Vandals of Vitry

Racism in a Paris suburb

It was a cruel welcome for the 320 black immigrants from the West African nation of Mali. They had just settled into their newly refurbished, five-story government housing project in the southeastern Paris suburb of Vitry-sur-Seine. Then, on Christmas Eve, the quiet of the shabby, working-class district was broken by a raid of angry townspeople. Accompanied by Paul Mercieca, Vitry's Communist mayor, a group of 50 residents and town officials swarmed over the building. They snipped telephone lines, sawed off water pipes, tore hot water heaters off the walls and ripped the wiring out of fuse boxes. While Mercieca stirred up the townsfolk through a bullhorn, one of the intruders revved up a bulldozer and rammed it into the building's iron railing. After knocking down a stone staircase and a cinder-block wall, he scooped the rubble into huge mounds that obstructed the building's entrances. The all-male group of immigrants, who had recently been forced to move from condemned dwellings in a nearby village, offered little resistance.

The vandalism at Vitry was just one of many ugly incidents of racism that have erupted in France as a result of growing tensions over the presence in the country of more than 4 million immigrants, mostly from Algeria, Tunisia and Morocco. More than half are unskilled laborers who work at construction and menial jobs long snubbed by French workers in prosperous times. As unemployment figures have soared, however, the French have come to resent the immigrants as job stealers. Adding to the resentment is the increased burden on education, and a popular feeling that crime rates among immigrants are high. Scrawled on brick walls throughout working-class regions outside Paris are the words ONE AND A HALF MILLION UNEMPLOYED IS ONE AND A HALF MILLION IMMIGRANTS TOO MANY.

Seeking to avert a social collision, the government of President Valery Giscard d'Estaing halted new immigration from non-European Community countries in 1974. More recently, it has redoubled police efforts to ferret out illegal immigrants, and offered $2,250 bonuses to workers who voluntarily return to their own countries. The trouble is that many African countries have refused to take them back. Consequently, what Giscard has failed to solve by expulsion, he has tried to accomplish by diffusion: thousands of immigrants have been moved out of cities by the government and relocated in suburban areas where their numbers are less conspicuous.

Since most of the forced relocation has been to grimy working-class districts that have long been Communist strongholds, the party has become sensitive to the issue. Once lukewarm defenders of immigrant workers' rights, the Communists now oppose any further relocation of immigrants in public housing, and will no doubt ride the issue all the way to the presidential election campaign next spring. The Vitry raid was duly denounced by a series of local political and labor organizations. But the liberal daily Le Quotidien de Paris sadly acknowledged that "electorally, it was the most profitable strategy." qed

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