Over the past 10 days, the department of Seine-Saint-Denis, north of Paris, known by its postal code as "le neuf trois," has become synonymous with blazing cars and buses, burning warehouses, schools and shopping centres, set alight by masked young men with petrol bombs. Anywhere else, the violence would be called race riots. In politically correct France, the vandals are referred to as "youths" - never as immigrants, Africans or Arab, writes Lara Marlowe
Since October 27th, the number of riot police deployed in the failed attempt to quell the violence has quadrupled. Yet the unrest has spread to five other departments surrounding Paris. The circle of suburbs known as la couronne has become a crown of thorns.
The word "suburbs" is misleading. In the case of Neuilly-sur-Seine, the home town of the interior minister, Nicolas Sarkozy, Paris's suburbs fulfil the image of Beverly Hills-like residences and gardens. In le neuf trois, "suburbs" means mile after mile of high-rise housing projects inhabited by immigrants and their offspring. The French word for suburbs, banlieue, conjures up drug-dealers, crime and violence.
To get to Le Chêne Pointu, the neighbourhood in Clichy-sous-Bois where the riots started on the night of October 27th, you take the 601 bus from the Raincy train station. All of the drivers are black.
"They used to hire white people," a bus driver named Cédric, the grandson of Senegalese immigrants, explains. "But there were problems."
Since the riots started, the bus service to Le Chêne Pointu stops at sunset. Like most of the residents of Clichy I talked to, Cédric understands the rioters, even if he doesn't approve.
"Until the bus company hired me, I couldn't get a job," he says. "Then I tried to rent a place outside the projects - the ads in the estate agents' windows said 'for rent', but every time I went inside, the property was already rented."
As we enter Clichy, Cédric points out the intersections at the upper and lower ends of the hillside town, where CRS riot police in body armour, helmets and boots line up every night.
"Those are the front lines," he says. "Every town in le neuf trois has front lines now."
In the daytime, security forces withdraw. Tow trucks remove the carcasses of burned-out cars. It is the Eid al-Fitr, the Muslim feast at the end of Ramadan, and there are children in new clothes playing outside.
As ghettos go, Clichy is not bad. Most buildings are well-maintained, but they have a cluttered, oppressive atmosphere, with laundry and satellite dishes on every balcony.
"The ghetto is in your mind," one resident tells me. "It's like living in a cage."
The tension is almost physical. Everywhere, small groups of Arab and African men stand on the pavement, as if to mark their turf, watching and waiting.
The bus drops me outside the shopping centre that houses the Bilal Mosque. Riot police line up across the street every night, and residents of Clichy accuse them of lobbing a tear-gas grenade into the mosque during evening prayers on October 30th.
TO DISCOURAGE LOOTERS and arsonists, shopping centres in the banlieue are built like giant warehouses, with shops opening on to a central passage that can be closed in. The centres are shabby and sinister, with a reputation as a haunt for drug-dealers.
The owner of a grocery store leads me out the back door and points to a garage-like prayer room decorated with Moroccan tiles. At first, the men who gather for midday prayers are hostile, but they relent slightly on learning that I am not French and do not work for television. In the banlieue, journalists are viewed as part of the establishment, government propagandists.
"Sarkozy used to bring TV cameras with him, and they filmed us like animals in a zoo," one resident explains.
"They distort what we say," complains another.
After prayers, a middle-aged man named Samir talks to me. An engineer with a degree in computer science, he claims he had a good job with a defence subcontractor until 1999, when he was fired. He believes the authorities didn't want Muslim Arabs working on sensitive technology.
A bushy-bearded man in sandals, an embroidered black robe and white skullcap seems to have authority over the others. He refuses to say his name or job, but shows me a recording on his mobile phone of the October 30th tear-gas attack. The images show pandemonium in the mosque, women screaming, people tripping and falling over.
MY REQUEST TO meet the families of Ziad Benna and Bouna Traore, the 17- and 15-year-old boys who died by electrocution when they hid from police in the local power substation on October 27th, gets lost in a thicket of broken conversations and mobile phone calls. Ziad's family are from Tunisia, Bouna's from Mali. This week, they filed a lawsuit against unknown persons - that is to say the police - for "non-assistance to a person in danger".
Sofiane, one of the boys arrested at the time, says he overheard policemen say: "They're in the power plant. They won't go far."
The prosecutor in nearby Bobigny has quoted police radio traffic in which a policeman reported that he "saw two youths climbing over the fence into the EDF plant". A preliminary inquiry notes that, a few minutes later, another policeman said over the radio "that entering the EDF plant was life-threatening". Yet police left the scene.
Sarkozy has promised that the circumstances of the tragedy "will come to light". But policeman are rarely punished for their handling of cases in the banlieue.
The deaths of Ziad and Bouna, the tear-gas in the mosque, and Sarkozy's "racist insults" are the three grievances I heard over and over in Clichy. Two days before the rioting started, on a visit to the banlieue, Sarkozy referred to young delinquents as racaille (scum).
Last June, when an 11 year-old boy was killed in a shoot-out between rival gangs in Seine-Saint-Denis, Sarkozy promised to "wash the neighbourhood with Karcher [a power hose]".
"We're not cars or wall-to-wall carpet, to be washed with Karcher," Mohamed (17) protests when I talk with him and his buddies in the street, a few metres from a melted green rubbish bin and the ghostly outline of a burned car.
"We're not respected," Mohamed continues. "So why should we respect anyone?"
For the rioting to end, he insists, Sarkozy will have to apologise on television or, better yet, resign.
When I go to the building where Bouna Traore's family allegedly live, I find four Africans and an Arab blocking the front door. Their eyes are glassy. One wears black leather gloves. Police reports say rioters wear gloves to protect their hands while hurling petrol bombs.
"Get out," the Arab says, glaring at me.
The reception is not much warmer at the fire station on the high ground above Clichy, which now serves as headquarters for security forces. From elevated desks behind one-way plate-glass windows, half a dozen firemen watch over the street which the bus driver described as the front line, and the slopes of Le Chêne Pointu beyond, as if staring from the bridge of a ship over a threatening sea.
Like most of the residents of Clichy, the firemen don't want to talk, but they offer the phone number of the press spokesman in Paris.
As I leave, one of them jokes: "Stick around. Things liven up after dark."