PARIS, November 8, 2005 (IslamOnline.net & News Agencies) – Faced with an ongoing unrest high-immigration suburbs, the French government announced Tuesday, November 8, a raft of security as well as social and economic measures to defuse the crisis.

Meeting in a crisis session under President Jacques Chirac, the cabinet invoked a 50-year-old law, which had ignited the six-year Algerian war of independence, authorizing curfews, house searches and a ban on public meetings, reported the Agence France Presse (AFP).

The notorious law permits state-appointed governors to "forbid the movement of people and vehicles in places and times fixed by decree" and ban "meetings likely to provoke or fuel disorder".

A Chirac spokesman defended the measure as an attempt to "hasten return to calm".

Le Monde newspaper warned that exhuming a 1955 law sends to the angry youth of the suburbs a message of "astonishing brutality" that the country "intends to treat them exactly as it did their grandparents" 50 years ago.

"It is really a provocation for those of us who lived through the humiliations, the torture, the round-ups during the war of liberation," said Abdelhakim Bouziane, 79, an Algerian living in the town of Mantes-la-Jolie west of Paris, and who had been through the horrors of the bloodshed back home.

Nearly two weeks of rioting in the country's high-immigration suburbs has left more than 6,000 cars burned, public and private property destroyed, tens of policemen injured and one civilian death.

More than 1,500 people -- mainly Arab and black youngsters -- have been detained.

The deaths 10 days ago of two youths fleeing police ignited pent up frustrations among young men, many of them of North and black African origin, at racism, unemployment, their marginal place in French society and their treatment by the police.

French police secure a position in Corbeille-Essonne, south of Paris. (Reuters)

Coinciding with the tough security measures, the government also declared a number of economic and social reforms to improve the living conditions and accelerate the integration of immigrants.

It decided to set up an anti-discrimination agency, open some 20,000 job opportunities for the migrants and earmark an extra 100 million euros (120 million dollars) for associations that work in the slumps.

The government will also appoint about 5,000 more teaching assistant posts in the 1,200 schools in the flashpoint areas in addition to creating 15 more special economic zones to boost local employment.

"Our collective responsibility is to make difficult areas the same sort of territory as others in the republic," French Prime Minister Dominique de Villepin told the National Assembly.

He underlined, however, that "the reestablishment of public order is a prerequisite."

The new initiative was a clear-cut acknowledgement of the accumulation of social and economic handicaps in the Arab community, according to AFP.

Jose Bove, a prominent French anti-globalization activist, has blamed the unrest on failed government's integration policies as well as the social and economic marginalization of immigrants.

"The unrest has its roots in decade-old failed social policies to improve the situation in France's poor suburbs." He told IslamOnline.net.

Muslim thinker Tareq Ramadan has also held the entire political class in France responsible for the riots after remaining "blind" to what has been happening in the suburbs, with their unemployed youth of Arab and African origin and bleak high-rises.

In interviews with AFP, a number of youths involved in the incidents distanced Islam form violence, describing their uprising as a response to social injustice.

"Why did they ask the imam of the Paris mosque to calm down the youths?" asked Saidou, 22, the self-appointed spokesman for a group of boys in the gritty Merisiers apartment blocks in the town of Trappes, west of Paris.

In Trappes, 27 buses worth 3.5 million euros (4.1 million dollars) were torched and destroyed in their depot.

"Do they have to wait for us to riot for there to be dialogue? We've appealed for help, they don't care. It's been going on for 30 years. Even we don't know how it will end," said Saidou.

"Whenever there is a problem in a country, its the Muslims (who are blamed)," said Karim, another young immigrant.

"It's not the Muslims, it's people who are in dire straits. I've got a qualification in construction. I'm in construction, but because I have no choice. There is work, but they give us the dirty work.

Many of the young men involved in the unrest said they do not intend to stop until they "win against Sarkozy", referring to Interior Minister Nicholas Sarkozy.

"As long as Sarkozy is around, we'll keep burning cars. We'll burn society," said a 17-year-old school drop-out.

"We want to make war. To let loose on the cops," he added.

A 16-year-old who calls himself Snipe is one of the bands of youths, mostly the children of African immigrants, who have been setting the Paris suburbs on fire for the past 12 nights.

"We are going to keep up the riots until we win against Sarkozy, until he resigns! Frankly, that would calm down everyone," he said.

In an opinion poll, more than half of France's youths aged 15-24 disapprove of Sarkozy's use of the words "rabble" and "louts" to describe delinquents in the suburbs that are currently the scenes of unrest.

Fifty-three percent of the 500 respondents to the poll by the Ifop firm for the latest issue of a magazine, VSD, said they thought those words were inappropriate.

The French Communist Party, the Greens and the Socialist Party have joined forces, demanding the sacking of Sarkozy over his handling of the crisis.

He has been accused of stoking passions by calling troublemakers "racaille" or rabble, and saying that crime-ridden areas need to be "cleaned with a power-hose."