Northern French Town Faced with Rioting

In France on Wednesday, an immigrants’ community in the town of Amiens is tense after two straight days of clashes between youth and police.

Young people burned down a school, a gym, and several cars.

Seventeen police officers were injured.

Those disturbances occurred after a police check interrupted the memorial service of a young man who’d died in a motorcycle accident.

French journalist and political commentator Christine Ockrent tells anchor Marco Werman that Amiens is a pressure cooker for disenfranchised youth without jobs – or opportunities.

She says president Francois Hollande, who has been in office just over 100 days, is faced with a difficult crisis.

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Marco Werman: So, some young immigrants in this country are breathing a sigh of relief while in France today immigrants and their families in the town of Amiens are tense. That’s after several days of rioting and clashes between youth and police. Young people burned cars and buildings, seventeen police officers were injured. French journalist and political commentator, Christine Ockrent, says Amiens is a pressure cooker for disenfranchised youth without jobs or opportunities. She explains how a traffic accident escalated over the past few days.

Christine Ockrent: A young guy got killed in a motorcycle accident. There was a mourning ceremony for him and then the police, for some reason or another, went into that neighborhood and some young people started aiming at them first of all with stones and then some rifles showed up and the police were shot at. Two schools were burned a few cars also police people were wounded. The home secretary went there yesterday and had the usual statements, saying that of course it was intolerable that the police would be shot at anywhere. But it’s a mix, unfortunately, of racial tension, unemployment lots of frictions between various communities. And, the great difficulty, which I believe we know in the US as well as in Europe, about what to do with idle youth who get violent and, even in europe where guns are prohibited, they get these guns…

Werman: Right.

Ockrent:..and they use them.

Werman: Well, complicating matters too is this violence falls in the Muslim holy month of Ramadan and I heard that the police actually have been camping out in Amiens waiting for something to happen which has to raise the tension.

Ockrent: Well, Amiens has been listed as one of the fifteen most dangerous places in France for that kind of incident to happen and the government had just announced that there would be police reinforcements in Amiens as well as in fourteen other spots in the country because it has been detected by the local authorities that indeed these ingredients are there for any situation to get from bad to worse which is exactly what happened.

Werman: Many people say Nicolas Sarkozy when he was president did very little to solve the root problems that led to those infamous 2005 riots. Has the new president, Francois Hollande – he’s been in office only one hundred days, has he offered any plan to improve housing conditions eduction and jobs for these disenfranchised youth?

Ockrent: You know, frankly, given the state of our economy and the sort of recession hitting Europe right now, whether you have conservatives in the government or socialists, as is the case with president Hollande, the remedies are not obvious and no one has a magic wand and there is no way to create thousands of interesting jobs for these kids overnight. And, I think that any government, whatever its political leanings, faces the same issues of feeling rather powerless.

Werman: French journalist and political analyst Christine Ockrent, thank you very much.

Ockrent: Thank you Marco

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