13 Arrested In Paris Suburb Riots

Violence Fueled By Police Crackdown, Gov't Official's Comments

(AP) 
Sarkozy recently referred to troublemakers in the suburbs as "scum" or "riffraff" and in the past vowed to "clean out" the suburbs.

Such "warlike" words won't bring calm, Equal Opportunities Minister Azouz Begag said in an interview published in the daily Liberation newspaper.

He told the paper that he "contests this method of becoming submerged by imprecise, warlike semantics."

While re-establishing order demands firmness, "it is in fighting the discrimination that victimizes youths that order is re-established, the order of equality," said Begag, who was raised in a low-income suburb of Lyon.

The president of SOS-Racism, an anti-racism group, called Tuesday for a "massive investment plan" to cure suburban ills.

"The police response alone ... are not at all adequate to the problem in question," Dominique Sopo said on France-Info radio, calling for a "real policy of breaking the ghettos." The money must go not only to building, but also to caring for the people via local associations, he said.

Sarkozy says violence in the suburbs is a daily fact of life, with dozens of cars torched each night and underground economies of crime.

In incidents apparently unrelated to the riots near Paris, youths set fire to an empty building and trash cans and stoned fire trucks in several nights of unrest in Sedan, northeastern France, authorities there said Tuesday. Officials said the youths were protesting the imprisonment of one of their peers on drug charges and for resisting arrest.