Twelve months have passed since the now infamous French riots erupted. As some of you may recall there was a bit of debate at the time about qualifying the violence as an ‘intifada', but it is a term now routinely used by French police unions, some even going as far as describing the deteriorating situation in the banlieues as 'war'. And various mainstream media have now picked up on a story the gravity of which was signaled on this and many other blogs well over a year ago. Here is the Globe and Mail which has a longer piece on the phenomenon and its political implications:

Michel Thooris, head of the small Action Police union, claims that the new violence is taking on an Islamic fundamentalist tinge.

“Many youths, many arsonists, many vandals behind the violence do it to cries of ‘Allah Akbar' (God is Great) when our police cars are stoned,” he said in an interview.

Larger, more mainstream police unions sharply disagree that the suburban unrest has any religious basis. However, they do say that some youth gangs no longer seem content to throw stones or torch cars and instead appear determined to hurt police officers — or worse.

“First, it was a rock here or there. Then it was rocks by the dozen. Now, they're leading operations of an almost military sort to trap us,” said Loic Lecouplier, a police union official in the Seine-Saint-Denis region north of Paris. “These are acts of war.”

The fact that police unions are the key voices on this deeply worrying trend tells us that the situation has reached a stage where policemen would in actual fact prefer to withdraw from these areas. And no one can reasonably blame them for this position. The safety and well-being of French police forces can no longer be guaranteed for the very simple fact that its mandate never included carrying out paramilitary operations in these dreaded suburbs. That most likely, requires a different skill and tool set.

The Globe and Mail points out that this will no doubt influence next year’s presidential election, but that remains to be seen. The current Dutch election campaign tells us that parties from both sides of the political spectrum have opted to emphasize the positive and ignore potentially explosive and controversial situations. Not only are these problems too complicated to solve, hard talk on immigration and law and order can only be applied in limited amounts in order keep an electorate prone to tilt leftwards on side. And, equally important, the escalating violence is confined to areas where the average Frenchman never ventures. So, it can be ignored for now, but whoever gets into the Elysée next year will be have the ultimate responsibility to ensure that the lawlessness will not spill into France proper. Given the current dynamics we can be assured however that it will.