FOLLOWING the Charlie Hebdo massacre, the national unity march in Paris on Jan 11 proved to be a highly emotional event. One saw leftist and rightist leaders walked together, hand in hand, some with tears in their eyes.
But three weeks later, the whole thing appears to be no more than a magnificent and touching TV spectacle that was shown live for more than three hours.
Political leaders who had appeared united are once again criticising and hurling insults at each other as usual.
It was Prime Minister Manuel Valls who fired the first shot, confusing the concept of ethnic diversity and racial tolerance.
The real cause of the acts of terrorism, he suggested, is the system of “apartheid” in France.
“What? Is our country like South Africa of the past!” exclaimed former president Nicolas Sarkozy
Bruno Le Maire, the leader of the opposition Union for a Popular Movement (UMP) party, angrily reacted to the prime minister’s use of apartheid and said it was an insult to the French republic and Valls owed an apology to the nation.
On his part the far right National Front leader Jean-Marie Le Pen, never known for political correctness, gave a new twist to the debate. He said: “Apartheid cannot always be interpreted as a negative idea. After all, it was only an experiment of offering two communities the right to develop in their own two different ways.”
As a firm believer in the adage the proof of the pudding is in the eating, I decided to see for myself how the minority communities are reacting to the “apartheid” controversy.
Asnières, a Parisian suburb just across the River Seine, is densely populated with Arab immigrants. There I met Youssef Kheltoumi, a man in his mid-forties who runs a restaurant. I asked him how he got into this business.
He replied: “I migrated to France from Morocco 15 years ago. Following an array of temporary jobs, I was employed by the owner of this very place you find yourself in — a coffee shop at that time. I worked hard here, waiting tables, doing the dishes and cleaning up several times a day. My boss, a Frenchman, liked my work and after his retirement 10 years ago he helped me draw a loan from the bank to help me become the proprietor of this shop. I turned the coffee shop into a kebab restaurant which I run with the help of my wife and her niece. Last year I paid the last instalment of my bank loan. The future of my children is secure.”
Mr Kheltoumi said it was simply impossible to be paid less than the employees of French origin since there was something called the SMIC law in France which fixed a minimum authorised wage at the beginning of each year. For example, the 2015 SMIC salary is 1,500 euros per month for 152 hours of work. Anyone who was paid less than this amount or made an employee work more than the stipulated hours of work was breaking the law.
He added that nobody, except probably drug traffickers, would dare do such a thing.
He said his children went to the same school as the children of his French neighbours. “You are not allowed to choose the school for your children. All children, whether they are Arab, African or French, go to the nearest school. Education is entirely free. So, being rich or poor hardly makes a difference.”
When queried if, as an immigrant, he faced any particular difficulties in raising his children, he said the contrary was true. “The law qualifies a couple with two children as a ‘large family’ and the state pays an allocation of 115 euros per month per child. The French normally have two children, but in our culture having five, or more, is a common practice. For a couple with four children they get an allocation of 460 euros per month. If the couple has more than four children they are paid an additional 165 euros per month per child.”
Finally, I asked him what he thought of the French prime minister speaking of “apartheid”. He said: “Frankly, I am confused. I remember a scene from the film Gandhi in which he was thrown out of a train in South Africa because he was travelling in first class and non-whites were not allowed to travel in a first-class compartment. But, I have never seen or heard of anything like that here in France.”
The writer is a journalist based in Paris.
Published in Dawn February 1st, 2015
On a mobile phone? Get the Dawn Mobile App: Apple Store | Google Play
Dear visitor, the comments section is undergoing an overhaul and will return soon.