Thursday, Nov 10, 2005
The cartoon in yesterday's Liberte, an Algerian daily, depicted a young man knocking at the door of the French consulate. "A visa or I'll torch your car," he threatens.
The image reflected the anxiety of young Algerians wanting a one-way ticket to France - and the rest of Europe - and worried that the riots could instigate new restrictions on immigration.
In the same newspaper, an editorial lambasted the French government for declaring a state of emergency based on a 1955 law that was designed to quell unrest during Algeria's war of independence from France.
"France is catching up with its past, a little glorious past of occupation," charged Liberte.
The past two weeks' violence in France is having nearly as immediate an impact on the other side of the Mediterranean, original home of many of the rebellious youth.
It has dominated headlines across the Muslim world.
In Turkey, Recep Tayyip Erdogan, the prime minister, sparked a diplomatic row with Paris when he blamed the rioting partly on France's decision in 2003 to ban the wearing of headscarves in schools.
Turks now fear that images of enraged Muslim youth could backfire on their country's drive to join the European Union. "There is an implicit and profound link between the events in France and Turkey's prospects of EU membership," wrote Cengiz Aktar, an academic in Istanbul.
Ihsane al-Kadi, a journalist and political analyst in Algiers, said the riots had troubled a country that had struggled to establish a normal relationship with Paris since gaining independence in 1962.
"There's a feeling of worry, a fear for the image of Algerians, and this sense that France is somehow catching up with its colonial past," he said.
The reactions appear far less intense in Morocco, another source of immigration to France.
"I imagine that Moroccans interested in immigration are upset, but they are looking more and more to go to Spain and Italy," said Boubker Jamai, editor of Morocco's Le Journal Hebdomadaire.
"The guys burning cars are also born in France, so the identification with Morocco is not made immediately."
The Qatar-based Muslim scholar Youssef Qardawi issued a call for calm on Tuesday, underlining that Paris had "an attitude towards Arab and Islamic issues which is just and free of American domination".
But France's popularityin the Middle East,reinforced by its opposition to the 2003 US war inIraq, did not prevent most commentators from blaming the state rather than the rioters.
"The land of law andfreedom has failed to deal with the old probleminherited since the end of colonialism," wrote Abdelrahman al-Rashed, a Saudi commentator.
Saleh Qallab, a columnist writing in al-Rai, a Jordanian daily, accused Nicolas Sarkozy, the French interior minister, of "racism and chauvinism" for calling the rioters "scum".
By VINCENT BOLAND and ROULA KHALAF
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