Analysis: France's urban "powder kegs" ready to blow again

PARIS (Reuters) - As police struggle to clamp a lid on violence in a poor neighborhood of Grenoble, officials say the latest riot shows that France's high-rise neighborhoods are a disaster waiting to happen -- again.

The latent violence in the overcrowded concrete jungles on the fringes of French cities poses a challenge to conservative President Nicolas Sarkozy, who won election vowing to restore security and flush out delinquent "vermin" with a power-hose.

Claude Dilain, president of the Association of Cities and Suburbs, a cross-party group of elected officials from some of the roughest areas, calls the high-rise estates "powder kegs."

"Massive security operations will not fix things," Dilain told France-Inter radio. "What we need are real long-term solutions to enable part of the population to live in normal conditions, which is not the case at the moment."

Despite sporadic high-profile police raids, little has improved since widespread riots spread around the country from the Paris suburbs in 2005, triggered by the death of two young people of immigrant origin who were fleeing police.

In a few areas, crumbling tower blocks have been demolished and replaced by individual housing, often reducing the crime and truancy rates.

But the main difference is the growing use of firearms against the security forces, highlighted by clashes in Villiers-le-Bel, near Paris, last year for which five men were sentenced this month to up to 15 years in prison for gun crime.

Shots were fired at police for the third successive night in the Grenoble suburb of Villeneuve, despite the deployment of 300 reinforcements including the national anti-terror and serious crimes squads. No one was injured but 20 people were arrested.

Helicopters hovered over the housing estate, lighting up tower blocks late into the night as armed police in bullet-proof vests went door-to-door searching for snipers, guns and drugs.

"This is like a country at war, this is not like France," said local resident Nicolas Pinel. "It feels as if the republic is coming to make war on our neighborhood."

MODEL COMMUNITY

Interior Minister Brice Hortefeux, a close Sarkozy ally, vowed on a brief visit to Villeneuve on Saturday to restore order after rioters angered by the police shooting of an alleged armed robber burned dozens of cars and fired on police.

Ironically, Villeneuve, home to 15,000 residents, was a model community when it was built in the 1970s, incorporating middle-class owner-occupied flats alongside social housing with winding streets and green spaces in contrast to the monolithic concrete blocks and wastelands of many big city suburbs.

But over the years, the middle class moved out, leaving a population more than 40 percent of immigrant origin, with an unemployment rate of more than 30 percent, Grenoble mayor Michel Destot told Reuters in a telephone interview.

"What happened is what unfortunately happens in many urban neighborhoods with the rise of an underground economy of drugs and armed robbery," he said.

"Young people -- mostly truant left to their own devices out of family control -- turn to crime through this underground economy, with easy money that enables them to buy weapons."

Many French cities are encircled by such suburbs plagued by high unemployment, poor public services and drug trafficking.

The government estimates there are as many as 500-600 such high-rise neighborhoods, home to nearly five million people.

Most were built in the 1960s and 1970s to house migrants from rural areas, waves of immigrants from North Africa and sub-Saharan Africa, recruited to work in French industry.

Sarkozy's strategy is to reassert a visible police presence in suburbs that have become virtual no-go areas for law enforcement, but Destot said police numbers in his city had been cut to 600 from 720 since 2002 because of budget cuts.

The government began to restrict immigration in the mid-1970s but failed to build enough housing for the newcomers or to disperse the immigrants around the country and into the population, turning many of the new suburbs into ghettoes.

Most of the residents of these suburbs have French citizenship, many are second or third generation.

The earnings available in the drugs trade dwarf what young people could hope to earn from legal work, and people are often sucked into the drugs trade from an early age, police say.

Officials estimate that a 13-year-old can earn 150 euros a day acting as a look-out for drug dealers.

The Socialist opposition said the latest violence showed the president's policy had failed.

"This was a patent failure of Nicolas Sarkozy," said Manuel Valls, mayor of the Paris suburb of Evry. "Acts of violence against people have continued to increase. Society is more violent today. That is a failure of the authorities."

The Socialists say the government would do better to invest in community policing, which Sarkozy abolished, and restore subsidies to local associations that help young people with education, vocational training and leisure.

But with public spending facing cuts to reduce a budget deficit swollen by the financial crisis, the chances of Sarkozy implementing the "Marshall plan for the suburbs" he promised in 2008 seem ever more remote.

(Additional reporting by Emmanuel Jarry, Bate Felix and Jean-Baptiste Vey; Editing by Janet Lawrence)