Paris march ahead of riot anniversary

Paris: Mixing rap music with memories of France's revolutionary past, youths from poor neighbourhoods of largely Muslim and African descent marched through Paris yesterday to present a collection of 20,000 complaints to lawmakers.

The march by several hundred people came ahead of tomorrow's one-year anniversary of the fiery riots involving youths from immigrant Parisian suburbs. Many in the country fear a new explosion of violence with tensions rising in recent weeks.

"The context is still the same, nothing has changed. So the situation is propitious for other events like last year," said Samir Mihi, co-founder of the AC-Le Feu group that collected the grievances from minorities all over France.

The demonstrators held ragged-looking notebooks filled with complaints while crossing southern Paris toward the Assembly, the lower house of parliament, after a stop at the Senate. "Immigrants scare the French" read one unsigned entry.

Another entry, by a 17-year-old boy from Besancon in eastern France, urged companies to use their profits to create more jobs.

Police blocked the marchers as they neared the National Assembly, allowing only a small group to reach the parliament.

Security forces have been girding for renewed violence around tomorrow's anniversary, and many streets throughout southern Paris were blocked by vans of riot police for yesterday's march.

The crowd sang La Marseillaise, France's national anthem, and broke into chants of Vive la France, proclaiming their allegiance to a country where they often feel unwelcome.

Last year's riots sprang in part from anger over entrenched discrimination against immigrants and their French-born children, many of them Muslims from former French colonies in Africa.

France's inability to integrate minorities from poor housing projects and recent violence against police are becoming major political issues as the campaign heats up for next year's presidential and parliamentary elections.

Disenchantment and anger thrive in the tall, cinderblock towers that make up the projects in the troubled suburbs that ring France's large cities. While politicians on the left have called for more government programmes to integrate poor youths since the riots, the leading presidential contender on the right, Interior Minister Nicolas Sarkozy, has sought to crack down on crime and immigration and echoed slogans of the extreme right.

"The young are starting to wake up. That bothers politicians," said 26-year old educator Audrey Pronesti, who lives in Epinay-Sur-Seine north of Paris, the site of a recent ambush of police officers by local youths.