It made national and even international news: Last saturday, a bus in Marseille was burnt while stopping at a bus stop. A couple of kids poured petrol into the bus and lit it up. So far, no one has died but one senegalese student was extremely badly injured.
It helps knowing that that day, it was one year that the kids died in the transformer house, which incited the riots in Paris and Marseille last year.
This actually happened quite close to my student's home. Here's a
Google Map Satellite image of where I live (I'm sorry, but I don't really know how Google copyright works and I've had enough trouble with net and law, so you'll have to follow the link). The two big greyish-reddish-beigish rectangular things in the middle are footie grounds, Résidence Chatenoud is right above them, the H-shaped building (I live in the lower right leg of the H). On the right hand side you can see a road running in north-south direction. If you follow the road downwards, past the footie grounds, you can see an oval shaped roundabout. That's about where the bus burnt.
While this is pretty close to where I live, the only problem this posed to me was that I couldn't get back from the station on sunday night because of the strike following this incident. If you look around at St Jerome, no-one seems very concerned at all. However, if you have look at the news you get the impression the whole nation is at war:
http://www.netzeitung.de/ausland/449863.html
http://www.lemonde.fr/web/article/0,1-0,36-828800,0.html
OK, around Paris a couple of busses got burnt too, so this was hardly an accident. Still, the last article suggests that politicans are using this incident to show how well they can deal with situations like this, with an iron fist and bla bla.
Temporarily upgrading the number of police patrols won't help (I didn't see any, by the way). Sorry, France, but your policy regarding integration has never been really well. Here's some additional information: The
13eme Arrondissement mentioned in the article above isn't really a very beautiful area, it's the Marseillaise version of a ghetto. Loads of HLMs, a couple of supermarkets and that's basically it. People who can't afford the better areas get plonked here and most of the time, they don't get out. So it's not really surprising that sometimes, frustration turns to violence and leaks out in cruel ways like this.
However, living at the edge of the
13eme Arrondissement isn't that bad, before or after the incidence. No-one ever assumed public transport in Marseille to be entirely safe and this has reminded us again. It still sounds better than
public transport in Berlin.
