Islamic fundamentalists and immigrant communities in France
WITH 800,000 ALGERIAN citizens living in France, and a much larger number of people more or less connected to Northern Africa by birth or descent, the serious situation in Algeria could hardly fail to have an impact on the Arab minority in France. Especially since Islamic fundamentalists have targeted the diaspora: source of finance, but
International Viewpoint #264 MARCH 1995 tobacco. Youth clubs, summer holiday camps, literacy courses, school support, cleaning the streets of drug dealers, maintainance of places of worship, so many vacuums left open for the fundamentalists to fill.
The hyjack of an Air France plane during the Christmas holidays was not just a signal to also the conduit for "dissolute" morality, and European music, fashion and television. by Suad B.
While the revolutionary left, and the workers' movement in general has only weak links to the North African immigrant communities in the suburbs of France, we have picked up enough signals to be sure that an Islamic fundamentalist campaign is under way. Islamic fundamentalist leaders hope to use those in Europe of moslem origin (Turks and Albanians in Germany and Switzerland, North African Berbers and Arabs in France and Spain, both groups in Belgium and Holland, Pakistanis, Indians and Bangladeshis in Britain) as one of the bases of their activities. In a way their model is the key financial and logistic role played by the French Federation within the National Liberation Front (F.L.N.) during the Algerian war of independence. With the enormous difference that the F.L.N. was leading an anti-colonial revolution against French oppression, while the fundamentalists are leading a civil war against their own people, especially women, to replace Algeria's current military regime by a religious dictatorship.
As in Algeria, women are the main target of Islamic fundamentalists in France too. Traditional societies create favourable conditions for a whole range of prejudices and discriminations against women. To be sure, polygamy, forced marriage, marital rape, "instant divorce' for men, or marital and parental violence against women, all existed in the immigrant milieu independently of Islamic fundamentalism. But urbanisation, contact with Western culture, television, the mass media, and the agitation and vociferousness of women have caused a decline in these practices in our communities. Or so it seemed.
Islamic fundamentalism wants to stop this evolution, and put women back where we were 1,400 years ago. This isn't a religious question: Islamic fundamentalism isn't some ultra-strict branch of Islam, but the use of religion for ultra-reactionary political goals.
The evidence of an Islamic fundamentalist offensive is clear. Four schoolgirls were suspended in September 1989 for wearing headscalfs: the number of girls comming to school with their heads covered is now over 4,000. (Source: Ministry of Education). It isn't the holy spirit which has caused thousands of girls and women in this country to start covering themselves up. Nor are they really so enamoured with this symbol of their oppression, a symbol which generations of women and men struggled for their right to tear off. The return to the veil is the result of an organised Islamic fundamentalist campaign to win male recruits. The fundamentalists offer the most backward of our men the possibility to compensate for their humiliation as exploited workers and as immigrants by taking it out on women.
Some girls have proclaimed on television that they have freely chosen their veil. And for sure, by no means all these girls and women support the full fundamentalist programme for women. Some want to proclaim their identity, and their refusal of racism, in displaying themselves veiled. This doesn't stop the hijab (full veil) from being a fundamentalist uniform.and a sign of intolerance. And it doesn't stop those who refuse the veil being attacked as whores.
Dozens, perhaps hundreds of associations more or less inspired by the fundamentalists are now active in most areas of community and civic organisation. To a certain extent, they fill the gap abandoned or neglected by the public sector, and left open by the trades unions and the left wing. In Lille, Northern France, veiled women distribute plates of the North African dish couscous (meat and vegetable stew with steamed semolina) to the homeless. In La Rochelle, posters call for regular, fair distribution of food for the poor (and for the criminalisation of alcohol and the French state (with whom, presumably, regular contacts have long been in existance), but more a message to French society and to Arab immigrants here. By humiliating the French authorities, the GIA presumably hoped to generate a feeling of vengance among immigrants, and to further provoke the excesses of anti-Arab racism among the widder population. What do do?
Young people in the 'worst" parts of town regularly explode in anger against the economic situation which condemns them to marginalisation, and to the racism which festers in society. Hardly a week goes by without a young man dying a violent death in suspicious circumstances. His (white) Killers -police, shopkeepers, whoever, claim self-defence. Once in a while they may be right. But what is certain is that there are no longer any groups of lawyers and 'personalities" which can help the families and mates of those who die violent deaths establish the truth.
For sure, the explosions of anger in the suburbs rarely take the best path for meeting the needs of those involved. But what is important to ask ourselves is what can we do to develop this anger in another direction than the burning of cars by teenage joy-riders? In 1994 the L.C.R. was very active in protests after the suspicious death of a young man in police custody. But only because this all took place in the 18th district of Paris, rather than in a small town. Obvously, the far left does not have the forces to be present everywhere. But the decline of the trades unions in the traditional sectors of the economy where so many immigrants worked have made our implantation in these milieu even weaker than 20 years ago.
And yet we see before us that a small number of young men, and a larger number of young women in these Arab districts are increasingly aware of the need to do something to protest against the grim future pressing down on them, These young people are those most at risk from the double-headed enemy of Islamic fundamentalism and French racism. We have to help them mobilise themselves in the high schools and in the districts they live in. Are we ready to make this a priority? *
L.