Bias Breeds Bitterness, French Muslims Warn

A hulking tin-sided factory that once made brake parts is now a holy place. Each Friday, Muslims file inside to escape for a while from a world they see turning against them.

“We are the enemy,” said Munir Mouiseddine, 24, a skilled maintenance technician with no job. “It was bad enough before. Since Sept. 11, it is impossible. How are we supposed to earn a living?”

He graduated first in his engineering class of 60. But at job interviews, he is told vacancies have been filled. “As soon as they see my Arab face, I’m out,” he said. “That makes you jealous, bitter, desperate.”

Another young Muslim in Aulnay’s immigrant quarter, who would call himself only Abdul, repeated the lament: “How do we fit into a society that despises us?”

Social workers say racism is a significant part of the problem, and is being worsened by the terrorism scare.

Abdul makes pizzas at Charles de Gaulle Airport but fears for his job. Other airport employees say police have canceled security clearances for many young Arabs, usually without explanation.

“We hate what terrorists did in America in God’s name as much as anyone,” Abdul said. “And we pay the price.”

The northern end of Aulnay is a banlieue, French for suburb and now code for any of the crime-plagued slums that ring large cities, whether in France or elsewhere in Europe.

Government employment figures make no ethnic breakdown, but economists see a wide gap between francais de souche, meaning European Frenchmen, and les immigres, which refers essentially to Arabs and Africans, whether they are French citizens of long standing or have just arrived in the country.

“People think these are all bad kids, and that’s totally wrong,” said Stephane Girard, an Aulnay city consultant. “Some employers tell me outright they don’t want Arabs. Some just quietly discriminate.”

France’s 5-million-strong Muslim community is Europe’s largest. Most originate from Algeria, Morocco and Tunisia, former French territories, living in banlieues or run-down inner cities.

Although one young man from Aulnay was seized in Afghanistan and taken to Guantanamo Bay Naval Base, police investigators say that so far, relatively few operatives of terror networks such as Al Qaeda come from these destitute areas.

Al Qaeda recruiters have focused most actively on large South Asian and Arab communities in Britain, police say. Even there, recruits apparently number in the hundreds from a total population of 2 million.

“Sleeper” cells uncovered in Germany and Italy seem to have reached a limited few. Zacarias Moussaoui, a French-Algerian arrested in Minnesota and allegedly linked to the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks, is from a middle-class family in southern France.

But unless things get better, police and social scientists warn, the potential in France--and elsewhere in Europe, with an additional 9 million Muslims--is hair-raising.

“Of course, terrorism is a natural outlet if someone sees no future, no way out, in an atmosphere of exclusion,” said Lucienne Bui Trong, recently retired as head of France’s urban violence intelligence unit.

She said Muslim extremists began recruiting in the banlieues in 1992 but until recently had little success. Now, she added, authorities are treating the threat with new urgency.

Terrorism is only one fear. Police worry that the banlieues, still a cultural mix of immigrants and European French, will become desperate ghettos with warring gangs.

Already, handguns and even semiautomatic rifles appear with alarming frequency. ‘Le drive-by shooting’ is now a familiar French term.

L’insecurite, meaning a generalized fear of violent, disaffected juveniles--already dominates the French presidential campaign, months before the final vote May 5.

A harsh stand against North African immigration has restored the extreme right-wing candidate, Jean-Marie Le Pen, to lost limelight. Opinion polls suggest his support is back at 10%.

Sophie Body-Gendrot, a Sorbonne University professor who has studied urban violence across America, warned in a comprehensive report for the French government of worsening problems if there are no changes.

“These kids have no future, no dignity, and they have no release for their violence,” she said in an interview. “They live in cement blocks with nothing else. What can you expect them to do?”

Police often worsen the situation by humiliating youths, she added. “They provoke. They order kids to look down, to avert their eyes. They insult them. This creates an obvious mistrust and tension.”

So far, she said, the worst of European slum violence still does not approach that of large American cities. But while U.S. figures are stabilizing, armed robbery and assault are rising fast in Europe.

