PARIS - President Nicolas Sarkozy yesterday unveiled a broad plan aimed at tackling the problems besetting the nation's immigrant suburbs, vowing to send in 4,000 more police officers and offer a package of aid for neighborhoods that have struggled with despair, violence, and riots.
Declaring that the "very idea of the nation is at stake," Sarkozy offered a strategy to reduce the isolation of neighborhoods of public housing towers where unemployment is high and youth violence sometimes erupts into rioting.
He pledged to improve public transportation to begin the "deghettoization" of such neighborhoods and promised a busing plan to move children out of underperforming, segregated schools.
Sarkozy also announced a three-year job training program for 100,000 youths and "second chance" schools for young adults who had failed to earn diplomas.
But along with the aid, Sarkozy delivered a muscular threat of a new battle against drug traffickers, who he said were "poisoning the lives of the neighborhoods."
"We will put an end to the law of gangs, the law of silence, the law of trafficking," he said. "There will be a war without mercy against drug trafficking and I will assume full responsibility."
His threat came after France's national postal service announced that it would stop delivering mail to some suburban neighborhoods because its employees had faced attacks on their routes.
Sarkozy is seeking to deliver on a campaign pledge to create a "Marshall Plan" to revive the suburbs, where seething anger about discrimination and unemployment exploded across France in car burnings and clashes with the police in 2005 and last year.
Sarkozy did not explain how he would finance the proposals, though he said the government would commit 500 million euros, or about $725 million, toward the improvement of public transportation for the suburbs.
As the nation's blunt, law-and-order interior minister, Sarkozy alienated many inhabitants of the troubled ethnic neighborhoods of France when he openly scorned their disaffected youth as "thugs."
He skirted the suburbs during the presidential campaign, venturing finally in January to Sartrouville, where he visited a police station and spoke with young people about jobs and training.
But Sarkozy made an elaborate event out of his speech yesterday, pressing the proposals further than his outspoken urban policy minister, Fadela Amara, who held four months of town hall meetings across France to develop a strategy that she outlined last month.
Sarkozy delivered his 50-minute speech on the issue in a rally-like atmosphere in a gilded hall of the Élysée Palace before an audience of several hundred people: business executives, community organizers, and residents of the suburbs.
Mingling among the guests were students including Yassine Arab, 18, a Rouen youth group member who remained wary of the president's promises.
"Young people have heard so many lies," Arab said. "So many things have been said and not done. They are given promises that this or that will get done and at the end nothing happens. Go to any suburb. It's like that."
