It was over a period of less than a week that Pissevin, a run-down quarter of mostly social housing blocks on the outskirts of the town of Nîmes in southern France, became rocked by a series of shootings, beginning on August 20th with the wounding of a 14-year-old boy. That was followed the next day by the killing of ten-year-old Fayed, who was hit by a bullet as he and his uncle returned home by car from a visit to a local restaurant. Fayed’s uncle, who was also wounded in the attack, rushed the boy to hospital where he died shortly after.
Nîmes prosecutor Cécile Gensac told the press that the shooting was being considered as a case of mistaken identity, and that the victims were simply “in the wrong place at the wrong time”.
Two days after the shooting of Fayed, and despite the sending of police reinforcements, an 18-year-old man was shot dead close to a spot used by drug dealers in the same quarter.
The following Friday, August 25th, French interior minister Gérald Darmanin travelled to Pissevin, surrounded by a media posse, when he promised to send added reinforcements, this time from the elite police RAID unit, and pledged the future re-opening of an abandoned police station in the quarter, along with the creation of a municipal police station.
“We expected a tragedy of the sort, we knew it would happen” said a local man, whose name is withheld, about the shooting of Fayed. “The minister has come to blow his own trumpet, whereas until now nobody has ever done anything.”
Arriving along a road that climbs up towards the quarter, the massive blocks of tall social housing buildings of Pissevin quarter, some reaching 20 stories high, impress by their sheer size. But behind this architectural Titanic is also the story of a wreck, of a construction project that was never completed, that became abandoned, and where poverty is rife. A wreck that sits socially cut off from the beating heart of Nîmes, an ancient Roman town, barely five kilometres to its north-east.
It was designed in 1960 by French architect and urban planner Xavier Arsène-Henry, and at the time had all the appearance of a very modern suburb. Pissevin was one of what were called zones à urbaniser par priorité (priority zones for urbanisation), or ZUPs, which sprang up on the outskirts of France’s towns and cities between the late 1950s and 1960s in order to meet the increasing and strong demand for housing.
Enlargement : Illustration 1
“A citadel was built, at the time the best of its kind, with central heating,” explained Azzouz Raouf, director of a social centre in Pissevin, Les Mille Couleurs, whose activities range from educational and cultural projects to action in favour of closer social ties. “But the quarter was never completed, the links with the rest of the town were never created, the necessary shops were never created, and after the pieds-noirs [editor’s note, the mostly French settlers who fled to France after the independence of its former North African colonies, and notably Algeria], the populations from the Maghreb finished up being crammed in there.”
Pissevin was not included among around 600 of France’s so-called “sensitive urban zones” designated, in the early 2000s, for renewal in a programme led by the National Agency for Urban Renovation, ANRU. “We fought for it, but we missed the boat for ANRU 1,” said Raouf.
Enlargement : Illustration 2
Little by little, Pissevin became transformed, ageing and falling into disrepair, while its population remained one of little social diversity. As family doctors and the few shops in the area moved out, and the local police station closed down, drug dealing and violence took hold. Before the shocking events of August, the Nîmes town hall decided in June, for security reasons, to close down the Marc-Bernard multimedia library in the quarter, which drug dealers had made their spot for transactions. The post office is also closed.
“I know that it’s not easy to mount resistance,” added Raouf. “But […] that’s how one leaves the place to delinquents.”
To its north, the Pissevin quarter borders another ZUP, called Valdegour, which was also designed by Arsène-Henry and built in the early 1960s alongside Pissevin. Rival gangs from the two quarters, which are separated by the Avenue Kennedy, are said to be engaged in a turf war. “The ZUP-Nord [Valdegour] was taken over by a gang of traffickers from outside the town, and they set their sights on the ZUP-Sud [Pissevin],” said Fadh Mihih, a lawyer who has regularly represented youngsters arrested for drug trafficking in Pissevin. “We’re looking here at a battle for territory, and terror is used to destabilise the opposing gang and to make them lay down their weapons.”
“This year, things rose to crescendo point in the Pissevin-Valdegour district,” said a local social worker, whose name is withheld here. “Last autumn, a young man was shot in the head during the football World Cup, whereas it was a moment of celebration. All through the months there have been a lot of provocations, fights, gunshots.” He said it was “obvious” that the situation would lead at some point to the series of deadly shootings that took place in late August. “And it was avoidable, even with just the presence of the police.”
