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Clouds obscure sporting 'rainbow nation'
26/04/2002 13:18 - (SA)
Mark John
Paris - "This is a France that wins and is, for once, united in victory" President Jacques Chirac beamed to a jubilant nation after its multiracial team of soccer stars carried off the 1998 World Cup.
Yet four years later, talk of the dawn of a "rainbow nation" of ethnic tolerance has gone silent as the resurgence of extreme right leader Jean-Marie Le Pen shows how far France still has to go with race relations off the pitch.
"Like the vast majority of French, I am shocked," France's Ghana-born captain Marcel Desailly said on his Web site of Le Pen's qualification last Sunday for the presidential runoff.
"I just hope that on May 5 the French come to their senses and vote against him," Desailly, who plays for English Premier League club Chelsea, urged.
Others of that 1998 team, victors on home soil who then went on to lift the European championship two years later, say they were less taken aback by the 17 percent score that put the anti-immigrant former paratrooper second behind Chirac in the first round, sending shock waves through Europe and beyond.
"Part of me is surprised, part of me not," said now retired goalkeeper Bernard Lama, the son of an immigrant from Guyana.
"There is a lot of discontent and people living in misery and Le Pen has been able to exploit all the social evils.
"The values we stood for in 1998 have been blown apart," Lama lamented to a French daily this week.
For a few delicious weeks of hope, the squad that contained eight non-indigenous players were hailed then as prophets of an era of understanding between white France and its large immigrant population.
Le Pen ate his words
Algerian-origin Zinedine Zidane, born in the rough La Castellane suburb near Marseille, was the star of the moment. Lilian Thuram, from the French West Indian island of Guadeloupe, was revered as the semifinal's two-goal hero.
Le Pen was forced to congratulate a team he had attacked as "artificial" and not authentically French after they beat Brazil in the final to lift soccer's greatest crown.
A few pundits even believed the victory had sounded the deathknell for Le Pen's National Front as sons of immigrants flocked to join local sports clubs in the hope of being the next Zidane. For the first time, some felt truly French.
"The politicians thought they had solved all the problems through football," anti-racist campaigner Mouloud Aounit said of the multi-ethnic glow that coursed through France, as the nation joined in celebrations of the victory.
"In fact, the effect lasted about as long as the fireworks."
Long a country of immigration, France granted citizenship to many of the millions of new arrivals from its former colonies in North Africa and elsewhere, but has been slow to assimilate them, Aounit and others argue.
While the 1998 win may have been a powerful symbol of unity, it did not change the social realities that, as France prepares to defend its title this summer, have kept the country divided.
"You are never going to get racial integration until you knock down all those ghettos where immigrants have been put because of discriminatory social housing policies," Mamadou Gaye of the SOS Racisme pressure group said.
Economy fades
Gaye acknowledges that Socialist Prime Minister Lionel Jospin, the humiliated loser in Sunday's first round, had begun to address some of the racial inequalities in housing and other welfare policies since coming to power in 1997.
But then the economy, a key factor in 1998's optimism, started running out of steam. By last year, unemployment, for so long turning downwards, began climbing back up again.
The explosion in Middle East violence did not help.
Anti-Semitic attacks by youths playing out Palestinian grievances on French soil have shattered the calm between the country's Muslim and Jewish communities, the largest in western Europe.
The picture is not uniformly bleak. Journalist Jean Philippe, author of a Zidane biography to be published next month, insists the Real Madrid star was the product of a family which, despite the odds, had managed to succeed socially.
"Ask Zidane if he was the victim of racism and he will say no," said Philippe. "But then, not everyone can be Zidane."
That is true of 1998 champion Christian Karembeu, a Kanak from the Pacific archipelago of New Caledonia who has a more ambivalent relationship with mainland France - to the point of not singing the Marseillaise, the country's national anthem.
In stark contrast to four years ago, he was hissed every time he touched the ball in a recent home international, suggesting that France was not yet immune to the racism seen and heard in soccer grounds in many countries.
Black, French striker Thierry Henry, now with London club Arsenal, was in no doubt about how he saw the incident: "It doesn't really make you want to want to come back and play for a French club."
- Reuters
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