VILLIERS-LE-BEL, France, Nov. 29 — The first thing everyone mentions is the helicopters: the relentless throbbing of blades cutting through the skies above the housing projects and the probing searchlights that have kept the residents of this heavily immigrant suburb of Paris awake over the last four nights.
The gunfire that echoed off the walls of the tower blocks in a violent outburst of rioting earlier this week has subsided. But the calm, enforced by 1,000 police officers deployed at sunset every night, had a precarious feel to it today as locals, caught in the middle between angry youths and the police, tried to make do with an undeclared state of emergency that has hobbled their daily lives in multiple ways.
“It feels like we live in a war zone,” said Nadège Tanier, a 40-year-old mother of two, as she walked by the burned-out hulk of a garbage truck still reeking of burned tires. “I feel safer for having all those cops on the streets and the helicopter at night making sure the kids are not planning more riots, but it sure is hard to live like this.”
There is no curfew, but few people go out after dark when rows of shielded riot police officers move in to take position around this town north of Paris. Buses, a popular target for youths with firebombs in the past, have stopped running in the early evenings, making it hard for people to come home from work. Many shops lock up hours before their normal closing time, partly for fear of vandalism, partly because few customers dare shop after dark. The Tunisian owner of a local bakery, Habib Friaa, said his staff was baking only half as many baguettes as usual because business had slumped.
Some damage could be more permanent. Among the buildings that were torched Sunday and Monday, was a complex housing a nursery school and a library with a children’s section. The 135 children who are enrolled in the preschool had to be relocated to four makeshift classrooms in a nearby primary school. But the library, described by several parents here as a sort of community center for children, a refuge for those hungry to learn, is gone for now.
Ms. Tanier, whose 11-year-old daughter Emiline visited the library regularly, said children in the neighborhood were traumatized by the sight of the charred ruin. Emiline, a slight girl with long blond hair wrapped up in a puffy winter coat, said she was scared that her school would also be burned down. City authorities have made a child psychologist available to the school to counsel distraught pupils.
,Today a group of 12-year old girls climbed through the shattered windows into what was once the reading room. One of them, pulling at a scorched volume, said they had hoped to find a few books they could save.
But they left empty-handed.
Just last week, Cise Tanjigora’s 8-year-old son Adama went to borrow a book for the first time after his class had visited the library a few days earlier. “I was so proud of him,” said Ms. Tanjigora, a 40-year old French woman of Senegalese origin who was clothed in bright-colored African garb.
“What have they done? This is a poor town, parents don’t have much money to buy books. There is no other library nearby.”
Ms. Tanjigora, meanwhile, has been walking 45 minutes to the nearest suburban train stop leading into Paris, because the buses are not running when she needs to leave to work her evening shift.
President Nicolas Sarkozy condemned the recent rioting in harsh terms today, blaming what he called a “thugocracy” of criminals for the violence. “I reject any form of other-worldly naïveté that wants to see a victim of society in anyone who breaks the law, a social problem in any riot,” he said in a speech to police officers west of Paris. “What happened in Villiers-le-Bel has nothing to do with a social crisis. It has everything to do with a ‘thugocracy.’”
The 48 hours of rage that shook the town — reminiscent of three weeks of unrest across France in 2005 — were set off by the deaths of two local teenagers whose motorbike collided with a police car Sunday. The police are not popular here, even among those who accept that they helped stop the violence and are grateful for it.
But in interviews with residents today, it became plain that there was little sympathy for rioters claiming to seek revenge for their friends’ deaths.
“I don’t like the way police are treating the kids sometimes and I know they have not got many economic opportunities, but there is no excuse for the violence and the destruction,” said Nora Hemmal, a Moroccan immigrant, who had hoped to enroll her 1-year-old daughter next year in the nursery which was destroyed. “Most of us are just caught in the middle.”
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