Is Sarkozy Turning France Into A Police State?

Today, President Sarkozy warned that France would strip “foreign born criminals” of their French nationality if they use violence against the police or public officials. Earlier this week, Sarkozy had said that he would expel foreign Roma minorities who commit crimes in France back to Eastern Europe in his vow to tighten nationality rules for other non-French-born.

This follow recent incidents in the city of Grenoble with clashes between police and armed rioters. During what French officials called “street battles” on the weekend of July 16, rioters opened fire and torched shops and cars after the police shot dead a 27-year-old man suspected of robbery in a car chase.

In a separate clash last week, masked rioters tried to break down the door of a police station in Saint-Aignan, in the center of France, damaged building and burned cars in anger after the police shot dead a Gypsy during a car chase.

On Wednesday, French Interior Minister Brice Hortefeux said that illegal Gypsy camps would be “be torn down” and that Gypsies from other EU states who break the law who be expelled from France. Sarkozy himself said that the “Roma posed security problems”. The police raids against Roma started today when the police drove out 50 Gypsies from a squat in Montreuil, a poor suburb of Paris.

The French President statement concerning the “Roma problem” has provoked swift condemnations from human rights groups. The French Human Rights League released a statement saying:“The President of the Republic has stigmatized Roma and ‘traveling people’ in a racist way, by creating an unacceptable amalgamation of a few individuals with entire communities, and announcing plans for ethnically targeted evictions of settlements.” The French Human Rights League added that these communities were “scapegoats for deficiencies of the state”.

Tensions have been running high for years between French police and people in poor suburban districts with high immigrant population and chronic double digit unemployment who struggle to integrate and find work. Today, Sarkozy explicitly linked immigration and crime.

Sarkozy’s pledge to declare a “war on crime” seems to be more a pledge to declare a war on Gypsies and on immigrants from Arab origins. It is a sad departure from France’s centuries-old tradition of welcoming foreigners, especially on human rights grounds and persecutions in their respective  country of origin. Sarkozy should remember that from first hand experience. On both side of his family, respectively Hungarian and Greek, his parents were the beneficiary of such generous French immigration policies.

“Nationality should be stripped from anyone of foreign origin who deliberately endangers the life of a police officer, a soldier or a gendarme, or anyone else holding public office. We are suffering the consequences of 50 years of insufficiently regulated immigration which has led to a failure of integration,” said Sarkozy in a shameless effort to cater to the electorate of French racist far-right party such as the Front National.

But this is mainly a Sarkozy version of “wag the dog”. Sarkozy’s approval rating is at a record low of 35 percent, and he is facing some major financial and political scandals. Unfortunately, just like in the United States, the blame-immigrants-for-everything rhetoric is gaining political traction in France and all across Europe. But in the case of France, the racist logic of “kick the foreigners out” and Sarkozy’s “war on crime” which is really a war on civil rights could, as proven in Grenoble two weeks ago, backfire. Ever since 1789, French people do not hesitate to take on to the streets and topple their governments.