The ‘City of Love’ has been anything but in recent weeks, and has, in fact, drawn parallels with war zones of the kind witnessed in Ukraine and Syria, with civilian protests and riots raging over the killing of a French teenager of Algerian descent by the police.
While the details are still fuzzy on what prompted the police to shoot the teen dead in the Parisian suburb of Nanterre, the incident saw public outrage spilling onto the streets in much the same way as had happened in Minneapolis, US, after George Floyd, an African American, was handcuffed, pinned to the ground and choked till he died.
A report quoted Nanterre Mayor Patrick Jarry as saying that the French youth, identified as Nahel Merzoukwas driving a Mercedes car when he was fatally shot, from point-blank range, as he approached a police stop near the Nelson Mandela Square.
While the police, according to a BBC report, denied killing the teen in cold blood, claiming, instead, that he was driving his vehicle with an intent to harm them, eyewitness accounts and material evidence seemed to differ.
According to news agency AFP, footage of the incident circulated online purportedly showed two officers standing by the vehicle. Moments later, one of the officers purportedly opened fire from close range as the 17-year-old attempted to drive off.
The footage, according to AFP, also picked up one of the officers (though it wasn’t clear who) as saying, “you’re going to be shot in the head”.
Although it couldn’t be determined from the footage as to who shot the teen, one of the officers was taken into custody on the charge of voluntary homicide, according to some reports.
However, the action served as no palliative to the old wounds that the incident had bared, as thousands took to the streets in Nanterre, torching vehicles, turning over trash cans and wrecking bus stops.
There were also reports of rampant arson near the police station.
In further escalation of the violence and civilian unrest, protesters allegedly rammed a vehicle into the house of a mayor in a town south of Paris.
The BBC report did offer some insight into what may have inflamed the public to erupt in protests and rioting, of the kind that France has been all, too, familiar with in the recent past. According to the report, while the 17-year-old was the second person to have been killed in France this year at a traffic stop, as many as 13 such incidents were reported last year, a record.
For a country, which is home to a sizable Muslim population and prides itself on its diversity, the killing of a teen of Algerian descent at a traffic stop, in full public glare, was clearly in conflict with France’s founding ideals.
However, as chilling as the shooting incident was and the protests that followed, it was only the latest in an unholy trail of events that shook the country’s core over the past few years.
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Pension Protests
In April this year, France was rocked by protests over the increase in pension age from 62 to 64.
As reported by Euronews, President Emmanuel Macron was greeted with protests as he arrived in a small town in southern France.
There were similar flare-ups elsewhere as well as the anger over the unpopular pension ‘reform’, through which the government attempted to cut its spending towards extending retiral benefits to government employees, spread across the country.
President Emmanuel Macron signed the ‘pension reform’ into law in April, after his government used a ‘controversial but legal’ instrument, as Le Monde put it, to ensure that the Bill did not come to a vote in the French Parliament or National Assembly.
Protests erupted at several points, with demonstrators, among whom were pensioners, massing in their thousands and chanting: “We are here, we are here, even if Macron doesn’t want, we’re here.”
Further, according to Euronews, as the French president arrived at a government school in a town south of the country, to talk about his education policies and garner favour and support of the locals, a power cut was reported that the far-left CGT Union later claimed to be part of the protests against the increase in pension age.
However, despite months of protest, the ‘Pension Reform Bill’, which Macron signed into law, still stands.
According to Anadolu news agency, a spokesperson for the French government announced that the Macron regime had ruled out rolling back the pension policy even in the face of protests.
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2017 Riots
Two separate and unrelated incidents fuelled civilian disorder and riots in Parisian suburbs in 2017.
Protesters hit the streets and resorted to wanton rioting and arson on February 2017 after a ‘black man’ was allegedly raped.
According to reports, the victim, identified as 22-year-old Theodore Luhaka (aka Theo), had gone to see a friend of his sister and was visiting some of his friends thereafter, in the Rose-des-vents neighbourhood in the Aulnay-sous-Bois suburb of Paris, when some policemen accosted them.
A report quoted the youth as saying that he was told to stand against the wall for a pat-down search.
When one of his friends asked the police why he was threatened with a fine of 450 Euros, he was slapped, the youth claimed, adding that as he tried speaking up for his friend, he was abused and beaten up.
The police, however, put out a contrasting version of events, claiming that the youth intervened ‘violently’ as an officer was in the process of arresting a ‘drug dealer’.
The incident provoked civilian unrest and protests that continued for over two weeks.
In another incident that sparked fury on the streets that same year, a ‘Chinese man’, as a report put it, was fatally shot by the police in Paris.
According to a BBC report, police said the man attacked an officer with a sharp object as he came to the door and the officer was saved by his bullet-proof vest, when another officer shot him dead. However, the lawyer of the family of the deceased refuted the claims saying it “totally disputes” the account.
“They smashed the door in, the shot went off and my father ended up on the floor,” BBC quoted one of the daughters of the deceased as saying.
Hundreds of people took to the streets, while some shouted “murderers” at the baton-wielding police. However, the protests over this incident ebbed the day after.
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