power; its role was to implement decisions taken by the Permanent Council of the European Federation, it was composed of a Representative from each member state. The Representative was a plenipotentiary Minister and necessarily member of the government of his country, in certain countries, as in the case of the Nation of France, the Representative was also Prime Minister or Head of State. Le Martel was the Representative of the Nation of France on the Permanent Council.
The governments of Sweden and Denmark loudly proclaimed their reprobation though they encouraged their own Muslim populations to take the road to Algharb via France with all its risks. France justified its right to offer ‘freedom’ to all those who had taken up arms against the State, the ‘freedom’ they had so fervently desired. Boublil simply brushed aside criticism from the Swedish government, which overlooked the sneering attitude of its own citizens’ attitude to their own Neos, referring to them as ‘black heads of the south’.
The governments of the member states of the Federation deported not only those classified as racially undesirable, but also small time criminals and even entire families of the unemployed Neos whose numbers never ceased to grow. Business had only too readily understood the advantages of the government’s policy and played the game by ridding themselves of their trouble makers and surplus workers replacing them by computerized robots that did not answer back and worked twenty four hours a day.
Manpower was a criterion of the past, even the service industries had eliminated a large part of its labour force. Algharb was a dumping ground, but dangerously close and consequently an interim solution. Le Martel’s government plans would restore power and respect for the Nation and a Special Task Force was created to prepare the implementation of his plans in the greatest of secrecy.
Algharb became a pole of attraction for disillusioned or idealistic Settlers from the north of Europe. From a distance it appeared a paradise in the sun, free from the dangers they had fled in their distant homelands, free from the discrimination and oppression they felt in the cold North. To reach Algharb, they risked living clandestinely in France, a country that refused their presence and saw Algharb as their own exclusive reserve for their own unwanted non-Gallo populations. Those of the new Exodus lingered in France and Italy waiting for a passage to Algharb by illegal passers who would guide them through the mountains of the Southern Alps to the Promised Land.
There were also those who arrived legally, those who were qualified, teachers, engineers, nurses and other skilled persons who could contribute to Hassan bin Ibrani’s dream of economic transformation of his country, a new Singapore, a doorway to Federation for the Caliphate and the Greater Levant.
o0o
The creation of a homogeneous majority by the mass deportation of those who did not conform to vague historical, linguistic and religious criteria was an old and practised method of ethnic purification that served xenophobic needs, justifying the inability of people to accept inevitable change. The methods employed had a regular and murderous efficiency, justified by the overriding well being of the majority, threatened by alien cultures, suspected of seeking to destroy the establishment and the status quo it enjoyed.
The Bible tells of the Jews exile to Babylon and into Egypt, the method was repeated with improvements and different actors again and again over three thousand years, into to the twentieth century with the flight of the Palestinians from Israel, the flight of six hundred thousand Jews from Muslim countries, mostly Arab states and especially North Africa. The last century had ended with the massacres of the Hutus in Rwanda and the Serbian ethnic cleansing in the Balkans, the new millennium with Darfur.
Today, the same method continues to function efficiently with the expulsion of the Arabs and non-Europeans from the Nation of France, to an enclave of misery and an oppression of another sort. Throughout history the victims who refused mass deportation were eliminated by atrocities, committed by not only by civil and armed forces, but innocents massacred in their homes and villages by the madness of their own neighbours and fellow workers.
Under the domination of a powerful unifying force multi-ethnic societies have prospered, not always without stress, but have often survived centuries, the Roman Empire, the Ottomans and the British Empire. The Ottomans reigned over a great diversity of peoples with a religious, linguistic and cultural tolerance that survived five hundred years.
The Hapsburgs united a multiplicity of different nations and more recently different communities had lived together in the Lebanon until the balance was upset by the sudden growth of the Shiite community that provoked a bloody civil war.
The dismantlement of empires and the arrival of democracy gave birth to a struggle for power and supremacy as in the case of those peoples who had lived peacefully in the Soviet Union. During the Soviet period the borders between two Soviet republics had relatively little importance. However, with independence nobody wished to find themselves as a minority population, without power or representation, and countries such as Moldavia and Transdniper declared either their independence or the wish to join to the ethnic group having the same affinities in Romania or the Russia.
Certain ex-republics of the USSR had developed their own programmes of ethnic purification, forcing Russians to quit their country, whilst others, still bound to the Russian Federation, declared independence throwing themselves into bloody wars such as Chechnya.
The USA was a melting pot that had functioned admirably until the arrival in mass of Settlers as a result of the successive economic and political crises in Mexico, Central America, South America and the Caribbean. The Settlers formed a vaguely homogenous group with a common language and the geographical area of settlement in the USA, principally in Florida, Texas and California. Spanish became the principal language in a number of states, preventing the traditional process of integration, creating centres of poverty with low levels of education and exclusion from the mainstream of the English speaking population.
The situation in France and Belgium had been similar with their Maghribi populations, who experienced great difficulty integrating themselves into the mainstream population for the same reasons as the Hispanics in the USA. That is to say a massive influx of newcomers over a short period of time, concentrated in dense colonies, which prevented integration into the respective countries with their secular institutions and resulted in the continuity of the cultural and religious traditions of the newcomers countries of origin, creating a society within a society and a mutual rejection of the others values.
Rebellion
It was said that the conditions of life in the poorest districts of Marseille had become insupportable for a population, mainly composed of immigrants, who occupied the lowest rank in French society. Ennis doubted it could have been worse than what he had observed over the previous days. In any case prior to the rebellion the North African population in the region had exceeded two million and their level of unemployment was not more than forty or fifty percent in certain quarters, and of those employed many were in temporary and precarious jobs. Industry had progressively eliminated the need for basic labour and tasks needing low skill levels. The service sector provided most of the jobs available, but at the low end of the scale in restaurant, cleaning and delivery services. The few employed in banking and office jobs were younger women.
The presidential and legislative elections in the late spring of that year had resulted in a breakthrough of the nationalist candidate whose party then went on to win seventy seats in the National Assembly. The Renaissance Party had long become part of the political scene in France, their success rising and falling with the country’s economic fortunes. At the same time the extreme left had risen squeezing the fractionated parties with conventional democratic principals in the centre with nevertheless a large majority of the seats in the assembly. The parliamentary electoral system had prevented greater progress of the Renaissance Party, but their votes exceeded ten million.
Democracy in France had become fragile and the country wavered
on the edge of political disaster. The Renaissance Party had evolved moderating their position as regards the Federation, in which France had become an inextricable member, engaged in all of its institutions. The Federation had moved from the political centre towards the right with several countries having large nationalist minorities in the parliaments.
As the gulf between the rich and poor grew and the economic crisis started to bite the distress of the underprivileged increased. It was late in the year when the first signs of troubles appeared, that year Christmas coincided with the end of the Ramadan, a time of celebration for Muslims. A strike had been simmering in the country’s social services and some of poorest families who been unable to claim their benefits were in a desperate situation. The police had manhandled mothers demonstrating outside of a social services office with a number of young mothers hurt in a scuffle.
That evening cars and buses were burnt and when the police tried to intervene, stones and Molotov cocktails repelled them. The trouble simmered over several days then seemed to die down with promises from the city mayor to provide assistance to the needy families and the