Politicians differ, and victims die France

FRANCE: The gang murder of a man defending his son and the torture of a teenage girl are just two cases in a crime wave which has become a key election issue, writes Lara Marlowe in Paris.

Jimmy Bègue, a 17-year-old boxing champion, fought off the youths who demanded money from him after school. He went home and told his parents, who filed a complaint with the local police commissariat in Evreux, Normandy.

But when Jimmy left school the next day and found about 30 boys waiting for him, he went back into the lycée and called his dad. Guy-Patrice Bègue, a 38-year-old former legionnaire from Réunion island in the Indian Ocean, had grown up in a bad neighbourhood and knew better than to wait for police. Before he went to try to reason with the boys threatening his son, Guy-Patrice slipped a box-cutter into his pocket. Near the Evreux train station, one of the young gang smashed a brick into his face. Then they beat Guy-Patrice Bègue to death.

The inhabitants of Evreux held two silent marches to protest at the murder in March of the man they hailed as "father courage". In the run-up to this month's election in which he has made security the leading issue, President Jacques Chirac telephoned the Bègue family to express his condolences.

As Chirac almost gleefully points out, crime in France has risen 16 per cent since a left-wing government came to power in 1997. More than four million incidents were reported in 2001 - one every seven seconds.

Yet the public seem strangely passive. "France remains a statist country; people are waiting for the state to act," explains Sébastian Roché, a criminologist and author of Zero Tolerance? Incivility and Insecurity. Police discourage citizens from taking security into their own hands, and pressure groups such as the short-lived "Stop the Violence" do not mobilise support for long.

Males under the age of 18 account for a stunning 50 per cent of physical violence on French streets. It has become politically incorrect to allude to what Roché calls "the over-representation" of immigrants in crime statistics. In his self-reported delinquency survey of 2,300 boys between the ages of 13 and 19, all admitted openly that North Africans represent a disproportionately high percentage of young criminals. French newspapers do not mention the fact, but "in the poor suburbs, everybody knows it; no one tries to hide it," Roché says. He blames the illiteracy of immigrant parents, whose inability to help their children contributes to scholastic failure, and an entrenched hatred of authority.

EU figures for 1999 show that France's crime rate is ninth in the EU, with 61 criminal acts per 1,000 inhabitants annually. The same statistics, from Interpol and the Ministry of the Interior, make Ireland look like a haven of peace, ranking it 14th in the EU, with 17 crimes per 1,000 people.

Sweden, Britain and Denmark have far higher crime rates, but the fear of violence has nonetheless reached debilitating heights here. In a study entitled Daily Oppression, the academic Eric Debarbieux shows how 15 teenagers took over a street in northern Paris, simply by playing loud music, sitting on steps, vandalising letter boxes and spray-painting graffiti. These minor offences are almost never punished by French police, and inhabitants of the neighbourhood are so intimidated that they hide inside their apartments.

The murder of Guy-Patrice Bègue was still in the headlines when public attention shifted to other barbaric crimes involving teenagers. In Besancon, eastern France, Morgane and Priscilla, aged 13 and 14 were detained last month for the attempted murder, torture and kidnapping of 14-year-old Kelly. The three friends had spent an afternoon drinking beer in an abandoned building when a "slapping game" got out of control. Priscilla, the older of the two, gouged Kelly's face with a shard from a beer bottle, then took a kitchen knife from her bag and stabbed her friend. Morgane and Priscilla dragged their victim down three flights of stairs to the cellar, slashed her wrists and tried to cut her throat.

After losing more than two litres of blood, Kelly crawled out of the basement and was found by a passer-by. Priscilla said she'd been influenced by the film Scream, and she was apparently jealous because a boy in their school had asked for Kelly's mobile phone number. Morgane had been caught desecrating a cemetery with skinheads when she was only 11.

ALSO last month, young men wearing ski-masks and armed with baseball bats burst into the security guards' room at an Auchan supermarket near Nantes at closing time. The young men threw Molotov cocktails. Thierry Thoméré, a 30-year-old guard, tried to stop the fire with an extinguisher. He fell, and several of the teenagers attacked him with baseball bats and threw a Molotov cocktail at him, turning the guard into a human torch. Thoméré, whose wife is to give birth in mid-April, is hospitalised with broken bones and burns over 50 per cent of his body. Nine men between the ages of 16 and 22 have been arrested for his assault.

Meanwhile, presidential candidates insist they can reverse France's crime wave. Prime Minister Lionel Jospin says he "sinned by naïveté" in believing this could be achieved by reducing unemployment. Hervé Algalarrondo, of the left-wing Nouvel Observateur weekly, has written a book entitled, Security: the Left Against the People, in which he suggests the French left is incapable of fighting violence.

"The culture of the left prevents them dealing seriously with security problems," says Algalarrondo. "Since May 1968, there's been a certain French idealisation of delinquency. The delinquent is considered a victim of society." The crisis is aggravated by in-fighting between the police, under the authority of the ministry of the interior, and the gendarmerie, who answer to the defence minister. And both blame judges for freeing suspected criminals: 80 per cent of cases are dismissed - while a left-wing magistrate's syndicate recently published a book portraying a policeman with a pig's head, Hitler moustache and hairstyle.

The right-wing Le Figaro quotes a secret investigation by the French government auditor, the cour de comptes, into the dysfunctional PJJ, the section of the Ministry of Justice meant to deal with underage criminals.

"In nearly all of the sites visited, the number of youths present was lower - often substantially - than the number registered," the report said. Auditors found evidence of embezzlement by staff, and continuing violence by the delinquents, who often use the centres only for sleeping.

Chirac and Jospin both say they would revise 1945 regulations that restrict the punishment of minors. At present, 11- to 13-year-olds cannot be held criminally responsible and 13- to 16-year-olds can be imprisoned for only the most serious crimes.

"Judges usually hesitate to punish teenageers under 18," Roché says. "The justice system is waiting until it's too late." Lucienne Bui Trong, formerly in charge of the "cities and suburbs" sector of domestic intelligence gathering, has listed 800 neighbourhoods in France where security forces have been attacked and now intervene only momentarily and in strength.

"The most important thing is to re-occupy public places," says Debarbieux. That would require a security presence - whether police, private guards or volunteers - in parks, subways, buses and buildings.