Riots in France continue after the fatal shooting of a 17 year old Algerian youth who had attempted to evade police after they ordered him stop the vehicle he was driving.
This morning it was reported that a 24 year old fireman named Gérald Darmanin lost his life battling a blaze in a car park in Saint Denis, Paris with 1,300 arrests being reported on a single night since the rioting started last week
Les armées rendent hommage à l’engagement total du Caporal-chef Dorian Damelincourt, mort au feu cette nuit.
Je m’associe à la peine de ses frères d’armes. Je m’incline devant la douleur de sa famille. pic.twitter.com/XbALwPGhP3— Chef d'état-major des armées (@CEMA_FR) July 3, 2023
The unrest between French police and Algerian migrants had been happening since the 1950s after France lost a violent war before Algeria gained independence from their colonisers.
Irish journalist Thomas O’Reilly, who works for the European Conservative, and was on the ground filming the riots in Lille, France told Gript that, “The policy of mass immigration from the Islamic world, the legacy of colonialism, and the corruption of the French police has created a cauldron of racial tension that exploded last week and which has been a feature in French urban life for years,” he said
#BREAKING #France #Nanterre Special police on the streets of Lille, France. pic.twitter.com/O224fleGdC
— The National Independent (@NationalIndNews) June 29, 2023
Speaking about the origins of the conflict he said, “They [the French] imported millions of Algerians afterwards [after the war] that quickly lost their jobs as factories closed,”
O’Reilly said this had resulted in job losses which saw the migrants become “an underclass” mostly inhabiting French suburbs.
He said rioters in Lille ‘targeted schools and town halls’ with an ‘alliance of drug dealers and leftist groups’ taking on police.
The squad rolled out in Lille as riots hit day 3 across France. pic.twitter.com/W3E4jjGn1e
— Christine Burgum (@ChristineBurgum) June 29, 2023
“Violence subsided from Thursday on when they sent in militarised units and cut the wire in social media,” he said, describing an “information embargo” surrounding the riots.
“The fact of that matter for anyone who has lived in Paris or most French urban areas is that the banlieues (suburbs) are parallel societies totally out of the jurisdiction of the French state.”
O’Reilly emphasised the socio-economic and historic factors at play as having “created a gangster underclass in France that is ready to mobilise at any moment against the forces of the state and is very susceptible to Islamism and political events outside of France,” including BLM from America and Algerian politics.
Reporting for the European Conservative he said, “The government is apprehensive to greenlight a proper offensive against the gangs, worried that more bloodshed could only drive a wedge between the banlieues and society at large. One person killed by law enforcement has resulted in this mess, a dozen at the hands of security services could be a recipe for civil war.”
O’Reilly told Gript that what he gathered from reporting in Lille and “chatting to members of the French legal system and nationalist opposition is that an alliance of drug dealers, angry young Arabs and even left wing partisans were able to bring the state to the brink in arguably the worst rioting France has seen post-war.”
He says that for Irish people the banlieue is “comparable only to what occurs in East Belfast under the UDA only an order of magnitude worse.”
“ France doesn’t just have no go zones, it has whole cities such as Marseilles simply not under the governance of the French state and run by criminal networks.” he said
O’Reilly said he believes the French state will veer right “either with a right-wing establishment alternative to Macron or a Le Pen government but the crisis to crisis that the country is stumbling from is only getting worse.”