Residents of Paris suburbs fume as riots ruin towns

Down past the burned-out delivery vans, between scruffy trees and high-rises with rusting balconies, stands a firebombed municipal social club. They used to teach tango and jazz dance here.

Further along, charred patches on the street mark the places where other cars were torched and then towed away. Shoppers hesitate before a supermarket with shattered glass doors. On the edge of town, acrid smoke rises from a smouldering carpet depot.

Explosions

After more than a week of nightly violence, the rundown northeastern Paris suburb of Aulnay-sous-Bois is a jumble of frayed nerves and flaring tempers. Residents are fed up with rioters upsetting their homes, their lives and their dreams.

"My kids can't sleep at night," says a mother who only gives her name as Samia. "They hear explosions, they see fires and they think they're in a war. When the slightest thing happens, they get anxious and say 'Mama, what's going on?'"

But if the politicians are at a loss for a coherent response to the unrest now spreading from Paris's suburbs to other cities many of the inhabitants and even the rioters themselves seem similarly trapped between anger and despair.

Henri Huynh, who came here from Vietnam in 1969, sighs in resignation at the sight of the firebombed social club. "That's where we used to have our dancing lessons," he mutters.

Only minutes later, he's screaming as young men turn up a boom box to blast rap music at the town's "silent march against violence" as it passes. "Stop that now! Stop that provocation!" he yells. The grinning youngsters ignore him.

Just off the highway linking Paris and its Charles de Gaulle airport, Aulnay-sous-Bois is one of many dreary suburbs around the capital where young French of Arab and African origin grow up feeling they have "No Future" tattooed on their foreheads.

As in many suburbs, unemployment is significantly higher than the national average of about 10 per cent. In the rougher estates, it probably reaches 30-40 per cent or more, feeding a widespread sense there's not much residents can do to get ahead. "Even if you have a university degree, in the end all they give you is a broom," hisses an Algerian cafe owner.

Fouzi Guendouz worries he won't get a summer job next year because he comes from this riot-hit suburb of 80,000 residents.

Drug traffickers

Guendouz has no time for politicians who urge residents of foreign origin to make more efforts to integrate: "I was born here, I went to school here, I'm a French citizen how much more integrated can I get? That's an insult, it's stupid."

Holding her little daughter, a young mother named Ghislaine says the protesting youths have no right to trash things, but sympathises with their frustration.

"The police are really rough with them," she says.

Officials accuse drug traffickers and militants of stoking the flames, an argument that elicits a shrug and a dubious shake of the head here.

Aulnay-sous-Bois (Reuters) Although nobody uses the word, many residents marching among the housing blocks seem to agree with embattled Interior Minister Nicolas Sarkozy that the rioters are "scum".

"You should see these hooligans in the morning," says Genevieve Bourgognat, a woman who watched from her eighth-floor flat as the local social club burned down below. "They come back to survey what they did and they're proud of it. They show their friends. They boast they got on television!"

Henri Huynh, a small business consultant, searches for the best way to describe them. "They're like dogs they bite anything in their way," he says.