[fse-esf] CALL for the SOCIAL FORUM of the BANLIEUES

[naima bouteldja]

  Version francaise ici http://fsqp.free.fr/appel.htm
   
  CALL for the SOCIAL FORUM of the BANLIEUES[1]
  22nd to 24th June, 2007, Paris St Denis
   
  Over the past 30 years, the French banlieues have been calling for justice. Concrete demands have been expressed through demonstrations, marches, days of action, public meetings, hunger strikes, and mass revolts. The response from governments of all political hues that have all come and gone, since the Ministry for Urban and Social Development was set up 15 years ago to address social exclusion and ghettoisation in housing estates, has been an array of initiatives with their fair share of acronyms and so-called miracle cures: ZEP (Education Support & Development in Targeted Zones), DSQ, ZUP, ZAC & ANRU (Urban Development Zones
)
   
  Our estates have become an easy target for media-hungry politicians and their sound-bite slurs: the ‘lost territories of the Republic’ are ‘no-go areas’ populated by ‘irresponsible parents’ and people drifting into ‘Mafia-like’ or ‘radical Islamic’ activities. The most stigmatised are the youth. They have become scapegoats for society’s ills. It costs little to mouth civic values while violently exposing the ‘scum’ and the ‘savages’ to public condemnation.
   
  The suburbs have been made into a special law and order issue, in the hands of the police and courts. And yet in all the revolts we have seen, from the Minguettes (1981) to Vaulx-en-Velin (1990), from Mantes-la-Jolie (1991) to Sartrouville (1991), from Dammarie-les-Lys (1997) to Toulouse (1998), from Lille (2000) to Clichy sous Bois (2005), the message has been clear : 
   
  We’ve had enough of unpunished police murders and brutality, of police checks based merely on skin colour, enough of ‘sink’ schools, of unsanitary housing, of systematic unemployment and underemployment, enough of prisons, of humiliation and oppression! We have become almost immune to the silence of millions of men and women suffering daily from acts of social violence, much more devastating than a burning car.
   
  It is our right to revolt against the social order.
   
  As we refuse to delegate power to those who no longer represent us, the Social Forum of the Banlieues will be a public space where we can assert our voices, and build a political, social, and cultural collective narrative drawn from the experiences, stories and memories of our neighbourhoods. The forum will be a place of reflection and a meeting place of different local struggles – offering them political visibility at a national level!
   
  Our estates and their inhabitants hold a wealth of stories and traditions of political and social commitment: from slave revolts to the Paris Commune; from the Etoile Nord-Africaine (North-African liberation movement) to the Main d'Oeuvre Immigrée (Immigrant Labour); from the 17th October 1961 demonstration (brutally crushed by French police), to the struggles for slum clearance and the closure of the 'cités de transit' (temporary, substandard, prefabricated housing projects for immigrant labour); from the Sonacotra hostel strikes to the March for Equality; from the occupation of the Talbot factory in Poissy to the movement of the unemployed; from the Sans-Papiers (illegal aliens) movement to the Committee Against the "Double Penalty" (deportation after serving a prison sentence). All these struggles are an undeniable part of the political, social, and trade union history of France. Let us free ourselves of the collective amnesia and political ignorance clouding these
 events to re-appropriate our memory and our history.
   
  Popular educational movements and social centres have long been let down by those in power. We assert that we can no longer blame other people for all of our hardships. By not taking action ourselves, we become complicit in our problems – we can no longer afford to ignore our collective responsibility. It is now up to us to imagine new forms of solidarity to alleviate our social conditions.
   
  There are many issues we have to urgently address: racism, police violence, social, racial and cultural discrimination, Islamophobia, colonialism and its legacy. But we are also looking more widely to confront issues on health, education, work, the media, sexism, liberalism, the environment, North-South global relations, forms of resistance and liberation, and the struggles for justice, for equality, for freedom
A visible movement in which we are effective political actors, producing our own discourses and developing our own autonomous practices is vital. The future of our estates depends on us, on you.
   
  The banlieues hold a crucial place in our cities, and can no longer be treated as an isolated case. Our forum, taking place from the 22nd to 24th June 2007 in the banlieues of Paris, will be a platform to collectively develop a strategy grounded on common references that we can clearly adopt. We call on all those who regard the issue of the banlieues as a priority to join the organising collectives. After a number of meetings and discussions, a national association has been established to organise the Social Forum of the Banlieues. You are now invited to join us in the regional organising collectives (Paris, Lyon, Montpellier, and Toulouse) to help set up this national event.
   
  The Forum is an opportunity for all those who want to build a collective discourse and power emerging from disenfranchised neighbourhoods. It is absolutely essential that we look beyond our own identities drawing strength from the diversity of our stories born out of political and cultural demands, actions, and participation. 
   
  Calling all ID card/passport holders, Residence Permit holders, illegal aliens, wherever you are – in banlieue estates or elsewhere – you are invited to join the MIB (Movement of Immigration and the Banlieues), DIVERCITE (DiverCity) and the MOTIVE-E-S to turn this event into a moment of convergence – political, social, cultural, festive – and to establish a common and radical voice for all of France's estates. Whoever wins the elections, we need a National Movement of the Banlieues as the only real way of striving for equality.
   
  For further information, please visit http://fsqp.free.fr or contact the regional coordinators:
  In Paris: Association " Forum Social des Quartiers Populaires"
  45-47, rue d'Aubervilliers 75018 Paris
  tel : +33 14036 2466
  email : fsqp2007 at gmail.com 
   
  In Lyons : Divercité 
  29 rue Léon Blum 69100 Villeurbane
  tel : +33 62052 3452
  email : divercite at gmail.com 
  In Toulouse : Motivé-e-s 
  27, rue des Lois 31000 Toulouse
  tel : +33 56227 6283 
  email : motive-e-s at motive-e-s.org
   
   
  
  
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      [1] The term 'banlieues' is used to describe rundown housing estates on the outskirts of Paris and many other large French cities, and mainly populated by French people of foreign descent or foreign immigrants In Britain they are sometimes called 'sink' estates, or just 'estates'. 



             
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