According to several sources, traffickers from the city of Marseille, which lies about 120 kilometres east of Nîmes, are involved in the turf war.
The day after the latest fatal shooting, which occurred during the night of August 23rd-24th, Mediapart caught up with two teenage boys in the Galerie Wagner, one of the residential blocks in Pissevin. The mobile phone of the elder of the two began ringing. It was his mother. “She wants to know if there’s shooting,” explained his companion. In the weeks following the shootings, they said, a number of families put in requests to be re-housed away from Pissevin. “My parents also, they’ve filled in papers, but it’s never worked,” said the elder boy.
In Pissevin, more than 70% of inhabitants live below the poverty line. Families feel trapped and abandoned to the traffickers who lay down the law, filtering, after nightfall, the people who may come and go in certain passages of the quarter.
Many parents fear that their children may become recruited by the gangs. The youngsters observe and know how deals are made, some fascinated by the image put about by the older drug traffickers. Some even wear baseball caps with the inscription “Plata o plomo”, meaning “silver or lead” in Colombian Spanish (“money or a bullet”), the phrase made infamous by Medellin Cartel boss Pablo Escobar. “One of my pupils even had his [Escobar’s] photo as his screen wallpaper,” said a local teacher, whose name is withheld. “That doesn’t mean that he’s a fledgling trafficker, but we have to be vigilant, because here it resonates differently.”
A social worker, who also asked for his name to be withheld, shared that observation. “One day I accompanied schoolchildren on a visit to Marseille,” he recounted. “There were loads of things to see, but they asked if they could visit the northern quarters.” What are commonly called les quartiers nord are the Marseille arrondissements which lie to the north of the port city, where around half the population live in run-down social housing blocks, areas which have become infamous for violent crime linked to drugs trafficking. By the end of August, 40 people had been murdered in Marseille since the beginning of the year in what are believed to be mostly drugs-related killings.
“They have this mindset inside them,” the social worker added. “It forms them, because it’s what they see where they live, in the media, in rap songs, on social media, on the TV. That fascination also affects children in villages, but the difference is that here the trafficking is within reach.”
At the Condorcet secondary school in Pissevin, where Fayed was due to start his first term this week, the number of pupils has risen by 40% over the past ten years, now totalling around 660 children. Many have alarming social or family backgrounds, with fathers or elder siblings in jail, and some drop out of schooling to become a “chouf”, slang in Arabic for “lookout”, for the gangs. Mediapart was told of how one of the pupils was found tied up and bloodied, presumably as a revenge warning by the traffickers. “When you see traffickers who stroll around with luxury watches, or with powerful cars, it creates desire,” commented lawyer Fadh Mihih. “For them, the model is he who manages to break into the trafficking.”
In order to protect their children, there are parents who strictly limit their activities outside home, keeping them firmly inside. “Some parents take on that responsibility, and tell me that,” said another teacher. “I have pupils who are born in Nîmes but who don’t know what the Tour Magne is,” she said, referring to an ancient Roman monument that is one of the town’s best-known.
In all evidence, children do not grow up in Pissevin as others do in the centre of Nîmes, but instead live to a backdrop of danger, abandonment, and stigmatisation, and which the so-called “reconquête républicaine” programme, launched by the government in 2018 and aimed at cracking down on crime in a number of targeted quarters, has had no effect upon.
The teacher described her pupils as “adorable and endearing”, who have few other means of finding their bearings than at school: “They are not ineducable savages as some would like to have it believed. In the morning, at the gate, we have “bonjour” greetings. At the end of the year, people are full of emotions, and as soon as we propose a [school] trip they rush for it. They want to go to the leisure centre, they want to take part in the town council for the young, they want to discover things. As soon as you open a little door, it creates a respite, and there’s energy.”
During his visit to the quarter in August, interior minister Gérald Darmanin announced that the whole of the Pissevin-Valdegour housing complex will be rebuilt between now and a period of between ten or 20 years as part of the new national urban renovation programme (NPNRU) which was launched this year.
As he strolled the alleyways of Pissevin, he was not confronted with the drug dealing hotspots, suddenly deserted, nor the mass of rubbish that usually piles up on the ground and which the municipal services hastily cleared with mechanical shovels before he arrived. The preferential treatment irritated some local inhabitants, for whom the temporarily removed misery is part of their daily lives. “That’s how I feel about it,” said one woman. “We’re pawns, subhuman. We don’t have the right to be respected.”
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- The original French version of this article can be found here.
English version by Graham Tearse