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World Cup loss exposes France’s racism

Published Jun 30, 2010 4:13 PM

Soccer’s World Cup every four years is the world’s most watched and followed sporting event. It consists of a first round, where the 32 teams selected are divided into eight groups and each plays the other members of the group. The best two teams from each group get to advance to the next round.

France’s team didn’t make it out of the first round, doing worse than South Africa’s. Some of the team’s leaders didn’t sing France’s national anthem “La Marseillaise” at the closing ceremonies.

The team included 13 men of color — from France’s very large North and West African immigrant communities or the Caribbean — out of 22 players. After the team and its entourage flew back to France and landed at a small airport north of Paris, the team’s union representative, Thierry Henry, a veteran of France’s 1998 team that won the World Cup, was driven to a closed, one-hour meeting with French President Nicolas Sarkozy.

Sarkozy called for a parliamentary inquiry on the failure of the French team after a meeting with Prime Minister François Fillon, Sports Minister Roselyne Bachelot and Rama Yade, the junior sports minister who was born in Senegal.

While Sarkozy and his ministers were restrained, members of his UMP (Union for a Popular Movement) party were venomous and racist. They called the team’s mainly Black members “gang bosses” and “immature kids” with “chick peas for brains.”

Fadela Amara, who was born to Algerian parents, is the secretary of state for urban policies. She is mainly concerned with the banlieus, France’s impoverished suburbs where the immigrant communities are concentrated. As reaction to the team’s loss intensified, she warned that it had become racially charged.

“There is a tendency to ethnicize what has happened,” she told a closed meeting of the UMP. She went on to say, “Everyone condemns the lower-class neighborhoods. People doubt that those of immigrant backgrounds are capable of respecting the nation.”

Earlier this year, Sarkozy and his minister for immigration kicked off a campaign of “debates,” which are the French equivalent of Town Hall meetings, on immigration and “national identity.” One sticking point was the fact that the largest number of people practicing any religion in France are Muslim.

Amara criticized Sarkozy’s handling of these meetings, warning that “all democrats and all republicans will be lost” in the “ethnically tinged” criticism that surfaced. As a minister in Sarkozy government, she really couldn’t call this criticism what it was: racist.

“We’re building a highway for the National Front (FN),” she said. The FN is a fascist party in France, founded by Jean-Marie Le Pen, who boasts of having served as a torturer in the French army that fought in Algeria. It has recently been growing in popularity, and is the UMP’s main challenger from the right.

Source of quotes: Le Point, June 22.