In the banlieues of France, police violence is not the exception, but a postcolonial legacy

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It was July 2016 when Adama Traoré, a twenty-four-year-old Frenchman, died of suffocation in a police station in Persan, in Val-d'Oise, north of Paris, after a chase with the police following a check.Thanks to the legal battle carried out by her sister, Assa Traoré, who never accepted the expert report which excludes any responsibility of the police and blames her death on an alleged genetic disease, the case is now jurisprudence in France.

Meanwhile, Assa Traoré has become the symbolic face of the French anti-racist movement.During the protest against the death of George Floyd in 2020, the committee The truth pour Adama (Truth for Adama) led by her, it brought more than 20,000 people to the streets of Paris.This July 8, 2023 he gathered them another 2,000 in Place de la République despite the prefecture's ban on demonstrations due to "risk of disturbing public order".Even during this Saturday's march the police did not spare themselves.A ventral tackle was used on Yssoufou Traoré, the brother of Adama Traoré, who died of asphyxiation following exactly the same type of move used to immobilize.Yssoufou ended up in hospital with a "broken nose, head trauma with eye contusion, thoracic, abdominal and lumbar bruises", reports the French newspaper Le Monde.

Just a few days after the new episode of night protests that shook the suburbs French - as happened not only in 2005, but also in 2016 following the death of Adama - the story of Yssoufou Traoré once again raises the issue of police violence in France towards its racialized citizens, often erroneously defined as " migrants” or “foreigners” in Italy.

Despite France prohibit by law since the 1970s ethnic-based statistics, the history of suburbs French speaks for itself.It is no coincidence, in fact, that the suburbs - characterized by the typical towers or "bars", very tall or very long condominiums capable of accommodating hundreds and hundreds of small apartments - are so identifiable.The architecture of grand ensembles it reflects the history of housing policies in the post-war years and is at the origin of real housing and racial segregation in the era that followed the independence of the former French colonial countries. “This is not a French specificity, but France has been the European country that has gone furthest in this type of urban planning”, explains to Blue suitcase the urban planner Franck Gintrand, expert in land planning and development.Gintrand recalls that these barracks were designed to accommodate a large number of people very quickly in order to empty the slums or prevent new ones from being created around the cities.

It was June 27th when seventeen-year-old Nahel Merzouk was killed by a policeman for not stopping immediately at a checkpoint.Nahel lived in one of the symbolic municipalities of that type of urban planning:Nanterre. Interviewed by Public Sénat, the channel of the French Senate, the historian Annie Fourcaut explains that the map of emeutes [ed, riots] that followed Nahel's death does not correspond to that of the poorest municipalities in France, as according to her it happened in 2005.His interview was thus used (also in Italy) to question the version of those who tried to explain the protests through the argument of frustration and social marginalization.Instead, it would be an essentially identity-related anger, a question of "non-integration" of young French citizens, in reality often of the fourth or even fifth generation.Yasmine Djamai, a twenty-year-old French granddaughter of an Algerian grandfather and an inhabitant of Nanterre, responds thus to those who ask her what her origins are and how she defines her relationship with France, where she was born and raised:“My integration presupposes that I am excluded from something, when I am part of a different and complex society that there are those who still cannot accept, and therefore cannot even describe”.

Nanterre does not appear at the top of the list of the poorest municipalities in France, yet it has another characteristic that catches the eye even just by looking at a map:it is one of the areas of the Paris belt that mark the divide between the center and the banlieue.Nanterre, in fact, begins beyond what in the capital is called the Periph', the Paris Peripherique ring road, and borders the La Défense district, one of the most important financial hubs in Europe.It therefore represents a common symbol, the margin where increasingly evident differences crystallize and marginalization becomes evident.Nanterre is a town that was born on the rubble of an enormous shantytown, where workers of Algerian, Tunisian, Moroccan - but also Portuguese and Italian - origin, regularly employed in the French industries after the war, during the 1950s and '60, then joined by their families.

The workforce coming from abroad, and logically largely from the colonies, where it was easy to leave, was not given a housing solution for decades.Many people on the streets of Nanterre still say that they were born French, yes, but in a shack ten minutes from the Eiffel Tower.“I discovered I was French at eighteen, when I was called to serve in the military under the tricolour”, says for example Ahmed Djamai, Yasmine's father, born and raised in Nanterre, whose story is told in the podcast Nanterre stop.His father arrived in Paris with a French document, a French citizen, as an inhabitant of French Algeria.However, he was part of the National Liberation Front, the movement that directed Algeria's war of independence against France.During the war of liberation of Algeria, the struggle for independence was organized not only in Algeria, but also in the slums of France.

