War On You: Breaking Alternative News

Every time trouble breaks out in a tough French suburb, the dreaded scarecrow of November 2005 rears its ugly head – when the country descended into three weeks of nightly riots in its “banlieues”.

The scarecrow was back this week after police were “ambushed” on Saturday night by assailants in the Cité 4000 – a housing project in the La Courneuve district in Seine-Saint-Denis, north east of Paris –  as they transferred two suspects to a hospital in the area.

They came under fire from an assault rifle, but miraculously, nobody was hurt. One suspect escaped but was quickly re-captured.

As it happened on Saturday night, the story was aired all Sunday – an otherwise dead news day – and snowballed. The incident had all the right ingredients for an explosive news story along the lines of “suburbs on verge of explosion”.

Firstly, this estate has huge symbolic importance, as it was here that Nicolas Sarkozy, while he was interior minister, famously promised to rid the place of drug dealers using “Karcher” (an industrial cleaner) after a youth was shot dead in the crossfire of a local feud. Critics say his words fuelled the suburban anger that led to the 2005 riots.

The fact that automatic gun-toting bandits are still there appears to suggest Sarkozy has not kept his bombastic promise; to rub salt in the wound, Michèle Alliot-Marie, the interior minister, described the estate as a “drugs supermarket”. Sarko has kept uncharacteristically quiet this time.

The use of an AK-47, Alliot-Marie said, was as a “worrying development” and the first time such a weapon had been used against police. She made a surprise visit to the estate last night and promised to send machine-gun wielding police reinforcements immediately.

Unions said that a “new line has been crossed”.

This is undoubtedly a worrying development, but should we be talking about (sub)urban unrest and a further deterioration in the tinder box banlieues? That was the initial knee-jerk media reaction.

But Mediapart, a subscription-only web site launched by a former editor of Le Monde, got hold of the police eyewitness report today written shortly after the shooting. A car swerved in front of the police van and a man came out, opened fire, and tried to open the back of the van. He ran off after police returned fire.

We only have the police view, but it does make one thing clear: this was not some random “kill the cops” attack pointing to banlieue meltdown: it suggests that the drug dealers were either being helped to escape or targeted by rivals.

I’m not saying that the situation has improved greatly since 2005, despite Nicolas Sarkozy’s pledge to launch a Marshall Plan for the suburbs. Yes the whole story is depressing and serves as a reminder of the type of violence that undoubtedly exists, but it cannot be taken alone as a sign of more widespread worsening tensions.

So put the scarecrow away…for now.