Ophelia's Journal.

Ophelia · Posted: Tue Feb 26, 2008 4:19 pm Post subject:

The first generation of Algerian immigrants, and clashes.

Those immigrants just went about their business, but as I wrote earlier, they were resented-- one reason I think I haven't mentioned yet is that some of them had fought against the French during the Algerian war. It was not known how many of the immigrants had taken part in the fighting, probably a minority, but all were suspected.

Those passionate negative feelings somtimes led to actual killings of immigrants from the Maghreb, the killings being called "ratonnades".
The worst one, which is comparatively well documented, took place in Paris in 1961.
I remember having a short discussion with a BT member, perhaps Mr P, about the idea that Nazi crimes were due mostly to the organization the Nazis created, and the indiciduals who perpetrated those crimes did not kill again later because they no longer had an incentive to do so.
This is certainly mostly true, but in the case of the infamous Maurice Papon in France, the same man who organized the sending of Jews to the Drancy camp went on with his career as an official. In the 1960's, he was the Prefet of Paris and led a "ratonnade" during which the cadavers of the immigrants were thrown into the River Seine.
Some people are just evil and are also very good at getting jobs with high responsibilities. As long as the situation offers no opportunities they seem to be respecting the law but when things turn ugly-- as in Paris at the height of the Algerian war-- they take charge. How he could continue in public life so far I do not know (yet!) but he was eventually tried in the 1990's.

It is very difficult -- once more, and this is infuriating-- to find out how many immigrants were killed after 1962 in such "ratonnade " attacks, which lasted until 1976.
My impression is that they were sporadic, not involving totals in their hundreds for example
One of the heartening things is that I sometimes find documents written by ordinary citizens who find, like me, that the press*and books don't say what they need, and then go about writing their own articles. Some of them are very helpful.

(* The press, for example Le Monde, express good opinions about racism but are very short on facts and analysis.)

Killings in the South of France (where most of the Pieds Noirs had settled):

The document below is the result of the research (in French) of one of those citizens. It's about events in Marseilles in 1973.
It's particularly interesting starting with part III.

http://s.huet.free.fr/kairos/doxai/mas73.htm

Ophelia · Posted: Tue Feb 26, 2008 7:19 pm Post subject:

Housing: First buildings were made, with a room per man, since the immigrants were all men.

Those who were most hardly dealt with were the Harkis (who had fought in the Frenvh Army against Algeria). They did not get the jobs or pensions they had been promised .

Then the high rise buildings were built in suburbs outside the towns where land was cheap. They were not meant to last, and the immigrants also meant to go back home.
But as the years passed the economic and political situation in Algeria kept deteriorating, and it became clear that finding a job in Algeria was, for most of them, an impossible dream.

Also, from the beginning, the Harkis lived in the same banlieues and buildings as the other immigrants from Algeria, and this created serious tensions.

Ophelia · Posted: Wed Feb 27, 2008 11:37 am Post subject:

I've seen half of the documentary by Gilles Perz "Pieds Noirs".

One thing which is said and the pictures show is that they were people of modest means, simple folks.

One of the interviewees says that history leaves very little space for the losers, and this is what happened to them.

There is an interview of Albert Camus's daughter-- he was a Pied Noir, and she says his life in Algeria is related in his book "Le Premier Homme"
(The First Man).

Another interviewee explains about one little-known activity of the terrorist organization OAS. Her job was to collect information about the cars of the Pieds Noirs who wanted to leave Algeria. Those people were considered to be traitors, and the OAS blew up their cars.

From what I've read so far it's difficult to understand exactly what General de Gaulle was trying to do.
After Word War II France had several governments in the 4th Republic (1946-1958).
They do not seem to have been very competent, and when they saw that they could not bring a solution to the Algerian problem they asked General de Galle to return (he had been writing his Memoirs in this house at Colombey les deux Eglises).

I've read two interpreatations so far:

1- De Gaulle first thought Algeria could remain French, and then events made him change his mind. This would explain the very surprising things he said in a speech at Algiers in 1958.

2- De Gaulle knew from the start that Algeria would be independent, but he felt he needed to buy time because so many minds were closed to this idea.

What he told the Pieds Noirs in Algiers was "Je vous ai compris!" (I understand you) and " Vive l'Algérie Française (Long live French Algeria).

