by Robb, Graham
As a precaution, none of them carried identity papers (it had taken their families years to get those papers), but a boy without papers was liable to be arrested, and Zyed had been told by his father that if he was picked up by the police for whatever reason, he would be sent back to Tunisia, which would be a fate worse than death.
A policeman or a bourgeois would have found their route irregular and suspicious. Knowing the lie of the land, they were heading for home in a logical straight line from the football pitch–across the building site and the ‘Pama’ (Parc de la Mairie) after Avenue de Sévigné, towards the towers of Le Chêne Pointu and La Vallée des Anges, where Zyed lived. The glare of security lamps darkened the twilight. They ran to the rhythm of the music in their ears. ‘La FranSSe est une garce…comme une salope il faut la traiter, mec!…Moi je pisse sur Napoléon et leur Général de Gaulle…Putain de flics de fils de pute.’
The sucking sound of the police sirens came through loud and clear. One of the other boys, crouching behind a burned-out car, had seen the policemen go by. Some of them were in plain clothes, which was not a good sign, and they were carrying flash-ball guns (marketed as ‘the less lethal weapon’–because the bullets were not supposed to penetrate a clothed body). Bouna, Zyed and Muhittin had run like wingers on a break in the closing seconds of the game to the other side of the park, hared across the road and dived into the wooded wasteground. This was, in police parlance, ‘an extremely hilly sector’, and since the policemen came from Livry-Gargan, where only French people lived, they might soon give up and go home.
The wasteground was a no-man’s-land, somewhere on the edge of Clichy-sous-Bois, which itself was nowhere in particular.
NOW THAT IT HAD been swallowed by Greater Paris, the north-eastern banlieue was further than ever from the boulevards. Many of its inhabitants had never been to Paris and had never seen the Eiffel Tower. Clichy-sous-Bois had no railway station. Its transport links with the centre were tenuous and inconvenient. The area was ‘enclaved’. Clichy wasn’t even on the RER map: it lay somewhere in the out-of-scale empty space between Sevran-Livry and Le Raincy-Villemomble-Montfermeil, which looked like insignificant outposts, even though a quarter of a million people lived there. In Les Misérables, when Jean Valjean rescued Cosette from her foster parents at Montfermeil and brought her back to Paris by way of Livry and Bondy, he was able to take a direct service from the centre of the city: a bus for Bondy left from the Rue Sainte-Apolline near the Porte Saint-Martin. But in 2005, Bouna’s father, who was a dustman, like Zyed’s, spent an hour on the RER every morning on his way home from work and then had to wait for the 601 which wandered about for six miles before dropping him off near Notre-Dame-des-Anges.
In any case, a renoi or a rebeu (a Black or an Arab) from the suburbs was no more likely to tour the sights than a nineteenth-century inhabitant of the Faubourg Saint-Marceau would have gone for a stroll in the Faubourg Saint-Germain. For a boy from the banlieue, Paris was one of the big railway stations or the Forum des Halles, where French boys and girls spent thousands of euros on designer clothes and CDs, took drugs and kissed in public, as though they had no brothers to look out for them and didn’t know the meaning of respect.
Paris was also known to be extremely dangerous. On the day he received his first diploma, a Moroccan boy had gone to Paris to visit his aunt. He had been arrested at the Gare de Lyon and beaten up by four policemen in a cell, then released without charge. Everyone had similar tales to tell. The police would stop a boy in the street, force him to take off his jeans and insult his family or what they took to be his religion. Sometimes, they pretended they were going to kill him or grabbed him by the balls and said things that must have been written down somewhere in a police manual. ‘T’aimes ça, petite pédale, qu’on te les tripote, hein? Allez, vas-y, lá, chiale un coup devant tes potes!’ (‘You like having them tickled, don’t you, you little poof? Go on, show your mates what a cry-baby you are!’) It happened in the banlieue too, but at least in the banlieue there was a sense of community, and there were places where the police never went.
This is why they had taken to their heels when they heard the sirens, and why they began to panic when they heard another car pulling up on the other side of the wasteground.
