Youths Without Hope Shake the French

Ask people who live in the dilapidated housing project called the Polygon who the biggest troublemakers are, and they’ll tell you, “Mehdi and his friends.”

Last autumn, the teens on the cusp of manhood allegedly took a 14-year-old girl down to the basement of one of the apartment buildings, put a knife to her throat and spent the afternoon gang-raping her. More recently, they smashed the windows and lights in a high-rise on the Rue de Sarlat because a tenant had shouted at them, residents say.

This New Year’s Eve, the restless youths allegedly tore the wiring out of a white Opel Corsa and tried to torch the car.

“They don’t have proof we did anything--so, tough for the cops,” is the world-wise observation from Mehdi, a bull-necked 17-year-old who has been raised by his French mother since his Algerian-born father was shot to death in a bar brawl a decade ago. “There is nothing to do around here, so we do this kind of stuff.”

How to deal with Mehdi and other problem children in France’s poorer districts, many of whom are the offspring of immigrants from northern and sub-Saharan Africa, has blown up into a major national issue. It is second only to the country’s high rate of joblessness, an abiding economic and social scourge that many blame for the mushrooming juvenile delinquency.

Just as thousands of jobless adults have staged sit-ins in government offices recently, youths in many depressed French neighborhoods--often the children of the unemployed--have gone on rampages of vandalism or clashed with police.

“We’re sitting on a powder keg,” warns Sen. Hubert Haenel, a right-wing lawmaker from Alsace, the region of eastern France with Strasbourg as its administrative capital. “There is a revolt by the young people of the suburbs [often areas of poverty] and another, completely justified, by the jobless. And then there is a revolt by people like you and me who aren’t going to accept anymore the fact that others are smashing everything.”

Some observers take the outbreak of violence as another sign that a new underclass is forming in the bleak projects on the outskirts of Paris, Lyons and other cities: the “youth from the suburbs.”

“They know that all their life, that’s what they will be,” says journalist and writer Francois Miclo. “That even when they are grandfathers, they’ll still be ‘youth from the suburbs.’ That their children and their grandchildren will never be anything else but ‘youth from the suburbs.’ ”

If so, it will mark a major failure for France’s society and political system. Since the 1980s, official doctrine and legislation alike have held that immigrants and their children, as long as they consider themselves part of the national community and obey its laws, are as French as people named Martin and Dupont. But the republican ideals of liberty, equality and fraternity have been sorely tested by economic hard times and feelings of racism.

A minority of youths in the projects are involved in violent crime, vandalism and drug dealing, experts say. But alarmed voices on the far right have direly spoken of an “intifada of the suburbs”--equating districts like the Polygon with the restive Arab territories under Israeli occupation. Such widespread feelings of insecurity are one reason for the political success of Jean-Marie Le Pen of the populist and xenophobic National Front, which hopes to cash in on voter frustrations in regional elections next month.

Juvenile Crime Has Increased Alarmingly

Although France has nothing near the levels of gun crime in U.S. cities, recent statistics from the Interior Ministry showed that the number of minors implicated in criminal offenses has increased alarmingly, by 81.5% over the past decade. Young people now account for 17.8% of crimes in France, including 40% of burglaries and 18.4% of rapes.

That’s almost identical to levels in the U.S., where 19% of arrests in 1996 involved minors, according to the FBI. But if the percentage of young criminals in the United States has been dropping recently, in France it is on the rise: In the first three months of 1997, juvenile crime rose 12% compared with the same period the previous year.

In a poll last month, 82% of the respondents said they believe that urban violence in France has reached alarming, record levels. Two-thirds endorsed massive police redeployments to the cities.

In recent weeks, 21 cars have been torched in the rundown industrial city of Saint-Etienne, home to a monotonous, 900-foot-long slab of public housing known as the Great Wall of China.

In Clermont-Ferrand, also in the south-central part of the country, bus drivers went on strike after one of their female colleagues was attacked by young people.

In Dammarie-les-Lys southwest of Paris, about 100 young people battled police after officers shot and killed 16-year-old Abdelkadher Bouziane as he allegedly tried to elude a police roadblock.

In Mulhouse and Colmar, cities south of Strasbourg, bands of youngsters have lobbed stones and Molotov cocktails at buses and other targets. Cities as far apart as Grenoble, Orleans and Toulouse have been rocked by acts of violence or vandalism committed by children, some as young as 10.

In the poorer sections of Strasbourg, torching cars has become something of a holiday rite for the young: As 1998 dawned, 59 automobiles in this city by the Rhine were either in flames or had already been reduced to gnarled, smoking wrecks.

In Hautepierre, another Strasbourg housing project, a homemade bomb of weedkiller and sugar packed in a fire extinguisher exploded outside a municipal gymnasium, causing more than $1 million in damage.

“Alas, no town is safe from an outbreak of violence. Because when young people today want to cut loose, nothing stops them,” says Claude Pernes, the center-right mayor of Rosny-sous-Bois and president of the association of mayors of the greater Paris region.

Reddoun Majjad, 24, the son of Moroccan-born parents, lives in Neuhof, one of Strasbourg’s worst neighborhoods--or, as French officials would euphemistically say, one of the city’s “sensitive quarters.”

“They told us it didn’t matter where we came from, that things in France were the same for everybody,” Majjad says. But so far, he points out, life has taught him a different and very bitter lesson.

Against heavy odds, Majjad kept to his schoolbooks with such dedication that he earned a graduate degree in mechanical engineering. But the young man, who has been married for a year, hasn’t been able to find work--because, he believes, his skin is dark.

