The impoverished youth of France’s outer-city ghettoes are speaking to all of us through ‘a pillar of smoke by day’ and ‘a pillar of fire by night.’ Their pillars are made of burning cars — some 6,000 to date — yet this apparently pointless violence has as clear a message. Europe, which to their immigrant parents seemed like the promised land, has turned into a new bondage.

“You know,” a young man called Bilal told a reporter at Housing Project 112 in Aubervilliers, “when you brandish a Molotov cocktail, you are saying ‘help!’ One doesn’t have the words to say what one resents; one only knows how to talk by setting fire.” So they know what they are doing. They speak through fire.

To say this is not to justify the resort to violence. Nothing in the world can justify the beating to death of an elderly, innocent bystander, Jean-Jacques le Chenadec, a retired car worker who was reportedly just trying to extinguish a fire in a rubbish bin near his home. Nothing. But even as a fragile social peace is, we hope, restored through the drastic means of declaring a state of emergency, we have to start understanding what is being said through the flames. Some commentators have contrasted peaceful, multicultural Britain with explosive, mono-cultural France. That seems to me dangerous complacency. Of course, the message of the burning Renaults and Citroëns is directed first and foremost at France’s leaders.

No country in Europe has a larger proportion of men and women of immigrant descent, mainly from the African continent and mainly Muslim: an estimated six to seven million of them, or more than 10% of the population. In few other European countries are those of immigrant descent so heavily ghettoised as they are in impoverished housing estates like No 112 at Aubervilliers. In few other countries could an interior minister denounce the rioters as “rabble” who deserve to be sand-blasted, and yet remain one of the most popular politicians in the land. That the French prime minister at such a moment is an unelected aristocrat, with a pen frequently dipped in purple ink, makes it hard to resist talk of an ancient regime. Indeed, few European countries have a more exclusive metropolitan elite. Just a few descendants of France’s post-war trans-Mediterranean immigrants appear in public life. Their position was perfectly summed up for me by a recent picture in Le Monde which showed the silver-haired prime minister, Dominique de Villepin, greeting Mr Azouz Begag, the minister for the promotion of equality of opportunity, by patting him on the head. Pat, pat, nice little Azouz.

Meanwhile, the social reality of “equal opportunity” is best summarised in the title of a book by a Moroccan-born businessman, The Social Elevator is Broken; I Took the Stairs. The evidence of endemic racism in the French labour market is overwhelming. The British writer Jonathan Fenby tells the story of an entertainer in one of those housing estates who wrote two job application letters to a state television channel. One gave his African name and his real address; the other, a French name and a better address. The first received a refusal, the second an invitation for an interview.

Moreover, France represents the European extreme of attempted assimilation. No other European state has been so aggressively rigorous in its banning of the Islamic headscarf. None has made fewer concessions to cultural difference. As Alain Duhamel observes in his book French Disarray, “the only community France recognises is the national community”.

All this is peculiar to, or at least most extremely represented by, the French Republic. But have no illusions: this is a problem that afflicts the whole of Europe. It was second-generation immigrants in peaceful, multicultural Britain who perpetrated the far-worse atrocity of the July bombings in London. Indeed, in the form of their revolt, Bilal and his comrades are in a way speaking old-fashioned French, albeit French without words. For spectacular but not ultimately very bloody protests, with road blocks and barricades, are part of a more than 200-year-old French revolutionary tradition. France’s second-generation immigrant youths burned cars; ours burned human beings. Which would you prefer? And it was peaceful, multicultural Holland which last year saw the ritual murder of Theo van Gogh.