Nobody would think about it twice if a politician said something like this nowadays, but in those days, the words of the hero of the Resistance carried weight, and people believed him, and hoped-- when they should have been preparing their repatriation.

Later when it became clear that he wanted to negociate Independence those people felt betrayed.

The Canadians among our readers may remember that de Gaulle did something similar when he made a speech on a visit to Quebec in July 1967 and told an extatic crowd "Vive le Québec libre!"-- free Québec--.

When I watch those pictures they make no sense to me. Neither the General nor the French people wanted to actually help people in Quebec become independent.
He was not the sort of man who said things lightly, and I wonder what he meant. Perhaps he was just thinking in terms of the development of French language and culture. Perhaps he just wanted to help put Quebec on the map-- which is what happened. Anyway, after this, the Canadian authorities shortened his tour of the country.

To return to Algeria, "Vive l'Algérie Française" it was in 1958, at least for a few months.

Ophelia · Posted: Thu Feb 28, 2008 2:26 am Post subject:

I've watched the second half of the Pieds Noirs documentary, and this is hard to take.

One woman explained that she and other young people had gone to Bab El Oued, a district of Algers, because the adults had told them to bring food to the OAS fighters and (strangely, with hindsight) no one had expected any harm could come to them. People were bewildered as the French army (those young conscipts I mentioned before) opened fire on the young people.

Ophelia · Posted: Thu Feb 28, 2008 8:07 pm Post subject:

In the 1970's and the 1980's racist and discriminatory behaviour was increasingly felt to be unacceptable, and we discovered then that we did not have adequate laws to prosecute such behaviour.

I had a look at the laws that were passed during those two decades, about all those things that are taken for granted now, and I was amazed to see that the list of things that were forbidden was so long: so those were all all the things that people had been doing openly and that required new laws. It was now forbidden to refuse to sell something, or to rent to a member of another ethnic group on grounds of ethnic belonging.
It sounds obvious, but I guess I believed those were laws that had been passed and needed in the States only.

Some anti-racist organizations were created, the main ones being LICRA, SOS-Racisme, Ligue des Droits de l'Homme, MRAP.
They did some very good work, and the situation improved over the years.

The point of view of some critics is that nothing has changed, and people are as racist as ever, but this is not the way I see it.

One of the changes that was hardest to bring about was the crazy behaviour of discotheque owners. For as long as I can remember, they've been accused of refusing access to non-whites on such a variety of grounds that it was very difficult to prove that they were discriminating on the basis of race.
Many have stopped doing so, but for those that remain I have seen on the site of SOS-Racisme that they have an elaborate procedure with advice on what to do:

The couples should go in groups of three, two white couples and one coloured couple.
They all come with hidden recording devices. The white couple goes in first, the black couple is refused, and the third couple is a witness to the refusal.
Then SOS-Racisme presses charges, showing that the argument used against the second couple "We only take club members on Saturday nights, come back on a Friday..." was not used for the first couple.

From what I read, this is an organization that is doing things right and getting results.

Another example we hear a lot about at the moment is the case of racist insults being hurled at non-whites football players by some football fans during a match.

Here it is obvious that the problem is being solved: they now have procedures that stipulate that the referree has to stop the match, the abusive football fan is taken to the police station, and the club will press charges against him.

People may conclude that "nothing has changed" but this is not the way I see it.
The fans will learn -- in my opinion they 're unlikely to learn to be better people, they'll just insult the players on non-racial grounds.
However, we cannot expect too much at this stage.

About ten years ago the government had an awareness raising campaign about discrimination at work which was very well made because it did not try to preach, and the actors were excellent in the types they represented.

It showed a third-generation immigrant from the Maghreb who was bored at work answering the phone for a wine company.
one day, the seller who normally delivered the wine was unavailable and the man in the story took it upon himself to deliver the wine.
As he was about to get into the truck, the foreman told him that there was no way he was going to make this delivery, that the company had delivered wine to customers for over 100 years, the wines were called Leblanc wines and the customers did not want them delivered by an Arab!

The actor who played the immigrant is actually famous, and I wondered how he felt playing such a sensitive part when he was a descendent of an immigrant himself.
I found out that he was not: Roschdy Zem is a Maroccan actor who often plays the part of an immigrant in French films (for example "Ma Petite Entreprise").

