Immigrant's arrest sparks angry resistance

The Paris police on March 27 seized a Congolese man who, they claimed, tried to get on a train to the northern suburbs of Paris without a ticket. He claims he had a ticket but it didn’t work.

The station where this happened—the Gare du Nord—is the largest in Europe, with many layers and an open central space. Passengers could see the Black man arguing and then many cops forcing him flat on the floor, handcuffing him and dragging him away.

A crowd supporting him quickly gathered. An elderly woman with her fist in the air began chanting “Free him! Free him!”

The struggle was on. It lasted for eight hours, with police assaults, tear gas and fast-moving confrontations with a few hundred demonstrators. According to the French alternative media, young women stood out in resisting the cops.

In 2005 the working-class and poor suburbs of Paris, where large numbers of immigrants and their French-born children live, were the scene of six weeks of furious protests over the sharp and rising discrimination they face. These protests spread to other major French cities.

In France, people with higher incomes usually live in the center cities, while the poor, nationally oppressed minorities, commonly from North and West African backgrounds, live in large housing projects in the suburbs.

France has what may be the strongest left movement in Europe, when it pulls together, but it definitely also has the strongest right, anchored by the National Front (FN) of Jean-Marie Le Pen. Le Pen boasts of being an intelligence officer in the Algerian War, which means he has blood on his hands from torturing Algerian independence fighters. Many progressives in France, and almost all members of the oppressed communities, consider the FN to be a fascist party.

The French presidential campaign is in full swing and this confrontation immediately became a major issue. What made it sharper is that the suburbs have had a phenomenal rise in voter registration, increasing as much as 400 percent since the last presidential election in 2002. The right-wing parties have also made immigration and “lawlessness” into a major issue.

Nicolas Sarkozy, the presidential candidate of the Union for a Popular Movement (UMP), just resigned as interior minister of the present government. He led the government’s effort to crush the protests in 2005, calling the protesters “scum” who had to be “steam-cleaned out of French society.” He was the first candidate to visit the Gare du Nord after the protest. Facing down hecklers, who called him a “fascist provocateur,” he used the opportunity to attack his main electoral opponent, Ségolène Royal of the Socialist Party.

Sarkozy claimed that Royal would permit poor, Black people free use of the trains and that she condoned destruction. Her response, unfortunately, was not to call for free transportation for all or criticize the police but to say that Sarkozy’s statements at the Gare du Nord and his earlier statements as interior minister in 2005 had provoked and incited violence.

Royal’s Socialist Party, trying to split some votes from Le Pen’s FN, is pushing for every student to learn the French national anthem in order to graduate and for every family to own a French flag to wave on national holidays.

France has two rounds of voting for its president. In the first round, any party that can gain the sponsorship of 500 or more elected officials runs; the two parties with the most votes in the first round then compete in the second. Currently, 12 parties are running.

This lets progressives vote their heart in the first round, even if they pick the lesser of two evils in the second. But since the left couldn’t agree on a single candidate, its electoral strength and impact on the French working class, which is combative and conscious but also politically disunited, has been diffuse.

The immigrant workers, however, are not waiting for elections and are taking their struggles to the streets.

While the French capitalists would like to see Sarkozy run the country, the protest at the Gare du Nord shows that the anger and resistance in the oppressed communities can break out at any time. If this anger generates significant solidarity from the broader French working class, the ruling class will have a major problem.