday, (still) characterise our own inner cities.
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