In this story, like the chicken and the egg, it's difficult to be sure who is the racist: the company owner, or the customer?

I've heard similar tales about restaurants: young people worked as waiters if they were white, and otherwise worked in the kitchen, on the grounds that customers didn't want to see an Arab or black waiter.

My answer to "the customer doesn't want..." is: why don't they try us?

I've tried to think whether people would leave the shop and not buy a washing machine because of the race of the seller, and I really can't see this happening, it just doesn't play out.
And if somebody was annoyed, this would be made up by other customers who would think the shop was doing things right.

For example, about two years ago our main TV channel, TF1, introduced the first black anchorman ever on the evening news (or any other news). The comments I heard was why hadn't this happened earlier.

Ophelia · Posted: Fri Feb 29, 2008 7:55 am Post subject:

Ophelia · Posted: Fri Feb 29, 2008 8:50 am Post subject:

Ophelia · Posted: Fri Feb 29, 2008 8:56 am Post subject:

With the waves of immigration starting in the 1960's, there was a tendency in France to become entrenched in positions of refusal. The expressions "invasion" or "colonization in reverse" were often used.
The French did not understand or accept the terms of the Evian Agreements concerning free emigration to France, and felt victimized by them.

For the Algerians, these terms were meant to reddress the wrongs of colonization, and as such what France was doing was not enough.

So we had two positions which could not be reconciled, all the more so as the underlying principles were not understood, and much less expressed or explained.
So, resentment kept building up on both sides.

On the French side, the old idea that this particular group of immigrants could not be assimilated into French culture cropped up again.
Similar ideas had been used in the 19th century about Italian and Polish immigrants. They were Catholics, but in those days people said that the fact that they held masses in Polish showed that they could not and did not want to become members of French society.

The new immigrants are Muslims, and I think Chirac's and Sarkozy's governments, among others, underestimated the importance of one of the central tenets in our society: religion is private, you practise your religion discreetly.
Many French Muslims do just that (usually second and third or fourth generation immigrants).

For others, things that seperate them very visibly form the rest of society is wearing the veil (sometimes third generation girls whose mothers do not wear the veil), praying wherever you happen to be , even public places, if it is prayer time, and polygamy.

I remember many years ago that someone from India told me that in his country, polygamy was forbidden, except for Muslims. Religions are very important in India, and that seemed like a sensible law for them.
I actually thought we had a similar law, but when I enquired recently, I found out that no, indeed polygamy is forbiddden in France, and that there had been many recent laws to that effect.

How we end up having a society with laws against polygamy but polygamists being tolerated is confusing, as a principle and in practical applications.

This is one of the things which I think increase resentment: I had to look hard to get this information, and it's still not very clear. What can it look like to the man in the street?

I hear that there is talk of changing the law against polygamy in Canada.

I don't like all those exceptions that mean that a law is never enforced; the damage that is done is not enormous, but it does reinforce the idea in people's minds that the system makes no sense and some people are above the law.

I don't worry too much about polygamy, first because it concerns (this is with a guess of how many illegal immigrants may be concerned) about 180,000 people (men, women and children in families with one husband and two or three wives), and mostly because, as far as I know, the phenomenon stops with the first generation.

I read many years ago that polygamy in muslim societies was allowed if

a- the first wife agree to the husband's second marriage --I wonder how many ever do voice an opinion--

b- the husband could support two families.

This is the problem in France, first generation immigrants are often poor, and the statistic average for such families are about 18 people living in a flat made for six people and supported by child welfare benefits.

The French authorities can prevent the second marrige from taking place in France, but that's about it.
Now what they do is they take a compromise step: the second wife must live in a separate flat. What I've read is that it leads to some absurd situatuations in which she is then told that she must get a divorce in order to have access to this flat.
What I've read doesn't make it clear how well or badly this works out.
_________________

Ophelia

Ophelia · Posted: Fri Feb 29, 2008 11:20 am Post subject:

Politics.

As far as (I was going to write "the debate", but there isn't one) immigration is concerned , the far right (Front National) did a lot of harm for obvious reasons, by stirring up fear and anger among the people.

