French police have arrested more than 50 people, following fresh riots in and around Paris and other parts of France.
Some 220 cars have been burnt on the ninth consecutive night of unrest in mainly immigrant-dominated areas near Paris, despite a heavy police presence.

Unrest has also spread to Rouen, Lille, Nice, Marseille and Toulouse.

On Saturday Muslim and Christian leaders hope to calm tensions with a march in the area where two youths died 10 days ago, sparking the unrest.

France has been stunned by the violence, which began when Bouna Traore, aged 15, and Zyed Benna, 17, were accidentally electrocuted at an electricity sub-station in Clichy-sous-Bois, near Paris.

Local people say they were fleeing police - a claim the authorities deny. Inquiries are under way.

Copycat violence

On Friday, Prime Minister Dominique de Villepin met youths from urban areas hit by the unrest to discuss the crisis.


Mr de Villepin is trying to launch an action plan for the affected Paris suburbs, which are poor, largely immigrant communities with high levels of unemployment.


Map of main flashpoints
Meanwhile, Interior Minister Nicolas Sarkozy has said solving the problems behind the rioting would take time.

Mr Sarkozy had earlier sparked some criticism with hardline comments describing the rioting youths as "hoodlums".

Fresh violence erupted on Friday in and around the French capital, with the north-eastern suburb of Seine-Saint-Denis being one of the most affected areas.

About 40 cars were torched in greater Paris, and several warehouses were set alight, police said.

Groups of youths were again roaming the streets, despite the deployment of some 1,300 police in Seine-Saint-Denis.

In the nearby area of Clichy-sous-Bois, several Muslim groups intervened and helped to calm the trouble, the BBC's Alasdair Sandford in Paris reports.

However, many residents say repressive policing has heightened a sense of injustice, with officers systematically stopping and searching young blacks and North Africans in particular, our correspondent says.

Some foreign governments - including the US - have advised their citizens to steer clear of the suburbs.

Several car torchings have been reported in Dijon, Marseille and Rouen, fuelling concerns that youths were carrying out copycat crimes.

Violent attacks were also reported in Nice, Lille and Rennes.

'We have been heard'

Earlier on Friday, Mr de Villepin met a group of young people from the affected areas, who included immigrants, students and the unemployed.

Several of them praised the prime minister's initiative.

"We get the impression that we have been heard," Anyss, a student from Bondy, told AFP, adding that Mr de Villepin "was genuinely seeking to deal with the problems".

Mr de Villepin has pledged to restore order following criticism of the government's failure to end violence.

But he came under fire from a group of around 30 mayors and other elected officials from the affected areas, who said this was no time for a plan.

"All we need is one death and things will get out of control," said Jean-Christophe Lagarde, mayor of Drancy.
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The images of wild gangs of young men silhouetted against the flames of burning cars came as an unwelcome reminder for France of its growing underclass just weeks after the French watched, in horrified fascination, the anarchy of New Orleans as Americans looted stores and defied the police after hurricane Katrina.

So far, while the damage to French property has been extensive - hundreds of cars and buses burned and dozens of businesses destroyed - and the violence has spread to troubled neighborhoods in many towns, there is no evidence that the unrest is coalescing into a broader political movement. Most of the rioters appear to be teenage boys bent more on making the news than on making a coherent political statement.

"It's a game of cowboys and Indians," said Olivier Roy, a French scholar of European Islam, adding that attacking the police and setting cars on fire "have become a local sport, a rite of passage."

But the fear is that a structural underclass is emerging - not only in France, but elsewhere in Europe as well - that could bring with it crime and religious fanaticism.

The French foreign minister, Philippe Douste-Blazy, warned Thursday that France risked losing the integration battle in its immigrant neighborhoods to radical religious-based movements - shorthand for Islamic extremism.

So far, however, Roy said, "The Islamists aren't in the affair, because it would expose them to criticism and gain them nothing."

France and other European countries are paying the price of history. There are three basic models of integration in Europe, which has faced large-scale non-European immigration only in the era since World War II. Each of the three demonstrates flaws.

Germany and Austria pursued a policy, now largely discredited, of "guest workers." It was based on the idea that immigrants were temporary laborers who would eventually go home. But the guest workers did not go home and their European-born children have begun demanding citizenship and equal rights.

Germany has recently moved toward more integration: While it is still difficult to become a citizen, there has been a wave of naturalizations in recent years and children born in the country to foreign parents now receive citizenship at birth. Several hundred thousand Turkish Germans voted in the country's recent presidential elections.

Britain has followed a policy more like that of the United States, extending citizenship to newcomers and encouraging strong ethnic communities that help themselves and give immigrants a political voice in the larger society.

British immigrants arriving from Commonwealth countries in the 1950s and 1960s enjoyed immediate voting rights until Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher put an end to the practice in 1981. But the law created politically powerful immigrant communities early on that banded together for resources and fought for their rights.

France has also offered citizenship to its immigrants, but the process was slower. Also, many of the Algerians who arrived to work after their bitter war of independence against France a half century ago were reluctant to take up citizenship, even though they were making their lives in France. Not until naturalizations became more common, in the 1980s, have immigrants and their adult children begun to develop political power.

But France discourages anything that could divide the public; ghettoization is known to all French as a destructive force that afflicts the United States.

Until the early 1980s, foreigners needed government approval to form associations. While there are no restrictions now, France provides little money or support for ethnic or religious-based organizations.

Only in 2003 did the French government encourage the formation of an umbrella Islamic organization that could represent French Muslims to carry on a dialogue with the state.

The policy has exacerbated problems by banning any form of what Europeans refer to as positive discrimination and Americans call affirmative action.

At the same time the government has suppressed cultural expression like the Mulsim veil in schools, leading to a sense of alienation among French-Arab and French-African youth. Despite vaunted ideals, immigrants feel ghettoized and abandoned.

The political establishment remains rattled by the resurgence of virulent, racist-tinged nationalism during the last national elections.

French politicians have warned of Islamophobia.

Jews, meanwhile, say the country is encouraging and enabling Muslim anti-Semitism by tilting its politics toward the Arab world.

Young French-Arabs are caught in the middle, saying they are as alienated from their parents and their roots as they are from what they see as a prejudiced general populace in France.

Employment, most experts agree, is crucial to solving the problems and accelerating integration. The jobless rate among French-Arabs and French-Africans is as high as 30 percent in some neighborhoods.

But France, is changing.

In March, President Jacques Chirac appointed the Renault chairman, Louis Schweitzer, to head a council to fight discrimination in jobs and housing. The council has the power to take companies or individuals to court.

The country is also debating whether to bend its ethnicity-blind laws to allow positive discrimination to fight bias in the job market.

French-Arabs regularly claim that when identical résumés are submitted to an employer with an Arab name on one and a French name on another, the French name will be the one to get the job or at least be granted an interview.

"The picture of France as a country that doesn't want to recognize diversity - that's partially true," said Patrick Weil, a Paris-based expert on immigration and integration for the German Marshall Fund.

"But there's a debate now about what steps should be taken to change that."

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