法国癌症 自由 平等 博爱

新的骚乱使法国面临老问题

法国做错了什么，导致一些人无法感受到所有人的平等和博爱？

https://www.sookenewsmirror.com/world-news/new-riots-make-france-confront-an-old-problem/

美联社 2023 年 7 月 4 日

“自由、平等、博爱”：法国长期以来所追求的崇高理想被刻在硬币上，刻在全国各地学校的门上。

然而，这与一些法国黑人或棕色人种在一段令人震惊的视频中看到的情况截然相反，视频中一名警察在交通堵塞期间射杀了一名 17 岁的北非裔送货司机。

有些人对自己说，那个孩子可能是我——或者我的孩子，或者我的朋友。 几个小时之内，第一场愤怒和复仇之火就照亮了巴黎郊区南泰尔的夜空，上周二上午 9 点 15 分，少年纳赫尔 (Nahel) 在那里被宣布死亡。 他的左臂和胸部被一发子弹从左到右射穿，随后他驾驶的黄色奔驰撞上了纳尔逊·曼德拉广场上的路障。

这座位于法国首都高层商业区边缘的小镇，由于住房项目落后、贫富差距悬殊，以及来自法国前殖民地的种族和文化影响的大熔炉，愤怒的火焰迅速蔓延。

超过 200 个城镇报告称，在六个晚上的骚乱中，公共建筑遭到纵火袭击、车辆起火、与警察发生冲突、抢劫和其他骚乱。 暴力事件波及全国——从法国北部海岸的蓝领港口到俯瞰比利牛斯山脉的南部城镇，从去工业化的前矿盆地到曾经是法国奴隶贸易中心的大西洋西海岸的南特和拉罗谢尔。

在逮捕了 3,400 多人，并且有迹象表明暴力正在减弱之后，法国再次面临清算——就像 20 世纪 80 年代、1990 年代、2000 年代和 2010 年代在混血、弱势社区发生骚乱之后所做的那样。

令人不安的核心问题仍然是一样的：法国做错了什么，导致其大部分人口，特别是非白人，无法相信其对所有人平等和博爱的承诺？

问题既老又新

受到指责和激烈争议的因素包括新旧问题：警察队伍和更广泛的法国社会中的种族主义、乌克兰战争相关成本上升使贫困变得更加绝望、数十年的城市忽视、婚姻和父母权威的破裂。 ，以及 COVID-19 大流行的连锁反应。 因病毒宵禁和教学关闭而中断学业的青少年参与了打砸、焚烧、盗窃和与警察打架的行为，并陶醉在社交媒体上的混乱之中。

亚齐德·凯尔菲 (Yazid Kherfi) 每天开车从一个住房项目到下一个住房项目，向年轻人讲述如何避免走上犯罪和监狱之路，对他来说，暴力事件是一代人的痛苦呼声，他说，他们感到不被爱和不被爱。 留在路边。

赫菲使用的小型货车背面印有马丁·路德·金的名言：“我们必须学会像兄弟一样生活在一起，否则我们都会像傻瓜一样一起灭亡。” 但凯尔菲说，在巡查过程中，他经常听到年轻人抱怨警察因为肤色而将他们单独挑选出来。

“警察没有受过在困难社区工作的良好训练。 有些警察是种族主义者。 有暴力警察。 它们存在。 我不是说所有警察，但仍然是一定数量，”他说。 “黑人和阿拉伯人被拦截的频率远远高于白人。”

“我们距离自由、平等、博爱还有很长的路要走，”他补充道。 “现实情况是，人们发现所有这些情况都非常非常困难。 40多年来一直如此。 当然，法国每次发生骚乱都与警察行动中年轻人的死亡有关。 警察很少责怪自己。”

自法国总统埃马纽埃尔·马克龙（Emmanuel Macron）以下，政府官员迅速谴责了这名因初步指控故意杀人罪而被监禁的警官的行为。 马克龙称枪击事件“令人费解且不可原谅”。 该警官的律师表示，他的委托人担心，当他们停下来的车辆再次开始移动时，他和他的同事会被拖走并被压碎。

当种族主义无法衡量时如何应对？

由于法国官方的色盲政策以及对可收集数据的严格限制，衡量法国种族主义和种族不平等的规模变得复杂。 对于批评者来说，这种指导思想让国家忽视了歧视。 法国的人口普查不存在种族或民族问题。

尽管如此，不平等现象仍然十分明显，不容忽视。 政府统计机构发现，2020 年，在 COVID-19 大流行最严重的时候，法国撒哈拉以南非洲移民的死亡率翻了一番，巴黎地区的死亡率增加了两倍，这承认了该病毒对黑人移民和成员造成的惩罚性和不成比例的影响 其他被系统性忽视的少数群体。 其他研究也揭露了工作场所和招聘中的种族主义。
“40、45年来，关于歧视的警告信号一直存在，”阿贝尔·博伊（Abel Boyi）说，他是一个名为“All Unique, All United”的组织的负责人，该组织旨在使年轻人与法国及其共和价值观达成和解。

