On October 27, 2005, in the Parisian suburb of Clichy-sous-Bois, three boys were electrocuted after climbing into an Éléctricité de France substation, running away from the police. They had been guilty of nothing more than growing up in a poor, racially mixed and crime-ridden neighborhood, one feared and marginalized by the rest of French society.
Just minutes before, the boys had been playing a pick-up game of soccer on a pitch near their high-rise projects. It was the end of Ramadan—the ninth month of the Islamic calendar, a time of daytime fasting—and with the sunset, the group of boys, many of whom were Muslim, were walking home for supper. After passing a padlocked construction site, the boys found themselves suddenly surrounded by police cars. A neighbor had called in to report (mistakenly, it turns out) that the boys were vandalizing the property. The police, armed with Flash-Balls—guns that fire rubber bullets—rushed up on them, ordering them to stop and produce their ID documents.
Tensions had been running high in Paris’s poor suburbs like Clichy-sous-Bois. Populated largely by immigrants, many from France’s former colonies in North and sub-Saharan Africa, the townships had become a toxic combination of all the country’s social ills: a decaying urban landscape, pockmarked with overpopulated and poorly maintained high-rise projects; widespread under- and unemployment; inferior education; juvenile delinquency; and crime. In a speech the week before, Nicolas Sarkozy, France’s interior minister (who would be elected president a few years later), had made sweeping and disparaging statements about the projects, describing its hip-hop-identified young residents as “racaille.” Commonly translated as “scum,” the word can also mean “vermin.” Sarkozy vowed to “nettoyer la cité au Kärcher”—to clean out the high-rise projects with a power hose, the language evoking the work done by an exterminator.
Relations between neighborhood residents and the police quickly deteriorated. Sarkozy assigned the CRS—the riot squads, which have a reputation for viciousness—to police these neighborhoods. Frequent and repeated checks of identity documents became commonplace. Residents perceived the CRS presence as being intended to intimidate, not to protect.
When the police cars sped up on the group of boys in Clichy-sous-Bois, three of them—Muhittin Altun, seventeen, Zyed Benna, seventeen, and Bouna Traoré, fifteen—panicked. Fearing the aggressive police as much as the eventual wrath of their parents for getting arrested, they ran. Muhittin, Zyed and Bouna sprinted past the graffiti-covered wall of a cemetery, the police chasing after them. Ignoring the skulls and crossbones, the Danger–High Voltage signs, the boys climbed the concrete wall of the electric substation in an attempt to hide.
The pursuing officers saw them enter the site. One commented, “If they enter the EDF compound, they’re as good as dead.” Still, despite recognizing the danger, the police left the scene without attempting to go to the aid of the boys—a violation of French law. They later reported not having pursued them at all.
Not long after, the entire neighborhood went suddenly dark. One of the boys must have misstepped. A blue charge—twenty thousand volts of current—engulfed the three youths. Zyed and Bouna died instantly. Muhittin, his clothes burned into his skin, managed to climb out and stagger back to his high-rise.
News of the deaths sparked violent riots, first in Clichy-sous-Bois and neighboring suburbs, then throughout the entire country. Over the course of the following month, dozens of public buildings were vandalized and burned, and thousands of cars were set ablaze. Five people died. Though three thousand rioters were arrested, no police officers were found guilty of any wrongdoing, not even those who saw the boys enter the substation and fled the scene.
Zyed, Bouna and Muhittin’s tragic story inspired us to write Away Running. Though our novel is not those boys’ story, their story has allowed us to explore the promise and the failures of multiculturalism and the accountability we all bear for one another.
Please visit www.awayrunning.com for more information and go to our Study Guide for Teachers for strategies and exercises that can help you incorporate the themes of our book into your lesson plans.