Body-Gendrot says home-grown peculiarities, such as starting fires and then ambushing the firefighters, suggest a nihilistic rejection of social values that leaves youths vulnerable--not just to traditional predators such as drug dealers, but to Islamic zealots in search of recruits for holy war.

This in turn poisons the image of the overwhelming majority who reject extremism.

“Sure, there is the occasional hard-core fanatic, but that’s the rare exception,” said Mouiseddine, the jobless technician. “For most of us, the mosque is the only place where we feel some hope. It makes us better, not worse.”

A two-year French government study of 48 sermons in 23 mosques found that imams preached nonviolence and civic responsibility, linking evils of the world to humankind’s general failings.

Social workers with long experience in French banlieues say that although many youths drink alcohol and skip Friday prayers, this sort of Islam helps keep many out of more serious trouble.

“For youngsters caught between two cultures, religion helps to frame their life, to show them a purpose in life,” said Dominique Barrot, who has worked with delinquents for 11 years.

All across Europe, Islamic leaders say they notice increased attendance at Friday prayers. Many say young people express new interest in the Koran, the Prophet Muhammad’s teachings and Ramadan, the Muslim month of fasting.

At Aulnay’s morning market, religious music reverberates from speakers, and stalls selling Islamic texts do a brisk business. Men collect money from passers-by to outfit the newly converted mosque.

Politicians have talked a lot about the need for “integration” and “assimilation” into the mainstream, but nowadays the more commonly heard buzzword is “exclusion.”

For generations, the French have sought to blend different ethnic groups from their colonies around the world into a single seamless society.

In December, all of France mourned Leopold Sedar Senghor, a poet who led Senegal to independence in 1960 and was its president for 20 years. Senghor was married to a Frenchwoman, retired to Normandy, and was a member of the hallowed Academie Francaise.

But such concrete examples are few. In recent years many French-born children of les immigres have gone in a separate direction, reacting to a feeling of exclusion by returning to cultural and religious roots.

On Oct. 6, French leaders attended a soccer match near Paris between France and Algeria, meant to symbolize the end of decades of tension left over from the Algerians’ bloody war of independence.

They grimaced as young French citizens of Algerian stock catcalled during “La Marseillaise,” the national anthem. Then, after Francescored its fourth goal, French-Algerians spilled onto the playing field, and millions of TV viewers saw the reconciliation match end in a brawl.

Francois Heisbourg, head of the International Institute of Strategic Studies in London and a veteran French defense analyst, warns that these surface signs hide a serious threat of divided loyalties.

“You have to find a way to make these young people feel proud or you will lose them,” he said in an interview.

Heisbourg fears a new and permanent worldwide fight against what he calls “hyper-terrorism,” and says it’s critical to avoid negative stereotypes about Islam that play into the hands of radicals preaching religious violence.

Already, many Muslims are on the defensive, and apt to misinterpret attempts to better understand their fears.

One recent Friday, an American journalist, invited by a young man to the cavernous former factory that is Aulnay mosque, took his place on the worn carpets spread out on the second floor.

Moments later, an angry member of a local Islamic association ejected him without explanation.

“Everyone is so afraid,” observed Nassera Benaddi, a young mother who helped to organize a group called 1001 Ideas to find ways to educate and occupy Aulnay youth.

She praised the city for funneling millions of dollars’ worth of municipal and European Union aid into the immigrant neighborhoods to underwrite job training.

Still, she adds, it is an uphill fight. She said her own brother nearly broke down when, having worked so hard at school, he couldn’t get a job.

“He is a good kid, sweet and gentle, and I’ve heard him crying alone at night,” Benaddi said. “If it hadn’t been for my mother, I think he’d have turned out bad like so many of his friends.”

Like many slum youths who try to avoid trouble, she added, he has a record because he stepped in to break up a fight, and police hurrying to the scene arrested the first person they saw--her brother.

Down the street, Taher Boubahri, a Tunisian whose wife runs a different organization to help youngsters, said a renewed interest in Islam was keeping the problems in check--for now.

“These kids learn about the prophet, practice Ramadan, and it gives them a purpose,” he said. “But that’s not enough. If they haven’t got enough to buy a cigarette or sandwich, they’re likely to do anything.”