Little changed since riots, say Parisian immigrants

PARIS — Hundreds of young people from the poor, immigrant suburbs of Paris that erupted in riots last year marched through Paris on Wednesday to present a collection of 20,000 complaints to lawmakers and urge the disenfranchised to make themselves heard with a vote, not violence.

Hours later, six to 10 young people forced passengers off a public bus in a western Paris suburb and set the vehicle on fire, officials said.

No one was hurt in the incident, which raised the specter of a repeat of the three weeks of fiery violence that rocked the country last year and overshadowed the peaceful message of Wednesday's march.

The events came ahead of Friday's anniversary of the riots by disaffected young people from the housing projects where people of Arab and black African descent live outside France's big cities. Many in the country fear new violence with rising tensions in recent weeks.

"The context is still the same, nothing has changed. So the situation is propitious for other events like last year," said Samir Mihi, co-founder of the AC-Le Feu group that collected the grievances from minorities throughout France.

The demonstrators held ragged-looking notebooks filled with complaints while crossing southern Paris toward the Assembly, the lower house of parliament, after a stop at the Senate.

"Immigrants scare the French" read one unsigned entry. Another entry, by a 17-year-old boy from Besançon in eastern France, urged companies to use their profits to create more jobs.

Police blocked the marchers as they neared the National Assembly, allowing only a small group to reach the parliament. Security forces have been girding for renewed violence around the anniversary, and many streets throughout southern Paris were blocked by vans of riot police.

The crowd sang "La Marseillaise," France's national anthem, and broke into chants of "Vive la France," proclaiming allegiance to a country where they often feel unwelcome.

Last year's riots sprang, in part, from anger over high unemployment and discrimination against immigrants and their French-born children, many of them Muslims from former French colonies in Africa.

Police said the violence, however, was not driven by Islamic groups.

France's inability to better integrate minorities and recent violence against police are becoming major political issues as the campaign heats up for next year's presidential and parliamentary elections.

While politicians on the left have called for more government programs to integrate poor young people, the leading presidential contender on the right, Interior Minister Nicolas Sarkozy, has sought to crack down on crime and immigration and echoed slogans of the extreme right.

Despite an influx of money and a glut of promises after the riots, disenchantment and anger are thriving in the tall, cinderblock towers that make up the housing projects in the troubled suburbs.

"In 12 months, it's obvious that you can't change everything," said Claude Dilain, mayor of Clichy-sous-Bois, northeast of Paris.

"I'm worried because not only has the French society's attitude not changed but I think it has even worsened," he told AP Television News. "A large part of French society disdains the suburbs."