RIGHTS: FRENCH BLACKS LOOK TO THE U.S.
Julio Godoy
PARIS - Black citizens in France have set up a new alliance to promote "our need of recognition."
The group, the Representative Council of Black Associations (CRAN, after its French name), brings together about 60 organisations of black people from sub-Saharan Africa and the Caribbean.
Among the members of the group launched last month is member of parliament Christiane Taubira, human rights activist Fodé Sylla and academics Pap Ndiaye and Francoise Vergès.
"The French white republic is over," CRAN founding member Sylla told IPS. "Anachronistic French institutions only serve now to perpetuate discrimination against those who are not white. France must face critically its own real history."
France praises itself as the cradle of human rights since the three values that emerged from the French Revolution of 1789 - "liberty, equality, fraternity". Black people are now invoking those very values.
After the immigrant youth unrest late October and November in the face of widespread discrimination, CRAN plans to take on France's official view of itself, that is often at odds with the values of the Revolution.
The National Assembly passed a law in February this year providing for school programmes to "recognise the positive role the French (colonial) presence played overseas, especially in North Africa."
The law has been interpreted as official French praise of colonialism. It stirred controversy in countries such as Morocco and Algeria, former French colonies in North Africa. In Algeria, the ruling party National Liberation Front (FLN), which grew out of the 1950s independence movement issued a statement condemning the French claim.
The French law, the FLN stated, "glorifies colonialism and a retrograde vision of history," and tries to justify "the barbarity of colonialism by erasing the most hideous acts" committed by French forces in Algeria.
Similar reactions came in territories still under French sovereignty, especially in the Caribbean. About a thousand people demonstrated against the law in Fort-de-France, capital of the French Caribbean 'department' Martinique Dec. 7. Demonstrators called it "the law of shame."
Minister for the interior Nicolas Sarkozy who had planned to visit the French territory that day cancelled his trip, arguing that he needed "a serene climate" to meet local representatives.
Earlier this month, France celebrated Napoleon's victory in the battle of Austerlitz in today's Czech Republic. During that battle French imperial troops defeated the Russian and Austrian armies. But France forgot that Napoleon reinstituted slavery in 1802, and a year later forbade marriage between white and black persons.
Racist views remain current also among the French intelligentsia. Alain Finkielkraut, professor of philosophy at the Superior Normal School in Paris described the French national football team in an interview to an Israel newspaper last month as "black, black, black", and said "the whole European continent is laughing about it."
CRAN plans to fight such views. "There exists in France an experience that is shared by millions of people who have only one thing in common - they are black," Pap Ndiaye, professor at the Paris School of Social Studies told IPS. "That experience is discrimination."
Black national football player Vikash Dhorasoo says the police used to harass him regularly before he acquired prestige as a sportsman. "But once I gained some standing as a middle field player, police stopped harassing me," he told the sports newspaper L'Equipe in an interview last month. "My success as football player whitened me."
The creation of the council was planned well before the immigrant youth unrest of last October and November.. The government resorted to an emergency law to control rioting. The law was passed in 1955 to check the Algerian war against French colonialism.
But the crisis strengthened the grounds on which people like< (END)
