World Cup loss exposes France’s racism
By
G. Dunkel
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.
Articles copyright 1995-2012 Workers World.
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