Algerian Experience Continues . . .

IN retrospect, it was not a good idea to have left his pistol at home. Called to the scene of a traffic accident in the Paris suburbs last Sunday, Jean-François Illy, a regional police chief, came face to face with a mob of immigrant youths armed with baseball bats, iron bars and shotguns.

What happened next has sickened the nation. As Illy tried to reassure the gang that there would be an investigation into the deaths of two teenagers whose motorbike had just collided with a police car, he heard a voice shouting: “Somebody must pay for this. Some pigs must die tonight!”

The 43-year-old commissaire realised it was time to leave, but that was not possible: they set his car ablaze. He stood as the mob closed in on him, parrying the first few baseball bat blows with his arms. An iron bar in the face knocked him down.

“I tried to roll myself into a ball on the ground,” said Illy from his hospital bed. He was breathing with difficulty because several of his ribs had been broken and one had punctured his lung.

His bruised and bloodied face signalled a worrying new level of barbarity in the mainly Muslim banlieues, where organised gangs of rioters used guns against police in a two-day rampage of looting and burning last week.

Not far from where Illy was lying was a policeman who lost his right eye after being hit by pellets from a shotgun. Another policeman displayed a hole the size of a 10p coin in his shoulder where a bullet had passed through his body armour.

Altogether 130 policemen were injured, dozens by shotgun pellets and shells packed with nails that were fired from a homemade bazooka. It prompted talk of urban “guerrilla warfare” being waged on French streets against the forces of law and order.

130 police injured. After France deployed it army, things began to settle down. I'll refrain from the jokes at this point.

Nearby were the charred remains of the local constabulary. The nursery school was burnt down. So was the library.

Rioting two years ago was widely regarded as a protest against poor housing, racial discrimination and unemployment of up to 40% in the grim housing estates surrounding most big French cities.

Good to hear they managed to torch a nursery school and library. They don't have much use for either one. France has created its own problems. It's nearly bankrupt; its policies discourage hiring; its tax rates discourage business; its people are, well, French. This doesn't leave a great deal of hope for the poor in the burbs. Having said that, its immigrants have a choice. They can leave.

“We shouldn’t try to excuse the inexcusable,” said the president in a television address to an anxious nation on Thursday, ridiculing the left’s vision of rioters as “victims of social injustice”. He pledged that those who fired at police would be tracked down, one by one, and tried on charges of attempted murder.

Lawlessness in the suburbs is an awkward issue for Sarkozy because he had promised to deal with it as interior minister, when he introduced “zero tolerance” policing, only to be accused of aggravating the problem by referring to trouble-makers as “thugs” and “scum”. Despite some successes, many of the suburban ghettoes remain a law unto their own and, like parts of New York in the bad old days, policemen do not like to set foot there.

“It felt like they were out to kill us,” said one of the officers in Villiers-le-Bel last week. “We knew that there were weapons in the suburbs, but they have never been turned against us like that. The kids were shooting at us at close range, loading and reloading their weapons. I’ve never seen anything like it.”

Sarkozy is right. The troublemakers are thugs and scum. They may also be victims of social injustice, but there are plenty of victims who don't fire on police officers. And the naivete of the police officer is a bit unnerving. These same thugs rioted in 2005. He knew they had weapons. Was he under the impression that the well-armed "disaffected Muslim youth" who had never been reprimanded for torching the country in 2005 were suddenly going to fall in line, take marketing jobs in Paris and raise their integrated families in peace?