Civil Unrest In France

Picture from BBC.

There is a civil unrest that has been triggered in France on 27 Oct 2005 when policemen who wanted to conduct immigration ID checks on some high school teenagers playing football in the Paris suburb of Clichy-sous-Bois. The teenagers, fearing that they were been chased by the policemen, and wanting to prevent getting into police custody for a long time for the checking of identities and having to involve their parents to bail them out after the incident, ran and hid in nearby places. Three teenagers who climbed a wall to hide in a power substation - two of them were electrocuted and 1 was injured and hospitalised.

This event ignited pre-existing tensions and led to the widespread suburban civil unrests. I read in today's Straits Times and article in the Review section. It talks about the existing state of immigration assimilation policies in France and also encompasses the whole of Europe, which differs from that of other immigrant countries like America, Canada, Singapore which have an existing policy to assimilate immigrants into society to absorb them to contribute economically to the nation - providing them with jobs, incentives for working in the countries, proper housing facilities and various other policies to promote foreign immigrants' assimilation into their society. In contrast, France and Europe, do not have this policy of assimilation. They can give citizenships to the foreign immigrants, but no process of integrating a national identity or more importantly, a sense of belonging a place to the immigrants. They do not ensure that most immigrants have economic stability, providing them with the proper job opportunities in France in order to quell the pre-existing tensions and thus this civil unrest has erupted. This can be seen from the fact that most of the civil unrest demonstrators are belonging to the poor suburban neighbourhoods of the country, who do not have a proper economic stability status and hence feel that they have been excluded from the nation (and thus no proper assimilation has occurred/no sense of belonging to the nation developed.) The demonstrators strike out and damage those facilities such as school institutions, and those other public institutional buildings, as a result of the ill-feelings that have developed because they felt that these institutions have not enabled them to have a good economic status in the country and have excluded them from developing in the country. Also, residents have reported racial and discrimination in those suburbs. Unlike Singapore, France do not practise some policies of racial cohesiveness throughout the social fabric of the nation. Singapore has promoted the social cohesiveness of all races from the time the nation is born, such as through the housing planning schemes, whereby there is a kind of fixed quota of housing where a housing board must have certain munber of mixed races living together, and this may develop to a kind of understanding between races which may lead to their racial harmony. Singapore has also promoted racial cohesiveness in education - such that national education curriculum has included the inculcation of values of racial cohesivess as a compulsory subject. Finally, the most recent event of the bloggers being charged for writing out seditious remarks in their blogs by the government. This has shown us that Singapore government is very strict on the issue of racial cohesiveness in Singapore. Although this key elements of policies are relevant to be implemented in Singapore, it may not be inappropriate to be applied in France due to the different social background and development and history of the two nations. In effect, the French government has implemented curfews to quell the civil unrest.

The last sentence of the Straits Times article states that besides the uneven geographical differences between rich and poor nations, the next geographical difference would be the difference between the rich people and people who are not assimilated/excluded from the system in the nation. This process of difficulty of assimilation of immigrants occurs not only in Europe but also in all western countries.