PARIS, Nov. 7 (UPI) -- France's Le Journal du Dimanche summed up the nation's dilemma Sunday in just three words: "How to Get Out?"
That's the 60-thousand euro question these days as violence, perpetrated by restless, disaffected ethnic immigrant youths continues to spread across the country and to take on menacing new undertones.
Monday evening, French Prime Minister Dominique de Villepin sketched out short-and long-term strategies to restore order in the country.
In the short-term, he said, a ministerial meeting Tuesday would consider reinstating a 50-year-old law giving prefects the right to establish curfews if necessary. But he dismissed demands by some politicians that the army should step in.
In the long-term, de Villepin vowed to place greater emphasis on educational, training and job opportunities in the country's suburban ghettos where unemployment rates are up to four times higher than the national average.
But the French Prime Minister also suggested the country needed to rethink how it views and treats its minorities.
"I've met a lot of young people in recent months and recent years," he said during an interview on TF1 television Monday night. "And they express the same sentiment. The sentiment of being pointed at. The sentiment of not having the same chances as others. The sentiment of being different."
He said that while the belief that radical Islam may profit from the chaos was a "concern," it was not the essential one.
Whether de Villepin's proposals will succeed in turning around the grim and mounting fallout from nightly arson attacks and clashes between police and young rioters is another matter.
Earlier Monday, police announced more than 1,400 vehicles had been burned across France Sunday night alone -- the highest nightly toll since the riots first began in France nearly two weeks ago.
Vandals also attacked three schools, a town hall, two churches and several police stations, police said Monday. And in a dramatic turn of events, several dozen police were wounded -- including 10 with shotgun pellets -- in clashes with rioters as young as 14-years-old.
The riots also produced their first casualty. A 60-year-old man attacked Friday in the gritty Paris suburb of Stains died of his wounds, a local hospital announced Monday.
Increasingly, analysts are viewing the riots as the worst crisis to hit France since 1968, when May student rallies blossomed into a national insurrection that threatened to bring down the government of former Prime Minister Georges Pompidou.
This time, the protesters aren't elite university students but young and disaffected ethnic immigrants from France's gritty suburban housing projects where poverty, crime, unemployment and despair have conspired to create a lethal cocktail.
It exploded late last month; after two young men of Tunisian and Mauritanian origin were electrocuted as they hid in a power station from what they thought was police pursuit.
Today nothing -- not the pleas of community leaders, arrests by French police, nor law-and-order declarations from French President Jacques Chirac on down -- appears to be curtailing the spiraling violence.
Perhaps the bitterest irony that the primary victims of the ghetto violence are the authors themselves.
"A hatred returning against oneself," Le Journal remarked in an editorial, "when a fire set on a business puts dozens of parents out of work, when a little brother can no longer attend preschool because it's been burned. No future?"
The repercussions are spreading far beyond the ghettos. Like 1968, they are touching the very stability of France's already embattled center-right government.
French President Jacques Chirac, already weakened by a series of setbacks this year, including France's rejection of the European constitution in a referendum, is now facing new criticism for having responded with too little, too late to the brewing social crisis.
Chirac finally made his first public declaration Sunday to echo a message already delivered by his government; that the top priority "is the reestablishment of security and public order."
Today, as Le Monde pointed out in an editorial, "Mr. Chirac is no longer a candidate, he is the president." And has been for the last 10 years.
Even the country's seemingly untouchable interior minister, Nicolas Sarkozy, is under the gun. The head of the ruling Union for a Popular Majority Party, Sarkozy has made no secret of his interest in a bid for the presidency in the 2007 election. Poll after poll show he might be a shoe-in.
But today, Sarkozy's get-tough reaction to juvenile crime, including calling the current rioters "scum," has sparked outrage not applause. Calls are even growing for his resignation, albeit by the opposition left.
Such a scenario appears to be unlikely -- if for no other reason than that it would be seen as caving in to critics. Moreover, a poll published by Le Parisien Sunday indicates that the majority of French people -- 57 percent to be exact -- still approve of the minister's performance.
And the partisan infighting begs the larger question: How to find long-term solutions to the growing violence. Indeed, some fear, it is a recipe for disaster.
"This political game on these problems is catastrophic," said Jacqueline Costa-Lascoux, head of the Paris-based Observatory on Immigration and Integration. She fears bickering by mainstream French parties will simply feed the far right. "It's irresponsible for politicians to use this for partisan political gain."
Experts like Costa-Lascoux fault decades of governments from both the left and the right who have created a second-class citizenry of ethnic-immigrant have-nots in France.
Those dealing with the country's grim suburban ghettos say they have been signaling the alarm for years.
Mayors complain about major cuts in local police forces and an overall drop in spending for France's low-income suburbs. Indeed, Le Monde noted that the government's 2005 budget cut $372 million from housing and other programs targeting the suburbs.
"Many of our students live in single-parent families, with mothers or fathers who are unable to cope," Pascal Odin, a history and geography teacher in the Paris suburb of Aulnay-sous-Bois told Liberation newspaper. "When they come to school, they haven't done their homework, they don't even have a notebook."
Others come to school hungry, and don't even have the $1.80 for a school lunch, he said. Parents don't show up for parent-teacher meetings.
For their part, teachers are increasingly afraid of venturing into the crime infested suburban projects where gangs vie for territory. Violence against teachers has been rising, Odin said.
"We've been alerting the authorities for years," he added. "We have the impression we're reacting in a void."