Most west European societies have large, dissatisfied communities of immigrant descent. We brought them here in the first place, partly as the legacy of our retreating European empires, partly as workers to perform the menial jobs native Europeans did not want to do, in the years of impressive economic growth after 1945. We kept them, for the most part, at arm’s length, treating them as denizens rather than full citizens of Europe. In Germany, for example, most of the so-called Gastarbeiter from Turkey were, until recently, not invited to take up German citizenship, even if they had lived there for 30 years. And the post-9/11 “war on terror” has added new grounds for alienation. This is an all-European problem. I’m tempted to say it’s the all-European problem; or at least, first-equal with that of creating more jobs. The two are closely related. In many of the housing estates now speaking through fire, unemployment is as much as 40 per cent, while the average age is under 30. Meanwhile, the older, native-European unemployed are strongly represented among the electorate of Jean-Marie le Pen’s National Front, and other anti-immigrant parties across Europe. This has all the makings of a downward spiral.

On all reasonable assumptions, Europe’s population of immigrant descent and Muslim culture will grow significantly over the next decade, both through higher relative birth rates and further immigration. If we cannot make even those who have lived in Europe since birth feel at home here, there will be all hell to pay. Six thousand burning cars will seem like nothing more than an hors-d’oeuvre. Addressing their socio-economic problems is half the answer, but very difficult, since the key is jobs and jobs are being created in Asia and America more than in Europe. —Dawn/The Guardian News Service

BELGRADE: The curtain has gone up on the last act in the tragedy of Yugoslavia. By the time it closes sometime in 2006, a shrunken Serbia may stand alone on what once was a crowded stage with five republics in its thrall.

The drama began in 1991, when the 45-year-old federation that had been an island of peace in the Cold War broke up along ethnic fault-lines. Nationalist strongmen seized the initiative, with Slobodan Milosevic of Serbia in the leading role.

Slovenia in 1991 was first to quit the Yugoslav federation. Macedonia slipped away also unscathed that same year. But war erupted with the Serbs when Croatia and Bosnia walked out, raging until late 1995, killing a quarter of a million.

The drama will close under the direction of the United States, the European Union and Russia, who this week delivered script ideas to surviving members of the cast, with strong pointers to the outcomes they favour.

Negotiations have effectively begun on the future of breakaway Kosovo, the Albanian-dominated province Serbs regard as the cradle of their heritage, and on continuing ties with Montenegro, Serbia’s ally for hundreds of years.

Serbia’s leaders are on the defensive. They say they are tarred with the brush of Milosevic. They are warning Serbs they have limited leverage with the international community over Kosovo, where some fear they may already face a fait accompli.

Kosovo Albanians want outright independence. They say they escaped from Belgrade’s grasp the day Nato entered Kosovo after 78 days of bombing Serbia to end a two-year war in which 10,000 Albanian civilians were killed. They say they’re not going back.

On Monday Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov of Russia — considered a friend — gave only lukewarm support to Serbia’s cryptic offer to give Kosovo’s 90 per cent Albanian majority “more than autonomy but less than independence”.

On Tuesday, US State Department senior official Nicholas Burns said Washington would block Serbia’s bid to join Nato until it had “resolved this huge question of Kosovo”.

On Wednesday, the European Union said Serbia should “take a constructive approach” in talks that could result in Kosovo’s independence, if it wanted to win EU membership eventually.

Russia, the United States, Britain, France, Germany and Italy make up the Contact Group which, diplomats say, will impose a solution if the two sides fail to agree.

Backed by the Orthodox Christian Church, hardline Serbs who say they do not care about isolation want to declare Kosovo “occupied territory” if that solution is independence.

But diplomatic sources say a consensus already exists that Kosovo should get “supervised independence”, with international monitoring of its treatment of Serbs and other minorities, plus a Nato peace force, for several years to come.

Western attitudes to Montenegro differ: the United States says it is neutral on the future status of the Adriatic republic — population 650,000 — while the EU is trying to discourage its “destabilising” divorce from the union with Serbia.

Montenegrin leaders vowing to hold an independence referendum next April were warned by EU diplomats on Wednesday that no date should be set until internationally acceptable rules are set.

But polls show it is by no means certain that a majority of Montenegrins will vote to part company with Serbia.

If Montenegro and Kosovo become independent, the territory with Belgrade as its capital will have shrunk to just 30 per cent of what it once was in Yugoslavia.—Reuters