Youth rebel in Brussels
Wathelet (social Christian), has demanded that vandalism cases get top priority in the courts. Of course, there will probably be legislative elections this autumn and
AN IDENTITY CHECK set off an explosion of ander ov an explosion or anger by youth from immigrant
(mainly Moroccan) familles on Friday May 10 in the
Forest precinct of Brussels.
Several hundred youth fought with the police and attacked symbols of luxury and elitism.
VINCENT SCHELTIENS
VER the next few days further clashes took place in other parts of Brussels, including SaintGilles, Molenbeek, Saint-Josse and Schaerbeek. This explosion of anger is born of a social situation which is to be found in all the big cities and housing estates of Belgium, where the authorities, whether at national or local level, have nothing to offer young people in general, and the immigrant youth in particular. Some 22% of the inhabitants of these quarters of Brussels, and one child in two, live below the poverty line, as defined by international standards.
About 50% of Brussels' youth are from immigrant backgrounds — about 27% of the whole population. The immigrant population is concentrated in nine of the city's 19 communes. This layer of the population is subjected to systematic discrimination. This applies in education: which is not adapted to their needs and where no acknowledgement of their different cultural background is made; employment: where many small firms refuse to employ immigrants; police hostility: with identity checks several times a day, often by the same cops; and with regard to recreation: no playing fields for the children - in Forest the swimming pool has been turned into an expensive dance hall, which refuses entry to immigrants.
The racism of the Brussels police force is particularly striking. Underpaid and working in appalling conditions, the communal police "take it out" on the young immigrants — a fact described in a recently-published book by an former Brussels cop. Extreme right groups have infiltrated the police. According to several inhabitants of the district, fascist militants gave the young immigrants "logistic support" with the aim of being better able
And also ON THE night of Saturday, May 25 election fever is on the rise.
These events renrecent cavarol Linda f These events represent several kinds of failure. After the 1988 legislative elec•tions, the new government installed a royal commissariat for immigrants, headed by Paula D'Hondt (social Christian - a former minister who had just lost her position). Her series of reports were hardly looked at by the government, on its own admission. The commissariat is an advisory body unable to make policy. The integration policy that it is fighting for (and which includes a number of sensible in France 1991, a hundred youth clashed with police in the Val Fourré district of Mantes, some 40 kms from Paris, looting and burning the town centre shops. Six young people were arrested during the night; one of them died on May 27 in detention, victim, according to the police story, of "heart failure following a serious asthma attack." This death recalls another, that of Malik Oussekine, who died as a result of a police charge during the student movement of November-December 1986.
Over the past eight months, the French suburban housing estates have been the scene of repeated explosions of violence on the part of desperate young people who live in these human dumping grounds where unemployment, insecurity and racism are concentrated.
The story begins in October 1990 in Vaulx-en-Velin, a working class district near Lyons, where some 20% of the 50,000 inhabitants are unemployed. The "accidental" death of a local youth at the hands of a police patrol led to violent clashes between hundreds of youth and the forces of order. There was looting and buildings were set on fire. The scenario is the same everywhere: police and private security guard provocations; racist insults hurled at young "beurs"
(young people of immigrant background) and repression of the "wreckers".
As in Sartrouville and Argenteuil - where the same outbursts of anger have been seen — Val-Fourré is a part a region of big public suburban housing estates built in the 1960s to accommodate immigrant labour employed in the big factories. These today have been hard hit by the economic crisis. Nearly 20,000 jobs disappeared in this region between 1982 and 1990, above all in the automobile and chemical industries. The unemployment rate is 10.5%, reach-
Wing more than 20% in some districts, and educational levels are low.
The authorities are becoming increasingly concerned about the deteriorating social and economic situation in such places, and attempts are being made to set up rehabilitation programmes and programmes to encourage youth employment. But it is not clear how the joblessness of young people is to be dealt with when nearly 30% of those seeking work are under 25 years old.
Inthe coming months such explosions will occur again and again, in confrontations in which increasingly desperate people, left on the sidelines of our "modern" society, will come up against a system unable to offer any perspective of meeting their basic needs.* 25 June 10, 1991 • #208 International Viewpoint