France mobilizes; neighbors worry

BERLIN -- As France declared a state of emergency yesterday to contain violence by enraged youths, Europeans watched with bewilderment and growing alarm at the continued torching of cars, at the destruction of businesses and homes, and at the defiance of police efforts to bring the rampage under control. The continent is home to millions of immigrants from North Africa, the Middle East, and South Asia, and many watchers see in the French crisis a portent for Germany, the Netherlands, Italy, Britain, and other countries if economic and social conditions do not improve for Muslim communities.

''The explosions now are in France, but other countries are sitting on the same time bomb; it's a European time bomb," said Bassam Tibi, professor of international relations at Germany's University of Göttingen. ''This is a warning for Europe from the 'no-future' Muslim kids whose lives are wasting all over the continent. Without change, the fighting will come to the streets of Berlin, Amsterdam -- wherever."

France used a seldom-invoked ''state of emergency" law, enacted in 1955 in a failed effort to suppress civil war in what was then the French colony of Algeria, to allow curfews to be imposed in hard-hit areas. This is a drastic step in a country proud of its civil liberties.

''The Republic faces a moment of truth," Prime Minister Dominique de Villepin said after President Jacques Chirac invoked the measures that will enable police to take control of communities most afflicted by disturbances.

''France is wounded," Villepin told legislators in Paris. ''It cannot recognize itself in its streets and devastated areas, in these outbursts of hatred and violence. . . . A return to order is the absolute priority."

But Villepin also said that fighting prejudice and discrimination against Muslims ''must become a priority" for France.

The widespread mayhem was linked to a drop in the value of the Euro, as anxiety spread to investment and tourist sectors.

The numbers of arson attacks and other violence appeared to be waning somewhat in the immediate vicinity of Paris, but they raged unabated in other parts of the country, according to police and media reports. ''The intensity of the violence is on the way down," Michel Gaudin, head of the national police force, told reporters.

If France has become notorious for the crime-ridden housing tracts inhabited heavily by North Africans, conditions are only marginally better for Muslims in other parts of the continent.

From Liverpool to Rome, from Lisbon to Berlin, an embittered and hopeless ''Generation Jihad" -- as news media have labeled the volatile second- and third-generation descendants of Muslim immigrants -- is arising in ghettos isolated from mainstream Europe.

Some immigrants, such as Tibi, have won prominent places in elite political, professional, and financial circles. But by and large, Muslims hold the most menial jobs, occupy the most blighted housing, and attend the poorest public schools.

Many in Europe see the eruptions in France as a stark warning.

''Paris is the 'view through the keyhole' for Berlin if we don't speed up the process of integration," Heinz Buschkowsky, the chief elected official in the Neukölln district of the capital, told German public television. ''We have to make the effort to give [Muslim] young people the feeling they are part of our society and have a future."

Germany, like the Netherlands, has recently enacted laws requiring newcomers to study the national language and to attend civics courses to gain a basic grounding in the ideals of a Western democracy.

Europeans heretofore have made almost no demands on immigrants, but, by the same token, few native Europeans have accepted Muslims as fellow citizens.

''Integration is not working in Europe because, deep down, Europeans do not want us," said Tibi, who came to Germany from Syria 43 years ago, and who is the author of a recent book on tensions between Europeans and the Muslims in their midst.

''When I've been at Harvard and Cornell, I have far more readily been accepted as a colleague and as a human being than I've ever been in Germany -- where I am seen as 'foreigner' or, at best, a 'guest worker,' even at my own university. The United States has problems, of course, but it is far more welcoming to outsiders, far more willing to see newcomers gain a full place at the table."

Not all analysts agree that Europe is drifting toward an ethnic cataclysm.

But most agree that alienation among Muslim youth is mounting, and that European societies are belatedly recognizing the danger. ''The young people raised by parents of one culture are trying to figure out their place in another culture -- and many are suffering a huge identity crisis," said Hank Dekker, director of the European Research Center on Migration and Ethnic Relations at the University of Utrecht in the Netherlands.

''If people believe they are deprived of their rights or the opportunities held out to others, they will respond with aggression -- that is as true for a quiet place like the Netherlands as for countries with even wider gaps," he said.

Others put it more bluntly. Karim Hassoun, chairman of the Arab European League's Belgium branch, warned on the organization's website that ''even one incident could set things on fire" in the country that serves as headquarters for the European Union.

The Belgium city of Antwerp suffered ethnic riots in 2002.

More recently, Europe has been stunned by the deadly bomb blasts in July in London, carried out by disaffected British Muslims, and by the grisly slaying last year in Amsterdam of a prominent filmmaker, Theo van Gogh. Van Gogh, a great-grand-nephew of the artist Vincent van Gogh, was shot, and then his throat was slashed, by an Islamic radical incensed by the filmmaker's public criticisms of Muslim attitudes toward women.

In Italy, a major opposition leader, Romano Prodi, stirred controversy by warning that cities like Rome could suffer the same explosions of ethnic violence that have roiled France for almost two weeks. ''We have the worst [slums] in Europe," he told reporters. ''I don't think things here are so different from Paris. It's only a question of time."

The fury among Muslim inhabitants of France exploded on Oct. 27, after two youths of North African descent were electrocuted in a power substation near the grim housing projects of Clichy-sous-Bois, an impoverished northeastern suburb of Paris. The pair was apparently trying to elude police, although French authorities have vehemently denied rumors that Ziad Benna, 17, and his friend, Bouna Traoré, 15, had been chased onto the cables.

Scattered minor incidents of arson continued yesterday in Belgium, but officials played down their significance.

In France, meanwhile, the state of emergency declared by the government was authorized for an initial 12-day period.

Villepin told the legislators that police are confronting ''determined individuals, structured gangs," and that the strong measures are necessary to ''guarantee public order to all our citizens."