For the other type of harm they did, they were unwittingly helped by the left.
In the 1980's, as the left and anti-racist groups fought against racism, discussing immigration became taboo among the left and intellectuals, and so the far right got a monopoly on the topic.
Those who were non-politcical saw that only the far-right spoke about immigration, and as they didn't want to be associated with that nonsense or criticized by the left for just asking questions, they learnt to keep quiet.
And oh, surprise, while everybody was keeping quiet problems did not get solved.

In the 1980's "the left" meant the Socialists and the PCF (parti communiste français).
As far as I know the PCF were rather harmless, but perhaps this was because they were a small party.
For years they had been in denial about what was happening in the Soviet Union, and they only formally renounced the dictatorship of the proletariat in the late 1970's.
They meant well, but they were not particularly open to dialogue.
The world was separated into working class people (their heroes) and capitalists (to this day being a businessman in France is still often viewed with some suspicion).

In the early 1990's I was still living in a HLM (Habitation à loyer modéré) in St Avold --those government subsidized rental flats people talk about for the banlieues). As a young teacher in the 1980's I had qualified for one, and I had stayed. My neighbours were retired people, who qualified for the flat because their pension was low.
My neighbour had done several jobs, he had been a baker, and at some stage he had been a taxi driver; he owned two taxis I think.
They were living in a working class area with heavy industry and everybody was a communist.
She told me that her son always looked dreadful when he came home from school, and that he was in continuous fights because the other kids said his father was a "dirty capitalist", and they made his life miserable.

Ophelia · Posted: Fri Feb 29, 2008 11:46 am Post subject:

Now the PCF has all but disappeared, and "the left" means socialists.
I often wonder why they annoy me so much, when in fact I share most of their ideas, and certainly the most important ones.

What is infuriating is their partial blindness.

Here I' ll write about a story which was told to me by a socialist colleague of mine.
Disclaimer: the end of the story proves nothing, what I am interested in is what it shows about the teller.

My colleague Baba Cool is a type in Education: a soixante-huitard, meaning someone who took part in the May 1968 protests or supports the ideas that were later developed in the name of May 68.

Soixante-huitards still sometimes come with vintage look, a certain type of clothing and long hair (sometimes held together by a purple elastic band).
They're intellectuals: Baba Cool teaches economics and social sciences; he's a brilliant teacher, he cares about his students, and is an excellent orator (sometimes giving presentations -- not on revolution, but on ecomomics-- to parents at schools.)

As far as I am concerned, his views on Education cause his colleagues nothing but trouble. During staff meetings, he berates the less revolutionary among us for not allowing pupils to chat, thus preventing them form acquiring the basics of "autonomy". Wall

He teaches lofty principles , and I must say I'm not exactly keen on having his students apply said principles in my classrooms, and I often find that when he is in a team, there's trouble, though not for himself (he can never admit that some of his students misbehave, or when he does it's too late).
After two or three years of that, I developed ways and means of making sure I wasn't on a any team with him any more, and all is now well.

As a person he is clever, he has a sense of humour, and, many people tell me, has personal charm.

On that particular day, I had lunch at the canteen with him and another Social Sciences teacher.

Ophelia · Posted: Fri Feb 29, 2008 1:33 pm Post subject:

Baba Cool's story.

As he was doing his shopping in Tours one day, he heard a woman scream. He turned around, and saw an elderly lady facing two young men. He came closer in case she needed help, and saw that she was berating the two young men for whatever they were supposed to have done, using ugly words meaning "Arab".
My colleague saw that it wouldn't come to blows, and walked away. He was feeling embarrassed, but after all-- racist elderly lady, these things happen.

Ten minutes later, he needed to buy some bread and walked into the local baker's shop, where the same two young men were stealing cakes.
My colleague ran away.

The petty thief is of no consequence, but what was interesting to me was how painful witnessing the scene had been to him.
He said several times "J'étais bien emmerdé". "I was in deep shit" does not quite translate it.
As I was listening to him, my respect for Baba Cool was increasing by the minute. Here was a soixante-huitard who had seen something which blatantly contradicted his neat vision of life, the values of who is a victim and who is a victimizer, and was able, not only to admit it to himself, but also to talk about it.

The second social sciences teacher started spluttering and complaining, but since this was Baba Cool, she didn't give him the full moralizing treatment.
After all, his credentials are impeccable: in May, 1968, he was on the barricades fighting the riot police. If you do the maths, he must have quite young then, so I suppose his parents took him.

