France, the shadow of the mafias behind the banlieue uprising

France, the shadow of the mafias behind the banlieue uprising

Emanuel Pietrobon

Source: https://it.insideover.com/criminalita/francia-l-ombra-delle-mafie-dietro-la-rivolta-delle-banlieue.html

The outburst of the inhabitants of the banlieues, the banlieusards, is over. The residents of the massive, dilapidated and overpopulated dormitory districts surrounding French cities have closed the Pandora's box inadvertently opened by a policeman on the morning of 27 June with the murder of Nahel Merzouk, and now the time for debate and reflection has begun in France.

The commissariats and related bodies have concluded their calculations, forwarding to the Elysée Palace every available data on the human and economic damage of the uprising, and have officially confirmed that it was the largest and most serious racial uprising in the country's history.

During the eight days of devastation and looting, which held France in check from the afternoon of 27 June to the night of 4 July, there were those who advanced embryonic demands for social justice, such as an end to racial profiling by the police, and those who pursued pure anarchy. But there were also those who, blending into the rioting crowds, took advantage of the general chaos to challenge the state: narco-banditism.

The most serious urban war in contemporary France

The banlieue uprising is over. The last significant burning and looting took place on the night of the 4th of July and since then, the classic quietness that precedes or follows a storm has dominated the destroyed streets of France. It is artificial stillness, imbued - perhaps more than before - with inter-ethnic nervousness, but it is destined to last for at least a few years, perhaps a decade, because it will take time for the anger, now fully discharged, to build up to the point where another flood is inevitable.

The toll of the eight-day urban war has far exceeded, in terms of damage and geographical extent, that of the first and historic suburban uprising in 2005. An overcoming linked to demographic issues - the growth of the banlieues and banlieusards -, social reasons - the lack of progress in the integration of the children and grandchildren of immigrants who moved to France from former colonies at the turn of the 1950s and 1960s - and political changes - the rise of feelings of autonomy and/or independence in the Overseas Territories.

The prophetic appeals of Mathieu Kassovitz, author of The Hate, and Samira Bellil, author of Away from Hell, have gone unheeded. The corpses of new Zyed Benna have continued to pile up. A dysfunctional assimilationism, which called for identity despoliation by offering socio-spatial segregation, produced crime, unemployment, intolerance and radicalisation. The malevolent influences of skilful external profiteers, from radical Islam to rival powers in Paris, did the rest. And the result, at the end of eight days of transnational violence, is a war bulletin:

    - Over €1 billion in damage;
    - 5900+ cars set on fire;
    - 3300+ arrests;
    - 1000+ buildings destroyed/damaged due to assault/ arson;
    - 800+ injured gendarmes, firemen and policemen;
    - 3 dead;

The violence of the rioters affected banks - more than three hundred locations and/or ATMs destroyed -, supermarkets, shops and designer shops - more than six hundred sites looted - and did not spare kindergartens, monuments, parks and schools.

But within the urban war, which momentarily transformed France into the set of a post-apocalyptic dystopia somewhere between Athena and The Purge, another war took place: that of narco-banditry against institutions. Which was won by narco-banditry.

The war within the war

Organised and heavily armed commandoes, responding to the galaxy of clans and cartels that dominate the transalpine criminal landscape, started a war within a war during the eight days of chaos that shook France.

Armed with an endless arsenal of warfare, including paper bombs, rifles, pyrotechnics, rocket launchers, machine guns and mortars, the narco-bandits were able to corner the forces of law and order. Who not only did not set foot in the banlieues because of the known presence of snipers, but were also victims of ambushes and armed assaults on barracks and police stations.

A quarter of all the buildings that were destroyed or severely damaged in the course of the popular uprising were not the object of venting the banlieusards' blind rage, but a specific target of the organised violence of one part of them: the narco-bandits.

Of the thousand or so buildings that suffered varying degrees of damage, two hundred and sixty-nine were barracks, police stations and police headquarters, i.e. the headquarters of the police and gendarmerie, and were literally bombarded by commandos armed with firearms, bazookas, paper bombs, fireworks and mortars. No casualties, but three policemen were wounded with shotguns.

Reacting to the sieges, which are nothing new in France, was extremely complicated for at least three reasons: the forty thousand extra policemen deployed by Emmanuel Macron were already busy with rioters in the city centres, the affected sites were understaffed due to the riot emergency, the gangs were sending their commandos to different points at the same time. Coordinated attacks. Or, as reconstructed by the police, 'organised guerrilla warfare'.

The episodes of violence attributable to narcobandits were distinguished from those of the rioting mobs by their methodicalness, organisation and preparation. Fast, efficient and focused, narcobandits stormed the buildings of institutions and their defenders, carrying out high-impact, highly symbolic attacks that monopolised the social media walls of Millennials and Zoomers, such as SnapChat, TikTok and Telegram.

The clans conducted raids against local institutions - more than a hundred - and infiltrated their men in scuffles with the police, confronted by bandits 'with experience in gang clashes', and in looting, making themselves recognisable by the use of vehicle-aircraft and the possession of bombs, with the double objective of setting themselves up as symbols of the community and recruiting new members.

Fog in the future of France

Narcotics is said to have been the undisputed but defenceless protagonist of the popular uprising. An uprising that, according to informed police sources and anti-crime veterans like Frédéric Ploquin, the gangs would have first infiltrated and then quelled.

The clans that dominate the French criminal universe would have seen in the infiltration of the riots a new way 'to mark the territory', as well as an unrepeatable opportunity to recruit angry young men without the fear of uniform. But later, having achieved their objectives and moved by the desire to protect illegal trafficking - interrupted by the riots - they would order the banlieusards to lay down their arms. Nothing new under the Sun: it already happened in 2005.

The great uprising of 2023 would have shown that peace and war in France depend, more than on the Elysée, on the will of the powerful and violent narco-clans that legislate in the 1,500 banlieues scattered throughout the territory. This is the opinion of the expert Ploquin, officer Rudy Manna and other policemen who spoke to the press on condition of anonymity.

Dysfunctional French-style assimilationism has failed: integration has become informal segregation. The dormitory districts are demographic bombs where one in three young people is unemployed and where the perception of insecurity is almost three times greater than in the rest of the country. The vacuum left by the institutions has been filled by organised crime and radical Islam, which not infrequently form alliances, and the situation in some suburbs is such that it has prompted the secret services to speak of the existence of 'lost territories'. The violence of 2023 is the result of the concatenation of each of the above factors.

In the absence of far-sighted and all-encompassing policies capable of unravelling every knot of the banlieue issue and reducing the conflictuality inherent in the current transition process towards full multi-ethnicity, France is destined to experience a crescendo of socio-racial instability and to experience neo-medieval scenarios of molecular civil wars, capillarisation of grey areas and processes of Mexicanization and tribalisation. An end of the line that awaits all those European countries, including Italy, that fail to learn from the Elysée's mistakes. 

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