Andreas Whittam Smith: What France needs is affirmative action

It is viewed with suspicion. But how else could Americans such as Colin Powell have risen?

Published: 21 November 2005

At last, time for reflection in France, where I am spending the weekend. The country is quiet again after 20 successive nights of turbulence in districts where immigrant families live. Some 9,000 vehicles were set alight, 30 schools burnt out, numerous business premises put to the torch and 126 policemen wounded.

Teenagers and young men, born in France, whose parents or grandparents came mainly from Algeria and Morocco and territories further south, all part of the old French Empire in Africa, wanted to make themselves heard. In this they have emphatically succeeded. They have been more effective than farmers defending their livelihoods by blocking motorways. They have even outdone the sailors operating the ferries to Corsica who recently hijacked their boats as a protest against privatisation. Imagine our alarm if disturbances had begun in some of the poorer London suburbs and then spread to, say, Bradford, Blackburn, Birmingham, Leicester, and lasted three weeks.

Article Length: 822 words (approx.)