The wasteground sloped down steeply to the south. There were soft mounds of earth where trees had fallen over as though they had been trying to get away. It had once been a plaster quarry, and then a municipal dump. Before that, it had belonged to the Abbey of Clichy. They were standing somewhere above the old abbey cellars, in the magical place that Mme de Sévigné had loved to visit. She had written from there to her daughter in 1672: ‘It is hard for me to see this garden, these alleys, the little bridge, the avenue, the meadow, the forest, the mill and the little view, without thinking of my darling child.’
They hurried through the trees and found the edge of the wasteground marked by a concrete wall. On the other side of the wall was an enclosed area full of metal structures and windowless buildings. Beyond that was the row of little houses with tidy front gardens and security gates along the Rue de l’Abbaye. The neighbourhood dogs were barking, excited by the sirens and the flashing lights. The boys could hear the crackle of the police radios just a few yards away. At least one other car had pulled up, and the wasteground seemed to be surrounded. The only place to go was over the wall. There were notices on the wall–as there were all over the banlieue: a skull-andcrossbones, some writing, and a raised black hand that looked like a stencilled graffito. Another sign showed a cartoon face with lightning bolts for hair. They climbed the wall, too scared to worry about the height, and dropped down on the other side.
TWO RINGS OF CABLES surround the City of Light–one at a distance of twenty-four kilometres, the other at sixteen kilometres from the centre. Though no one would ever go to see them, these two enormous rings are as important in the history of Paris as the walls and ramparts that mark the stages of the city’s expansion. The outer ring carries 400,000 volts. The inner ring, which reached Clichy-sous-Bois in 1936, carries 225,000 volts. In France, this dual configuration is unique to Paris. If one substation is affected, some of the power can be made up by the next substation along, and in this way, the Paris region, which consumes one-fifth of the electricity used in France, is protected from major power cuts.
The three boys had taken refuge in the Clichy substation, which reduces the incoming voltage to 20,000 volts and feeds it into the distribution network. First, they tried a door in the main building, but the door was locked. Then they climbed a gate into a compound within the enclosed area, and went to stand as far from the gate as possible: if the policemen tried to get in, they could still try to hide behind one of the transformers.
Bouna and Zyed stood on one side of the compound, Muhittin on the other. There was no longer any hope of getting home by six o’clock. The best thing was to wait for the police to go away. Ten minutes passed, then another ten minutes. The policemen sat in their cars, their blue lights flailing across the trees. They were talking to the operator at Livry-Gargan: ‘Yeah, Livry, we’ve located the two individuals; they’re climbing into the EDF* site…’ ‘Repeat end of message…’ ‘Yeah, I think they’re going into the EDF site. Better get some back-up so we can surround the area.’ ‘OK, got that.’ At one point, one of the policemen was heard to say, ‘S’ils rentrent sur le site EDF, je ne donne pas cher de leur peau’: ‘I don’t fancy their chances (literally: ‘I wouldn’t give much for their skin’) if they go into the EDF site.’
Four cars and eleven policemen had taken up position around the compound. No one called the electricity company or the fire brigade. The boys had entered the substation at about half-past five. At twelve minutes past six, one of the boys–Bouna or Zyed–raised his arms in a gesture of desperation or impatience, hoping for a miracle or trying to work off some nervous energy. It is likely that, by then, the police had left the scene, since no one reported the brilliant flash of light that danced above the wall
s and disappeared.
3. Immigrant
TWENTY HOURS BEFORE, the Minister of the Interior had visited the north-western suburb of Argenteuil after dark. It was a deliberately provocative visit. Some stones were thrown by local youths and bounced off the security guards’ hastily opened umbrellas. A woman called down to the minister from the balcony of a tower block and asked if he was going to do something about the racaille (‘scum’). The television camera showed the minister looking up at the balcony. For a moment, he was eclipsed by the shaven head of a boy who was jumping about, trying to get his grinning face on TV. Then the minister jabbed his finger aggressively over his shoulder, and said to the woman on the balcony, ‘You want someone to get rid of those gangs of scum, don’t you?…We’ll get rid of them for you.’
A short man dwarfed by his security officers, he nonetheless looked like a man who was not to be trifled with. He had removed his tie, and he wore an expression that was something between a scowl and a leer–the face of the cowboy vigilante who knows that the bad guy is out of bullets. There was a lunge and swagger about his gestures that made it easy to edit the videos and make him look like a rapper–‘When I hear de word banlieue, I get muh flash-ball out!’ (The joke was that the minister had ordered the prosecution of a rapper for defamation of the French police.)