博伊是黑人，他谴责政府的色盲行为是“法国人的虚伪”。 他说，他经常遇到有色人种年轻人和来自贫困社区的白人，他们申请了数十份工作，但没有被录用，“因为姓氏听起来很陌生，因为地址不好。”

“不幸的是，当出现不公正现象时，总有一些激进分子会走向暴力。 我们看到这些12岁到19岁的年轻人……在凌晨1点、2点、3点烧毁汽车，向警察投掷石块，向公共汽车投掷石块。 这太可怕了，”博伊说。 “愤怒是正义的，但方法是错误的。”

视觉效果火上浇油

纳赫尔死亡的视频也有助于解释暴力的迅速蔓延和突然的强度。 与乔治·弗洛伊德在美国被杀的镜头一样，这些图像让一些人怀疑警察的虐待行为有时是否会因为没有被摄像机捕捉到而不受惩罚。 南泰尔的喷漆涂鸦上写着：“如果没有视频，纳赫尔将成为一个统计数字。”

然而，警官瓦利德·赫拉尔 (Walid Hrar) 表示，法国治安部队与他工作的弱势社区之间的关系并不像骚乱看上去那么破裂。

他管理着一个由警官组成的志愿组织“兄弟会守护者”，他们与邻居的孩子们会面，试图建立理解，帮助他们认识到在制服背后，他们也是人。 “有时，谈判非常艰难，非常激烈，”他承认。

但拥有摩洛哥血统和穆斯林身份的赫拉尔表示，自从他加入以来，警察部队已经“发生了巨大变化”，变得更加多元化。

那是2004年的事。次年法国爆发骚乱。 他的职业生涯一直在巴黎北郊度过，那里是暴力事件首次爆发的地方，当时 15 岁的布纳·特拉奥雷 (Bouna Traoré) 和 17 岁的齐德·本纳 (Zyed Benna) 在克利希苏布瓦 (Clichy-sous-Bois) 的一个变电站躲避警察时触电身亡。

赫拉尔说，当时和现在的一个区别是，新一代暴徒似乎没有界限，他们破坏学校、市政厅、警察局和其他权威象征。

“对于某些人来说，确实是彻底崩溃了，”赫拉尔说。 “确实需要做一些基础工作。”

另一个关键区别：社交网络。 政府表示，这一代人不仅在短视频中庆祝了 TikTok 和 Snapchat 的混乱，有时也在他们的网络上组织了混乱。 有关抢劫的表情包和标签很快就淹没了有关纳赫尔正义的内容。 马克龙表示，一些骚乱者似乎正在表演“让他们陶醉的电子游戏”。

所有这些加起来都是有毒和危险的，一个国家的根基出现了深深的裂痕，这个国家仍然与其经常发生的暴力殖民历史不可调和，而且根深蒂固的歧视和不平等现象无法快速解决。

“我们如何将众多的历史汇聚成一部与我们所有人有关的共同历史，无论肤色和出身如何？” 伯益说道。 “这是法国在21世纪面临的巨大挑战。”

New riots make France confront an old problem

What is France doing wrong that prevents some from feeling equality and fraternity for all?

https://www.sookenewsmirror.com/world-news/new-riots-make-france-confront-an-old-problem/

ASSOCIATED PRESS Jul. 4, 2023

“Liberty, Equality, Fraternity”: The lofty ideals to which France has long aspired are embossed on coins and carved above school doors across the land.

Yet they are the polar opposite of what some French people who are Black or brown saw in a shocking video of a police officer shooting and killing a 17-year-old delivery driver of north African descent during a traffic stop.

That kid, some said to themselves, could have been me — or my children, or my friends. Within hours, the first fires of anger and revenge were lighting up the night skies of Nanterre, the Paris suburb where the teenager, Nahel, was declared dead at 9:15 a.m. last Tuesday. His left arm and chest had been pierced from left to right by a single shot fired before the yellow Mercedes he was driving then slammed into barriers on Nelson Mandela Square.

From the town on the fringe of the French capital’s high-rise business district, with its disadvantaged housing projects, glaring wealth gaps, and melting-pot mix of races and cultural influences imported from France’s former colonies, the flames of fury quickly spread.

More than 200 cities and towns reported arson attacks on public buildings, vehicle fires, clashes with police, looting and other mayhem in six nights of unrest. The violence was nationwide — from blue-collar ports on France’s northern coast to southern towns overlooking the Pyrenees, from de-industrialized former mining basins to Nantes and La Rochelle on the western Atlantic coast, once hearts of the French slave trade.

After more than 3,400 arrests and signs that the violence is now abating, France is once again facing a reckoning — as it did after previous riots in mixed-race, disadvantaged neighborhoods in the 1980s, 1990s, 2000s and 2010s.

And the uncomfortable central question remains the same: What is France doing wrong that prevents chunks of its population, particularly among non-whites, from being able to buy into its promise of equality and fraternity for all?