“It makes me angry to realize that after all that schooling, I’ve been put on the sidelines,” Majjad says.

Underclass Apparent in ‘Europe’s Capital’

In Strasbourg, a historic city of 250,000 that as seat of the European Parliament and Council of Europe has awarded itself the title “Europe’s Capital,” the existence of the underclass is easily discernible.

Downtown, in well-to-do neighborhoods, people stroll the cobblestoned streets near the Gothic cathedral, one of France’s finest. Some of the country’s best restaurants are here. In December, more than 1 million visitors stream in for the Yuletide market, a frenzy of consumerism and Teutonic-style holiday trimmings.

Fifteen minutes away by bus or tram lie the different worlds of the Polygon, Neuhof and Hautepierre. Neuhof alone is now home to 21 nationalities, from native-born Alsatians to newly arrived Turks who still keep their women cloistered in their apartments, from Algerians who fought for the French when their homeland was a French colony, to Gypsies from Spain who deal in scrap iron and junk.

On the walls, graffiti vent homicidal hatred for les poules, or the police. Music wafting from windows in the shabby multistory buildings might be a wailing lament in Arabic or a song by the African American rapper Coolio. Children throw stones at elderly people on the street because they won’t fight back.

“The only way for adolescents here to go up in others’ esteem is to attack the weak or score with girls,” says Bernard Schreiber, head of a social services office in Neuhof that local youths tried to set on fire in December. “Because there is nothing else that is heroic about life.”

In fact, many young people here believe that they have already hit bottom.

“I’m going to be 17, and they don’t give me anything,” says Kiki, a pimply-faced companion of Mehdi who, like his friend, has dropped out of school. He puffed on a Marlboro and pulled his duffel coat around him to keep out a winter night’s chill. “You find that normal?” According to the neighbors, the boys now make money by dealing hashish smuggled in from Morocco.

In the Polygon, where 7,500 people live in 2,000 publicly owned apartments, half the adults are without a job, and many have never worked in their lives. A nearby cargo port on the Rhine was recently automated and no longer provides many jobs for the unskilled. People 20 and under make up 40% of the population, compared with 27% for all of Strasbourg.

In this sensitive quarter of one of France’s wealthiest cities, a typical family is a single mother from one of the Arabic-speaking nations of North Africa with three to five children and income of $200 a week in government welfare payments, according to local officials. At the only local supermarket, milk, yogurt and bread, all inexpensive staples, are the biggest sellers.

Abdel Malik Fayette-Mikano is one of seven French-born children of parents from the Republic of Congo in Central Africa.

The lanky, intelligent young man is now 22, and of his childhood friends, four have died of heroin overdoses and two others are serving lengthy prison sentences for robbery. Most of the rest are in and out of jail for lesser offenses.

“We say we are from Neuhof; we don’t consider ourselves French, really,” Fayette-Mikano says when asked to explain to what or whom he and his friends feel allegiance. “We identify ourselves with a neighborhood, a street, a building even.”

Jobless Youths Identify With Neighborhood

Sebastien Roche, a researcher at the Paris-based National Center for Scientific Research, says of youths like Fayette-Mikano: “These young people, who have no jobs that are liable to get them out of their neighborhoods, identify themselves literally and exclusively with their local turf. To draw the boundaries, to forbid outsiders from passing through, become obsessions.”

Fayette-Mikano says he used to snatch purses, pick pockets and steal “anything I could.” But he has converted to Islam and changed his ways.

Nowadays, he belongs to a Neuhof rap group that sold 26,000 copies of its first CD, and he is studying philosophy at Strasbourg University.

It is not growing up poor, he says, that makes young people in his neighborhood desperate and angry--it is the likelihood that they will be stuck there for the rest of their lives.

“The lack of money doesn’t turn kids to violence--the lack of hope does,” he says.

Center-right President Jacques Chirac and Socialist Prime Minister Lionel Jospin have jumped on the juvenile delinquency issue, with Jospin, keen to show that the left can also be tough on crime, calling the “right to security” the most important right of all.

“There are young people who have no idea what good and evil are,” Justice Minister Elisabeth Guigou has declared. “There must be punishment for each breach of the law.”

For the recent rash of arsons in Strasbourg, 31 young people have been arrested, and sentences were swiftly meted out ranging from four months to two years, exceptionally harsh by French standards.

Socialist Mayor Roland Ries has also endorsed creating a Neighborhood Watch program to revive a sense of community, and toughening up laws on juveniles. City officials also say they’ll exploit the Jospin government’s new tax-supported job-creation program for the young to give a few children in the suburbs a shot at beginning a career.

In the Polygon, Hautepierre, Neuhof and similar places, pessimism and skepticism are rife.

“The French call us ‘dirty Arabs.’ That will continue whether we have jobs or not,” predicts Imam Laatik Bouazza, a gentle-mannered Muslim clergyman from Morocco who runs an Arabic-language school in a ground-floor apartment in Neuhof.

“I want to get out. To get out of here,” Mehdi, natty in Nike sneakers and white designer slacks, confides as he stands outdoors smoking with his friends after an evening watching a French-dubbed video of “Mission Impossible.”

Another neighborhood resident, Kader, a 22-year-old who has spent time in prison for starting a fire in a Strasbourg school but prides himself on having reformed since, laughs.

“You think burning cars and all that is going to get you anywhere?” he asks. “Where is that going to get you?”

Mehdi and his friends give no answer.