These walkabouts in the banlieue were important opportunities. The minister’s popularity rating always soared after a visit to the banlieue, and he played his role to perfection. He was the decent man who has finally had enough, who stands up to the hooligans and tells them who’s in charge. In June, he had gone to the suburb of La Courneuve, where a child had been shot, and promised that the area would be ‘cleaned up with a Kärcher’, which is a high-pressure hose used to blast the filth off paving stones. He made ‘no apology’ for using inflammatory words. ‘The French language is rich. I see no reason why I shouldn’t use its full range.’
As he explained in his manifesto-autobiography, he had had to be tough to survive. In the beginning, he was on his own: ‘I had no network, no personal fortune, and I was not a civil servant.’ He was a lawyer in the wealthy suburb of Neuilly-sur-Seine. He was also the son of an immigrant, and he had an unusual, foreign-sounding name: Sarközy de Nagy-Bocsa. It might have been Jewish or perhaps Romany, but in any case not French. ‘With such a name, many people would have deemed it wise to melt away into anonymity rather than seek the limelight.’
‘Sarko’–as he was known to enemies and allies alike–loved his job as Minister of the Interior: ‘Day and night, drama and passion rise up at the office door: hostage crises, terrorist threats, forest fires, demonstrations, raves, bird flu, floods, disappearances–the responsibility is overwhelming.’ He saw himself at Sangatte, in the hangar where illegal immigrants were penned: ‘Three thousand pairs of eyes imploring me and threatening. None of them spoke a single word of French. They expected everything of me, but I had so little to give.’ He increased the fingerprint database from 400,000 to 2.3 million, and allowed foreign prostitutes who betrayed their pimps to remain in the country.
Out of devotion to his job, he had neglected his wife: there were sacrifices that had to be made. The country was falling apart. Rural France was being colonized by the British, and French businessmen were emigrating to London. His own daughter had gone there to work for a bank. Middle-class people saw their investments losing value, while unionized workers thought they had a God-given right to a minimum wage.
He remembered how, as a fifteen-year-old boy, he had laid a flower under the Arc de Triomphe on the day of General de Gaulle’s funeral. No one cared about the nation any more. French football supporters booed the ‘Marseillaise’. Cowards who had been shot in the First World War were rehabilitated. Napoleon Bonaparte was likened to Adolf Hitler, and colonization was seen as a criminal enterprise.
As a professional politician, he did whatever he could to earn the respect of the police. He allowed them to carry flash-balls and, since ‘the biggest problem is housing’, he gave them better barracks and police stations. When a police officer married or had a child, the officer received a personalized bouquet from the minister. The minister’s own Labrador, Indy, had been sent for training with the counter-terrorist RAID unit of the national police. Policemen would no longer have to work with their hands tied behind their backs: the old ‘defensive strategy’ would be replaced with an ‘offensive philosophy’ that would ‘bring firepower to zones of lawlessness’.
His speeches were played to members of the public assembled by a public-relations firm. The members of the public held joysticks connected to a computer, and twitched the sticks in response to what they heard: left for negative, right for positive. The word ‘racaille’ had produced a significant jerk to the right.
The woman on the balcony at Argenteuil on the evening of 26 October had unwittingly uttered a vote-winning word. Journalists would always find some elderly white woman with shopping bags or a well-dressed social worker to say that things were not so bad in the banlieue, that young people had nothing to do and were poorly treated. But no politician could ignore the fears of ordinary people when they saw the beautiful city of Paris besieged by the racaille.
4. City of Light
AT TWELVE MINUTES past six on 27 October 2005, the lights went out in Clichy-sous-Bois. There were howls of dismay in a hundred thousand households. Then the emergency backup supply kicked in, and the lights came back on. This was the sort of service people had come to expect in the rundown banlieue.
A teenage boy came shambling into town, looking like some kind of alien. He was heading for La Vallée des Anges and Le Chêne Pointu. His face was a nasty shade of yellow, and his clothes were smouldering as though he was about to burst into flames. He slumped along, eyes glazed, muttering something incomprehensible.
