Burning Buses: [France] “She was black but she looked white, her skin was peeled."

The French media are accused from some corners of pouring oil on the bus fires of France by snooping around in the banlieues for signs of a remake of last year’s French uprising. But in truth, the banlieues do seem to be poised for another go ‘round. Sarkozy tried to squelch the very notion of “anniversary,” which carried with it an expectation of an annual banlieue uprising, similar to the traditional cycle of strikes & goodies. In this new “celebration” the “youths” would do a billion dollars worth of damage per year and the government, in exchange, would renovate a neighborhood, pry open a job market. Such colorful, scheduled riots could become a sort of raunchy tourist attraction.

But instead of a replay France got a new twist: murderous attacks against policemen and buses. Now, as a 26 year-old French student burned in a Marseille bus fights for her life, the media are remarkably discreet. Slow on the uptake, stingy with details of this terrible crime, but also, as we discover in retrospect, strangely silent about lesser assaults that have become the ordinary fare of buses all over France. Suddenly we learn about the elaborate security systems developed in this or that city, in response to incessant attacks.

Mama Galledou suffered 2nd and 3rd degree burns over 70% of her body when the bus was ambushed and torched by five or seven punks in gangsta hoods. If she survives she will live a life of pain and sorrow, deformed, critically damaged by flames that ate deep into her body. Born in France, raised in her native Senegal, Galledou had just finished a degree in nutrition at the St. Jerome science college which is situated at the end of the line of the 32 bus.

Galledou was on her way to visit cousins who live in a housing project near the stop where the bus was ambushed. Neighbors are horrified, the government is outraged, but they shouldn’t be surprised; the murderous outcome of bus burnings was inevitable. And the media helped hide the fact by misreporting five previous incidents with a typical journalistic sleight of hand.

Though all of the ambushed buses contained passengers, they were—miraculously— empty when burned to a crisp. No intrepid journalist found a survivor to tell the harrowing tale. The public was not invited to imagine flight from a burning bus. What about the reactions of a bus driver when he sees the hooded pirates stomp into his bus? There was no background, no human interest, no drama, no dire warnings. Instead we are ‘advised’ that the watchword is: keep a low profile, we don’t want copy cat incidents.

The result was, of course, copy cat incidents. And by the way, wasn’t the first bus burning already a copy cat? Didn’t the image of a charred bus chassis evoke any memories in the media’s collective brain pan?

Passengers scrambled to escape those flaming buses. And the media scrambled to balance the reports with a discrimination positive [affirmative action] angle: boys and girls from the ‘hood who found employment thanks to a host of programs, networks, tutors, sympathetic buddy systems. The message is “We hear you.” The equal opportunity payoff is on the way to — if not already at — your doorstep. This cheap sociology contributes to a degradation of the public mind in counterpoint to the degradation of the public transportation service. What possible cause and effect relation could be established between the usual socio-economic gripes and torching a bus complete with passengers?

Abundant tear-jerking mixed with a show of ‘power to the people’ marked the solemn commemoration of the accidental death of Zied and Bouna in Clichy sous Bois that triggered the November 2005 uprising. The chronology was retraced with diagrams, archive photos…and arrows pointed at the police.

Why did the kids hide in the electrical power substation? Was asked again. Because they were harassed by the police, chased, cornered, practically forced to touch high voltage wires and die, as the t-shirts say, pour rien [for no reason at all], came the answer. An investigation is underway to determine if the police can be blamed for their death. The Zied and Bouna cult left little space for the bouquet placed in memory of the Frenchman beaten to death earlier that same day for taking a snapshot of a lamppost in a project at Epinay sur Seine. Coincidentally a bus was recently torched in Epinay — “without passengers” as they say.

Opposition leader François Hollande swore not to make political hay from the charred body of a promising student, and then went on to shovel manure over the head of Interior Minister Sarkozy (most likely rival of Hollande’s ambitious companion Ségolène Royal). Hollande complained all in one jumble that there are too many, not enough, and not the right kind of policemen in the banlieue; they are only interested in repression and punishment, don’t deal with the underlying causes, don’t have friendly relations with the local population, and are constantly harassing the youths. Besides, Sarkozy provoked riots last year by calling the rabble racaille. The only solution, according to Hollande, is a change of government.

Last year, Zied and Bouna were running from the police. This year, Mama Galledou was taking a bus from her modest bed-sitter to a nearby public housing estate described as calm, cool, and collected. Nothing to do with the rowdy neighborhoods that spawned raging fires last year, insists Marseille mayor Jean-Claude Gaudin, declaring that this was an isolated incident in a harmonious multicultural city.

Five suspects accused of the burning, aged from 15 to 17, were taken into custody at dawn on last Tuesday, October 31. The police worked quickly. According to press reports, quite a bit of information was gathered from eyewitnesses and neighbors who came forward willingly because they were so horrified by the cruelty of the attack.

The bus was ambushed around 9 PM, but urban lighting is well-developed in France, the bus stop and adjoining projects were not lost in an inky darkness. The marauders must have felt quite safe hanging around after their first attempt to board the bus was foiled. They waited for it to reach the end of the line just a few stops away and come by again.

Either these kids carry a few bottles of gasoline wherever they go, or they had planned the escapade well in advance. Maybe they felt invulnerable because there is so much torching, so few arrests, even fewer tough jail terms, and no bad publicity for criminals. Facts pop up once in a while like fish bubbles on a quiet lake—hundreds of cars burned on a relatively calm night, at least a hundred every night all year long, 2500 policemen injured since January 2006—and disappear without consequences.

