‘We have to listen to them’: Youth associations on the front lines during Nahel riots

Lufiane N’Dongola, 42, recently spent three nights on the streets talking with young people in a working-class neighbourhood near the city hall of Vitry-sur-Seine, a city in the southeastern suburbs of Paris. Vitry-sur-Seine and other cities across France experienced nearly a week of riots following the fatal shooting of 17-year-old Nahel by a police officer on June 27 in Nanterre – another western Paris suburb – during a traffic stop.

“The nights were tense in Vitry as soon as [the following] evening,” said N’Dongola, who heads Lol’idays, a social association that has been working with youth and families for 10 years. “Tram shelters were broken, garbage cans were burned and shops were looted.”

“From 11pm to 3am, elected officials were there too, as well as other associations. There were many adults; in Vitry we really came together. We went to see the young people to raise awareness, to tell them we are listening to them – even if it did not prevent them from smashing things in front of us. Yet they knew they had adults they could talk to,” said N’Dongola, convinced their presence limited the destruction and helped end the violence over the course of the following days.

Despite the tension and fear of further unrest, N’Dongola said it was important to keep up a dialogue with young people from the city. “It was essential to defuse the situation,” he said. Through its solidarity grocery shops helping low-income families and its training programme for future youth workers, Lol’idays is in constant contact with the city’s young people. But N’Dongola says he has long noticed a breakdown in relations between them and the police.

“The dialogue had already been broken for a long time. But with the death of Nahel, it was the straw that broke the camel’s back. Now we have to try to fix everything. First we have to be with them, to listen to them, talk and look for alternatives.”

Read moreFrench suburbs: Fresh protests against police violence rooted in decades of harassment, inequality

Workshops in the presence of a former police officer

The behaviour of the police sometimes complicates N’Dongola’s work. On Friday night, while he and other adults stopped to talk with a group of youths, police targeted them in front of the younger people. “They shouted, ‘Disperse! Disperse!’ before firing tear gas at us without knowing what we were doing. We had come to extinguish the fire, as volunteers, and we were insulted. The worst part was that it discredited our work with the youth.”

N’Dongola, who has worked for more than 25 years in working-class neighbourhoods near Vitry, is not planning to give up. On the contrary, he wants to be able to react more quickly. He is planning an organising a citizen training workshop in the presence of a former police officer in the upcoming weeks. “We will work on the ‘identity check’: how to behave, and we will discuss the fear that comes with police contact,” he said.  

‘Daily lives have not changed much’

In Clichy-sous-Bois, another working-class town in the Paris suburbs, elected officials and mediators did not wait for President Emmanuel Macron’s call to keep young rioters off the streets. After stationing themselves outside schools to raise awareness among parents, they went door to door one evening asking them to keep their children at home. The day before, the damage was so extensive that the town hall issued an order establishing a curfew for minors from 10pm to 6am.

This town in the department of Seine-Saint-Denis remains scarred by the memory of the 2005 riots that erupted after the deaths of teenagers Zyed Benna and Bouna Traoré, who were electrocuted at a substation while running away from the police.

Mariam Cissé, a city councillor since 2008 and a cousin of Bouna Traoré, spent part of Thursday evening with mediators in the city’s streets. They could not succeed in preventing a massive fire at the library, she said. “We lost our library; we tried to save everything we could the next day. The books were soaked after the building was flooded by firefighters trying to put out the fire.”

Other damage inflicted upon the town included destroyed internet cables, which cut internet access for some of the inhabitants of the Chêne pointu (pointed oak) district, where many families are already struggling economically. The widespread violence led the Paris region of Île-de-France to shut down bus and tram service after 9pm – but this prevented some inhabitants from going to work for lack of public transport. The town is nearly an hour’s walk from the nearest RER (train service linking Paris to the suburbs) station, and many residents who work night shifts in other cities do not own a vehicle.

“Those from the youth associations did not recognise the rioters because the young people we usually interact with were not behind the damage,” said Cissé, adding: “I think social networks had an amplifying effect.”

For her, the events of the last few days have reminded her of 2005. “It naturally takes me back to a period I lived through and reminds me how the city and the inhabitants of Clichy-sous-Bois have tried to recover from this [negative] image. I hope the state will tackle the issue of working-class neighbourhoods head on,” the city councillor said.

“We have made a lot of progress around the city but people’s daily lives have not changed much. Filling your fridge at the end of the month is still a priority here.”

‘The invisible ones’

Yazid Kherfi still remembers the riots of 1983 that broke out after police violence in Minguettes, in the suburbs of Lyon. “History is repeating itself,” said Kherfi, director of the Médiation Nomade association.

The 62-year-old renounced a former life as a thief to become an expert in crime prevention. He spends part of the night near housing projects in his association’s motor home, encouraging young people to talk. He has visited more than 200 working-class neighbourhoods throughout France at the request of municipal authorities. Last weekend he went to meet with the youth of Mantes-la-Jolie, a town west of Paris.

“At night I see a world without adults,” he says. “Young people are alone, their parents are destitute, youth centres have closed for the day, educators and mediators have gone home. There are far fewer resources than before. Money can be put in safety-deposit boxes with video surveillance cameras, but we forget prevention and the human factor.”

Read moreRacism, sex abuse and impunity: French police’s toxic legacy in the suburbs

Kherfi, a graduate professor in educational science at the University of Nanterre, said the young people seen setting fire to public property and ransacking shops last week are those who sociologists call “the invisible ones”. 

“They are failing at school, failing at work. They are falling off the radar of institutions, schools, jobs … But in recent days the world has heard them. They have found a way to exist through violence,” Kherfi says.

“These are young people who are not doing well, who for years were considered worthless. We left them to themselves, so they ended up having a one-sided conversation.”   

He emphasises that there is an urgent need to reconnect with these young people. “We have to dedicate resources to the emmerdeurs (troublemakers). In schools we need to trains ourselves better and take the time to work with ‘the worst’ among them.”

As for what happened in that week of riots, Kherfi said he would describe it as “self-destruction”.

This article was translated from theoriginal in French.