He reached the shopping centre at 6.35. The first person he saw was Bouna’s older brother, Siyakha Traoré. Muhittin could barely speak, as though his tongue was too big for his mouth. Siyakha made out just two words, which he repeated over and over again: Bouna…accident…
He had clambered over the wall in a dream. The policemen were nowhere to be seen. He had noticed that his clothes were burning, which seemed incredible. His friends had disappeared in a flash of light. For a moment, the air had been on fire. The next thing he knew, his jacket was being pulled up over his head by Siyakha’s friend.
The friend phoned for an ambulance while Muhittin led Siyakha through the park. He was saying, ‘They chased us…’
They reached a place near a mound of trees that Siyakha, in all the years he had lived in Clichy-sous-Bois, had never noticed. He could feel the heat coming off the concrete walls, and there was a smell that reminded him of a sick room. He asked, ‘Where are they?’ Muhittin covered his face with one arm and pointed with the other: ‘In there.’
Later that night, Muhittin lay on the operating table and then in a sterile room at the Hôpital Saint-Antoine, watched by his father, an unemployed brick mason, who spoke to him through the Hygiaphone. The news was spreading through the banlieue, first by word of mouth, then by television and radio, and then, more slowly, like incessant, heavy rain, through the blogosphere.
The sequence of events became muddled almost immediately. The crucial pieces of information were carried along by an overwhelming narrative that had the unmistakeable appearance of truth. No matter how often the facts were cut and pasted, edited and translated into the evolving language of the banlieue, they always came out the same. The police had caused the death of two boys in Clichy-sous-Bois. The Minister of the Interior had called them ‘scum’. Another boy was fighting for his life. The victims were a Black, an Arab and a Kurd. They were boys from the banlieue, no different from anyone else. One of them was only fifteen years old.
On the following night, twenty-three cars were set alight in Clichy-sous-Bois, and there were pitched battles with the police. Cars were always burning somewhere in the suburbs, but now the fires were like hilltop beac
ons signifying an invasion or a festival.
From his hospital bed, where he had to lie very still because of all the skin grafts, Muhittin could watch a television that was bracketed to the wall. Sometimes, he was in tears; at other times, he trembled with rage. Politicians were feeding the flames with their lies. On his second day in hospital, he was questioned by the police, who brought a computer and a printer and spoke to him without using the Hygiaphone. ‘Look what you’ve done now,’ they said. ‘Thirteen cars were set on fire yesterday.’ They told him to sign the statement, and since he was unable to write with his burned hands, they made him sign with a cross.
The signed statement was leaked to the press. Muhittin Altun was said to have confessed that the police had not been chasing them, and that they had been fully aware of the danger of entering an EDF site. Furthermore, the Prime Minister and the Minister of the Interior announced that according to information received from the police, the boys who died had been in the act of committing a burglary.
On 30 October, a tear-gas grenade launched by the police exploded outside the Bilal mosque at Clichy-sous-Bois and the fumes wafted into the building. The mosque was full because it was near the end of Ramadan. The congregation tumbled into the street to see policemen pointing their guns and shouting. Then the situation ‘stabilized’: that night, only twenty cars were set on fire. But the violence was spreading, at first in a tight arc around the northern suburbs, then fanning out to the west and the south.
In the days when Northmen had sailed down the Seine to plunder Paris, chroniclers had exaggerated the calamity to match the magnitude of the offence. In 2005, television news performed a similar function. A map of France, less accurate than the charts of medieval geometers, appeared on CNN, showing Lille on the coast and Toulouse in the Alps. Commentators analysed the situation and warned of a cataclysm of international dimensions: the burning of the Paris banlieue was connected with racial tension, terrorism, fundamentalist Islam, the practice of polygamy and the wearing of the veil. Paris was no longer the enchanted enclave of biscuit-tin memorials preserved by architects and politicians for the benefit of the admiring world. It was something vast and shapeless, ugly, unruly and uncharted. Its population of intellectuals, café waiters and femmes fatales had vanished. A new population of Parisians appeared in the international media, their hooded faces flaring out of the apocalyptic gloom when police cars passed with flashing lights or another petrol bomb exploded.