“Forty years after the March for Equality and Against Racism, let’s take up the reflection on police work”

2023-08-27 11:00:09

We will celebrate in a few weeks the forty years of an event now forgotten but which resonates more than ever with regard to the troubles experienced this summer after the death of Nahel [tué le 27 juin à Nanterre (Hauts-de-Seine) par un policier].

On October 15, 1983, a small group of walkers called out from a city in Marseilles, La Cayolle, called by a collective born in Les Minguettes, in Lyon. The marchers were protesting the death a few days earlier of a 13-year-old child. The collective had as a unifier a kid from Minguettes, Toumi Djaïdja, himself seriously injured during a police check. Leaving from La Cayolle, the group joined the city of Flamingos where, three years earlier, a young man from the city, Lahouari Ben Mohamed, had died during a police check.

In a few weeks, the March for equality and against racism grew, aroused a current of deep empathy to end in Paris, on December 3, 1983, Place de la République, bringing together more than a hundred thousand people.

It is useful today to recall the results of this rally and the demands it carried, as well as its emotional framework. There was anger at the initiative of the movement, rage even in the face of the exactions of a police force where some kings of the trigger were beginning to crack down.

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But this anger led to a movement that claimed active pacifism, and aimed from the outset for demands and political construction. There was a demand for concrete political measures, which would be heard within the framework of what would become the city’s policies, with their own ministry. Policies finally thrown out of the way, and above all of which we have forgotten how central the educational question was to them (creation of priority education zones, school support measures, etc.).

apartheid democracy

Two demands that were at the heart of the movement have never been heard.

The first concerned the right of foreigners to vote in local elections. Giving reason today to those who see at the very heart of the State persisting a postcolonial fiber, the measure was very quickly put away in the closet of electoral promises never kept.

Also read the forum: Article reserved for our subscribers Death of Nahel M.: “The only question that violently resurfaces once the sentence has passed in the face of the death of a teenager, is that of the reasons for inaction”

We measure today the consequences in the ordinary politics of the neighborhoods: not only few leaders and political notables come from the “neighborhoods”, but they do not carry the anger and the dormant rage of the young people either. It is revealing to note today that no real political career has been built in the movement, most of whose participants have fallen into oblivion or have followed other professional paths than those of politics. It is, in the long history of French politics, a remarkable exception.

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