The agonizing condition of Mama Galledou, a studious attractive young woman from a good family—her father is a chemist trained at the same school she was attending, a sister is studying to be an engineer—is muted. Why? An attending physician wiped tears from his eyes as he approached the microphone to give an update. (Suddenly I remember the upbeat medical bulletins delivered when Arafat was rotting at the Val de Grace military hospital; the public heartbeat was pumped with images of concerned friends, relatives, colleagues, and secret service goons.) We did finally see an informal assembly of faculty and students at St. Jerome, but those who spoke into the roaming mike were particularly inexpressive…or else the report was deliberately toned down. One young woman, a blonde, remarked that St. Jerome was a good school, but it had a bad reputation because of frequent attacks from delinquents living in the nearby projects. More isolated incidents no doubt!

France suffers from the absence of healthy sensationalism to deal appropriately with sensational events. Words bring people to life. The victim of this vicious attack hardly exists in the public mind. Her friends and family are shown from a distance walking into the hospital, a professor speaks a few words, there is no image of her face in happier times.

The most moving description comes from 30 year-old Rachid, cited in Le Parisien. He was standing at the bus stop when the bus went up in flames. He saw the young woman get off the bus, almost fainted at the sight of her burning body, “she was black but she looked white, her skin was peeled.” Overcoming his fear that he would cause further harm by touching her, he carried her away from the bus, even more afraid that it might explode. He tried to douse the flames by covering her with his jacket and at the same time handed his cell phone to a friend who called for an ambulance.

Why we aren’t shown Rachid’s heroic face? Is he afraid of being identified by neighborhood racaille that would seek revenge if they could get their hands on him? Police investigators are encouraging escaped passengers who had not yet not come forward by offering them the exceptional possibility of testifying anonymously.

Government officials convened in this kind of crisis are always shown at big gleaming tables in ornate palatial rooms. Villepin announced a new measure that should make these marauders think twice before striking: from here on in, everyone who participates directly or indirectly in a guet-apens [snare or ambush] will be considered equally guilty and punished for the consequences, whether or not they actually participated in the embuscade [ambush]. This is not a case of exquisite French nuance too difficult to translate. If there is a distinction here, it would be too subtle for words. Someone who helps ambush the bus or police car or fire engine but does not actually pour the gasoline or strike the match is now going to be caught in the same snare as his accomplices. One might add “it’s about time!”

Readers of the left wing let-it-all-hang-out daily Libération give their opinion in a miles-long thread; they lean heavily in favor of severe punishment for criminals who set fire to bus passengers. Poverty, discrimination, and youth were dismissed as flimsy excuses and phony explanations by these readers who seem to be more lucid than those who are supposed to be informing them.

Judging by the looks of the protesting father of one of the suspects, who says his son has an alibi, and the skeptical friends of others, who accuse the police of arresting them just because they’ve been in trouble before, the suspects are the usual suspects. The dawn arrests were covered by the press, allegedly following a tip off from “the government.” The media report that the suspects come from large dysfunctional families; they even mentioned that one of the boys hid in a local mosque to avoid arrest. Will they explore the punk jihad mentality behind this phenomenon or stick to the “disgruntled youth” euphemism?

Desperate efforts to squeeze last year’s uprising into a comfortable Watts scenario may have silenced some observers but they had no effect on reality. Now we hear French policemen talking about an intifada in the banlieues. The nature of this guerilla warfare against the state is willfully obscured by the argument that the rioters are not all Muslims, and they don’t parade behind a “religious” cause.

How absurdly illogical to imagine that 16 year-old Muslims would be inspired by an American black power movement of the Sixties rather than the glorified jihad of fellow Muslims fighting the Israelis, the Americans, and infidel Europeans at the dawn of the 21st century? We know that Arafat, Osama bin Laden, and Hassan Nasrallah are heroes in those quarters. Have any of these kids heard of Stokely Carmichael, Huey Newton, or Martin Luther King? No, the images that inspire them are shababs throwing killer rocks at soldiers and policemen, Iraqi “insurgents” burning and quartering American contractors, car bombs in mosques and markets, and charred gutted Israeli buses with body parts strewn around.

Facts pop up once in a while like fish bubbles on a quiet lake—-hundreds of cars burned on a relatively calm night, at least a hundred every night all year long, 2500 policemen injured since January 2006—-and disappear without consequences.

She nails it. Really nails it.

Our media will get us all killed in the end.

insists Marseille mayor Jean-Claude Gaudin, declaring that this was an isolated incident in a harmonious multicultural city.

Yes, how could I ever think otherwise. What is the french word(s) for kool-aid?

THis really struck home:

and

Words bring people to life. The victim of this vicious attack hardly exists in the public mind. Her friends and family are shown from a distance walking into the hospital, a professor speaks a few words, there is no image of her face in happier times.

Excellent article. Thanks for posting it. Reading about the rescue of that poor woman who was burned on the bus really puts things into perspective. The man who rescued her is afraid of being identified, fearing repercussions from the Muslims. They truly have taken over.

I think you are correct about armed citizens. In my humble opinion the rag heads may riot once here and do some damage, but on the second night I would bet there would be a whole lot of folks locking and loading to stop THEIR car from being burned.

Meadow Muffin

Apparently, not even the police are permitted to defend themselves, much less ordinary citizens.

The same thing is happening in England. When "Asian" thugs attack a police car, they leave the neighborhood as fast as possible, instead of defending themselves. Not exactly the best way to persuade these Muslim thugs to behave, when the police reveal that they are not allowed to shoot back or defend themselves, on peril of losing their jobs.

As I look in my crystal ball, I see the following:

1. Police unions refuse to allow their members to enter the muslim areas, leaving them ungoverned.

2. Liberal pols & muslim leaders agree to allow muslims to police their own areas.

3. sharia law is implemented in muslim areas, making them autonomous within France.

4. The muslim areas simply grow to encompass all of France. Viola, a new muslim country governed by sharia.

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