December 2, 2003	Tuesday	Shawwal 7, 1424

PARIS: Job vacant: High-flier needed for challenging administrative post upholding values of France’s secular republic. Only candidates from minority groups need apply — Muslims preferred.

As France wakes up to the need to improve the lot of its large immigration population, it is toying with the US-style affirmative action always deemed unnecessary in a country where equality — at least in theory — is a given.

Interior Minister Nicolas Sarkozy said last month that he expected one of France’s five million Muslims to be named in coming weeks as a county prefect, the post created 200 years ago by Napoleon to wield his imperial might in the far-flung provinces.

Minorities have held the job in the past, albeit rarely. Sarkozy’s announcement drew gasps because he made it clear he was actively backing a minority for the next vacancy.

For many in France, such positive discrimination is the thin edge of a wedge they fear could prise the French Republic apart.

“It is not an idea that I reject, but I do not like the word ‘discrimination’,” Prime Minister Jean-Pierre Raffarin said days later, trying discreetly to put the genie back in the bottle.

But Sarkozy’s comments have raised the question: How do you tackle racial inequalities and the demands of minority faiths in a country that is officially blind to race and religion?

SOME MORE EQUAL THAN OTHERS: Half a century after France starting taking in immigrants from north and west Africa following the end of its colonial era, no one denies that stark inequalities exist.

Immigrants and their families are over-represented in the bleak “banlieue” housing projects around big cities where unemployment, school failure and social deprivation are rife.

At street level, there is evidence of racial integration but minorities are almost non-existent in the upper echelons of French life, whether in politics, the media or civil service.

“Take a look at a typical French street. Then look at the National Assembly,” said Mouloud Aounit of the anti-racism group MRAP. “It’s like looking at two different worlds,” he said of France’s almost exclusively white lower house of parliament.

Previous attempts to discriminate positively on grounds of race or faith have fallen foul of the French constitution which proclaims all citizens equal before the law without distinction of origin, race or religion.

In the United States, affirmative action policies such as race quotas for university entrance or employment were launched in the 1960s as redress for over two centuries of slavery.

Without a history of slavery on its own soil, France feels no such moral obligation. In any case, quotas and other policies would be impossible here because citizens are not classified by colour or creed. You are either French or you’re not.

Sarkozy’s proposal led to protests from both left and right.

“I cannot back the idea of US-style quotas that would lead to communitarianism,” said Jean-Marc Ayrault, parliamentary head of the Socialist party, using the word which in France means to divide society into ethnic or other groups.

Yet more quietly, several positive discrimination projects “a la francaise” have started to take shape.

Together with the anti-racist group SOS Racisme, half a dozen of France’s top companies have launched an initiative under which their personnel directors will be forwarded the CVs of deserving candidates from deprived neighbourhoods.—Reuters