I think in his place, another socialist at the baker's shop would not have allowed himself to notice what was happening, or if he had, he would have forgotten immediately.
The fact that he had faced the unthinkable, that a somebody who was a member of a group who had been victimized could do the things the group as a whole was unfairly criticized for made me understand once more what was wrong with the other socialists: life is easy for them I think, they have decided, once and for all, who are the good guys, and this suffers no exceptions.

This is called "angélisme", a better word than the translation "naïve optimism".

In the story at the baker's this philosophy does no harm, but when held by a lot of people it helps to further confuse issues, and in the example I'll give later it prevents new problems from being recognized and addressed.

Ophelia · Posted: Fri Feb 29, 2008 3:26 pm Post subject:

As we are struggling on the path towards less discrimination and more tolerance, new problems appear that add up to an already tense situation.

About 5 years ago, a colleague of mine who teaches English in Thionville, a small town in the East of France, told me of a strange thing that had happened at his junior high school.
One afternoon he heard screams and screeching (doesn't translate the word "hululement") coming from another classroom. He and other colleagues stepped into the corridor, and found out that the problem was coming from a history class of thirteen-year-olds.

The curriculum for that class, among other things, has a part about the main monotheists religions. All had gone well for Christianity and Islam but on that day they were going to study judaism, and the Muslim students, about 30 % of the class, would not hear about it and were refusing to take notes (refusing to write is very unusual in French schools, when students don't want to work they usually think copying things from the board is an easy part of the lesson).

The headmaster was called, and he stood in the classroom the whole lesson so that the teacher could teach, and to force the students to take notes as usual.

On leaving school that day, the Muslim students set fire to their history notebooks.

Obviously, something was very wrong.

When I tried to enquire, I got the usual closed doors, and once more the official view was that there was no problem.

Even on the internet, I only found three partial explanations, after a lot of searching.

Ophelia · Posted: Sat Mar 01, 2008 1:30 pm Post subject:

Because I can be obstinate, I found three sites which mentioned the problem my friend had stumbled upon for history teachers.
Two of them were texts written by history teachers -- the second time the Holocaust is studied is in the twelfth grade after the study of World War II.

The first teacher was personally implicated in his pupils' reactions to the teaching of the Holocaust because he is a Jew.

He explained that the Muslim pupils' refusal to study anything having to do with the Jews was due to their identification with Palestiniens in the current Israel/ Palestine conflict.

It's an identification without knowledge of the history of Palestine or even a vague idea of where the two countries are situated on the map.
This teacher, who never sounded bitter in his relating of what he saw in his school, said that he spent a lot of time, from the beginning of the school year, explaining that the conflict mentioned above was political, not religious, and that the Jewish community in France for example was a different entity from the Israelis. He had to keep returning to all those differences because sometimes, when the pupils had understood, they would go back to their prejudices, and he'd have to remind them of what he had said before.

Having done this for a whole year, and because his pupils had interacted with a teacher who was a Jew, he found that the history lesson about the Holocaust at the end of the year was accepted.

Of course the influence he had was only in his classes, and he noted that anti-Jewish insults (sometimes even if no Jewish pupil was present, as there are not many of them) an anti-semitic grafitti at school were on the increase.

He explained that some of his colleagues (my interpretation is that this would refer to the leftist teachers) were in denial about the increase of anti-semitism.
He described one scene that I can visualize very easily. In a corridor, he would try to attract the attention of a colleague to this problem and she, with her back to a wall containing anti-semitic graffiti in large characters, would answer indignantly "Our students ARE NOT anti-semitic!"
The reasoning being: I am anti-racist, I love my students, and therefore....

When the history teacher pointed at the graffiti she would say "That's nothing. They just repeat what they hear, they don't mean it".

Or, in my words: my students are victims. How can they victimize others?

Anyway, this was a positive example of a teacher who had solved the problem of the history class, at least in his own classroom.

However, his experience can't be used by other teachers: his success is due to the unique combination of his personality and his being jewish.

Non-jewish teachers would not be in a position to speak about being jewish on a regular basis.
Moreover, the history curriculum is absolutely packed, with an exam at the end of the year, and the emphasis he gave to the jewish issue must have meant not mentioning at all some other aspects of the curriculum.
It was worth it of course, but his choice is an andividual one.


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