{news} Fw: MERIP report: Urban Violence in France; The Mehlis Report and Lebanon's Trouble Next Door

[Justine McCabe]

From: "Middle East Report Online" <ctoensing at merip.org>
To: <justinemccabe at earthlink.net>
Sent: Sunday, November 20, 2005 7:45 PM
Subject: Urban Violence in France


> On November 15, 2005, the French National Assembly voted to extend by three
> months a "state of emergency" declared eight days earlier in response to two
> weeks of clashes between police and youths in decaying suburban housing
> projects across the country. The clashes broke out following the October 27
> electrocution of two teens, both housing project residents, who were fleeing
> what they believed was police pursuit. Interior Minister Nicolas Sarkozy
> went on national television to promise "zero tolerance" for what he called
> the "scum" torching cars and attacking state property in protest.
> 
> The immediate causes of the ongoing confrontations are the two teens' deaths
> and Sarkozy's inflammatory rhetoric. But as Paul Silverstein and Chantal
> Tetreault argue in their essay, "Urban Violence in France," the deeper cause
> is a concatenation of state policies developed over decades that has
> endeavored (and failed) to "integrate" the children of immigrants and poor
> whites into the system, while simultaneously stigmatizing those youths as a
> threat to public security. These policies point to an "enduring logic of
> colonial rule within post-colonial metropolitan France."
> 
> Silverstein and Tetreault's essay is now available in Middle East Report
> Online:
> http://www.merip.org/mero/interventions/silverstein_tetreault_interv.htm
_____________________________________________________________________

The UN-authorized investigation into the assassination of former Lebanese
Prime Minister Rafiq al-Hariri, now well into a second phase of heightened
brinkmanship between Damascus and Washington, also has Lebanon holding its
collective breath.

Journalist Marlin Dick explains how the first Mehlis report, and the wait
for the second, have left both Lebanese politics and Lebanese-Syrian
relations in a state of paralysis. Read "The Mehlis Report and Lebanon's
Trouble Next Door," in Middle East Report Online at:
http://www.merip.org/mero/mero111805.html.
Middle East Report Online is a free service of the Middle East Research
and Information Project (MERIP).
.

-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <https://pairlist10.pair.net/mailman/private/ctgp-news/attachments/20051120/a00a4df4/attachment.html>