THE PROBLEMS ARE BOTH OLD AND NEW

Among the factors being blamed and hotly disputed are problems both old and new: racism in police ranks and French society more broadly, poverty made more desperate by rising costs related to the war in Ukraine, decades of urban neglect, breakdowns in marriages and parental authority, and the ripples of the COVID-19 pandemic. Young teenagers whose schooling was interrupted by virus curfews and teaching shutdowns were among those smashing, burning, stealing and fighting with police — and reveling in the mayhem on social media.

For Yazid Kherfi, who spends his time driving from one housing project to the next, speaking to young people about how to avoid the route that he took into crime and prison, the violence was a cry of distress from a generation he says feels unloved and left by the wayside.

The minivan Kherfi uses has a quote from Martin Luther King painted on the back: “We must learn to live together as brothers or we will all perish together as fools.” But on his rounds, Kherfi says he frequently hears young people complain that police single them out because of their color.

“The police aren’t well trained to work in difficult neighborhoods. Some police are racist. There are violent police. They exist. I’m not saying all the police but it’s still a certain number,” he says. “Blacks and Arabs are stopped far more frequently than whites.”

“We are a long way from liberty, equality, fraternity,” he adds. “The reality is that people find all these situations very, very hard. It’s been like this for more than 40 years. So of course, every time there are riots in France, it’s linked to a young person’s death related to a policing operation. And the police rarely blames itself.”

From French President Emmanuel Macron down, government officials were quick to condemn the actions of the officer now incarcerated on a preliminary charge of voluntary homicide. Macron called the shooting “inexplicable and inexcusable.” The officer’s lawyer says his client feared, when the vehicle they’d stopped started moving again, that he and his colleague would be dragged along with it and crushed.

HOW TO TACKLE RACISM WHEN IT CAN’T BE MEASURED?

Measuring the scale of racism and racial inequality in France is complicated by its official policy of color blindness, with strict limits on data that can be collected. For critics, that guiding philosophy has made the state oblivious to discrimination. France’s census has no questions about race or ethnicity.

Still, inequalities are too glaring to be ignored. The government’s statistics agency found in 2020 that death rates among immigrants from sub-Saharan Africa doubled in France and tripled in the Paris region at the height of the COVID-19 pandemic — an acknowledgement of the virus’s punishing and disproportionate impact on Black immigrants and members of other systemically overlooked minority groups. Other research has also exposed racism in workplaces and hiring.

“For 40, 45 years there have been warning signs about discrimination,” says Abel Boyi, head of a group called “All Unique, All United” that aims to reconcile young people with France and its republican values.

Boyi, who is Black, decries the state’s colorblindness as “a French hypocrisy.” He says he regularly encounters young people of color and also white people from disadvantaged neighborhoods who apply for dozens of jobs but aren’t hired “because the family name sounds foreign, because the address isn’t a good one.”

“Unfortunately, when there’s an injustice, there’s always a radical fringe that tips into violence. We saw these young people, aged 12 to 19 … at 1, 2, 3 o’clock in the morning burning cars, stoning police officers, stoning buses. It’s terrible,” Boyi says. “The anger is righteous but the method is wrong.”

THE VISUALS ADDED FUEL TO THE FLAMES

The video of Nahel’s death also helps explains the rapid spread and sudden intensity of the violence. As was also the case with the footage of George Floyd’s killing in the United States, the images left some people wondering whether police abuses sometimes go unpunished because they aren’t captured on camera. Spray-painted graffiti in Nanterre read: “Without video, Nahel would be a statistic.”

Police officer Walid Hrar says, however, that the relationship between France’s forces of law and order and disadvantaged neighborhoods he works in isn’t as broken as the rioting made it seem.

He runs a volunteer group of officers, The Guardians of Fraternity, who meet with neighborhood kids to try to build understanding and help them see that behind their uniforms, they are people, too. “Sometimes, the talks are very hard, very stormy,” he acknowledges.

But Hrar, who is of Moroccan descent and Muslim, says the police force has “changed enormously” and become more diverse since he joined up.

That was in 2004. France was swept by rioting the following year. He has spent his career in Paris’ northern suburbs where that violence first erupted, when 15-year-old Bouna Traoré and 17-year-old Zyed Benna were electrocuted while hiding from police in a power substation in Clichy-sous-Bois.

One difference between then and now, Hrar says, is that the new generation of rioters seems to know no limits, trashing schools, town halls, police stations and other symbols of authority.

“With some, the breakdown is total, that is true,” Hrar says. “There is real groundwork that needs to be done.”

Another key difference: social networks. This generation weaned on TikTok and Snapchat not only celebrated mayhem in short videos but, the government says, sometimes organized on their networks, too. Memes and hashtags about looting quickly swamped references about justice for Nahel. Macron said some rioters seemed to be acting out “the video games that have intoxicated them.”

It all adds up to something toxic and dangerous, with deep cracks in the foundations of a country still unreconciled with its often violent colonial past and with engrained discrimination and inequalities that defy quick fixes.

“How do we bring together the multitude of histories into one common history that concerns us all, regardless of skin color and origin?” said Boyi. “That is France’s great challenge for the 21st century.”