The slums then become a matter of internal security and are replaced by hastily built public housing following the Vivian law of 1971, when the then prime minister Jacques Chaban Delmas ensured:“By 1972 there will no longer be a single shanty town, neither in Paris nor anywhere else in France”.According to Muriel Cohen, French researcher who worked for a long time in Nanterre and author of the essay Des families invisibles.Les Algériens de France entre integrations et discriminations (1945-1985), "these cities they were hastily built because the government was risking its credibility.The militant associations who frequented and helped the families of the slums disappeared, because at the time it was believed that the problem had been solved.On the contrary, people lived relegated to isolated areas, in highly flammable prefabricated buildings where there were several fires and accidents because the housing was of such terrible quality.People were moved following the logic of segregation.I don't think it could have been worse:take all the inhabitants of a slum and move them in one fell swoop, without criteria, into isolated prefabricated buildings".

Thus the banlieue was born, where the logic of colonial domination was reproduced.This is how the large 'barres' were born, the beehive condominiums which were supposed to represent a temporary solution while waiting for a council house, but instead often remained standing for decades.What at the time were called 'transit cities', literally transit cities, often still host families to whom the State promised a long-lasting housing solution.The fact that these condominiums were controlled by the same army generals and police officials who returned from Algeria after independence in '62 has fueled tensions for decades, giving rise to a system of organized and systematic repression of these neighborhoods of France .It is here that, following a series of deaths already in the 80s and 90s, as told in the famous film La Haine (Hatred), the tradition of emeutes of the French banlieue.

To understand the revolts of the suburbs today and also the history of its complex identities - which too often seem to become the only reason for the debate - it is therefore necessary to take a step back and return to what these neighborhoods represented in the past, how they were formed and Why.Their history, the history of the French citizens who live there, and who sometimes still keep the document that reads "FMA - French Muslim of Algeria", for example, has closely to do with the recent colonial past of the Hexagone.Its consequences, in fact, are not only still visible today, but still remain a very delicate political issue.Emmanuel Macron also knows this well, and for years he has been trying to sugarcoat his image by establishing a dialogue with the countries of the former French colonial empire - where anti-France sentiment is spreading like wildfire - and in particular with the Algeria.

In 2020, for example, Macron entrusted the French historian Benjamin Stora with the preparation of a report on the memory of colonization and the Algerian war with the aim of "formulating recommendations to promote reconciliation between the French and Algerian people" .If there are therefore attempts - not always successful - to make progress in the development of a common memory, these seem to be limited to a question of foreign policy.The "internal colonial question" of France (and Europe), how they define it several scholars of the post-independence period, however, remains unresolved.The social frustration of neighborhoods born in a specific historical context, grown in opposition to their surroundings, is still considered and managed as a matter of mere security and treated as an emergency, when in reality it has deep roots.Almost demonstrating the distance between the political class and the complex reality of the so-called neighborhoods, Emmanuel Macron declared following the first protests that young people “They live on the streets playing video games that have intoxicated them”.

According to Nordine Nabili, former director of the Bondy Blog, a media that provides information from and about the suburbs, segregation can now be measured with data:“In the PolitiqueVille neighborhoods [a public program to support the suburbs], one in two children lives in a poor family.Almost 40% of the inhabitants live below the poverty line, three times more than in other territories.For the same qualifications, the unemployment rate in the suburbs is double that elsewhere:45% between 16 and 25 years old, 16% among young graduates.40% of the inhabitants do not have a driving licence.Paediatricians are one third compared to the national average, with a much larger population of children.Pupils in schools in Créteil [Paris suburbs] lose on average a year of compulsory schooling due to the absence of substitutes who have never been replaced", he lists in a thread on Twitter.

And he concludes:“The state of emergency will not resolve the accumulation of emergencies experienced daily in these neighborhoods or respond to the widespread feeling of betrayal that originates in the promises of the political class, which were never respected.”Just browse the articles of the editorial project BondyBlog to realize when Nahel's apparently exceptional story is actually a common story.In the suburb of Sarcelle, for example, on June 4th another twenty-eight year old died after a chase with the police, reports the local media.The incipit of this report Sarcelle who talks about a protest in memory of the young man speaks clearly:“Is this march for Nahel?” asks a passerby.“No, it's for Monzomba”.

On July 2, another young 27-year-old died in unclear conditions in Marseille during protests.Therefore, a generation of which the French newspaper recognizes itself in Nahel's story Le Monde he tried to trace the profile by talking to families, friends, people close to the protesters.Not even once is the word "migrant", "foreigner", "native of" reported, but rather the "loss of orientation" of a part of that generation "in revolt and hyper-connected, with a complex profile" who experienced adolescence during the Covid-19 period in isolated and closed areas, where social stigma historically derives from undeniable racial and territorial segregation.

Preview image:AP video frame via YouTube

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