Regional Outlook : Is Racist Rhetoric Turning Into Europe’s Reality? : A spate of violence against immigrants across the Continent has many worried that animosity is out of control.

By SCOTT KRAFT

April 18, 1995 12 AM PT

TIMES STAFF WRITER

MARSEILLES, France —

Some would later call Ibrahim Ali’s death an unfortunate accident. Others saw it as a deliberate, racist act. But everyone agreed that two powerful forces in modern-day Europe collided violently at a suburban intersection here one recent night.

Ali, a 17-year-old French citizen of East Africa’s Comoro Islands, was running down the street with a dozen of his fellow rap musicians, trying to catch the last bus home from a rehearsal.

Nearby, Robert Lagier, 63, an unemployed French construction worker, was sitting in a car with two fellow members of the National Front, a right-wing political party. They had just plastered a wall with blue-and-white party posters bearing the slogan “Immigration Equals Unemployment.”

The white men saw the black teen-agers, and Lagier and a friend drew guns and fired. The youngsters dove for the pavement or cowered behind trash cans. Ali chose to run and was shot once in the back.

As the gunmen’s car sped away, Ali fell on a railroad track, moaning “They’ve got me” before he died.

The boy’s death was a sharp reminder of the escalating tension between immigrants and France’s powerful political right, which sees the newcomers as a threat to jobs and to the future of traditional French culture.

Animosity toward foreigners has become a feature of life in Europe in the past few years.

But a spate of recent attacks, from France to Italy to Austria, has many in Europe worried that racist rhetoric is being transformed into violent acts with increasing frequency across the Continent.

Two months ago in Oberwart, Austria, right-wingers erected a sign outside an 80-year-old Gypsy, or Romany, settlement. It read “Romans go back to India,” and it was booby-trapped. When four Gypsy men tried to take the sign down, it exploded, killing all of them.

Last month, two Gypsy children begging at an intersection in Pisa, Italy, were handed a gift-wrapped package by a passing motorist. When the children unwrapped the package, it exploded. The 13-year-old girl lost a finger; the 3 1/2-year-old boy lost an eye and suffered severe burns.

About the same time, near Rome, two North African men were hospitalized after being stabbed and shot. The random attack appeared designed to avenge the death of a 15-year-old Italian girl who was well known for intervening on behalf of immigrants and who had been killed a few days earlier by a car driven by four drunken Moroccans.

Incidents like these remain relatively rare, but growing anti-immigrant feelings and violent acts worry many in Europe, and especially in France, which has one of Western Europe’s larger immigrant populations.

“What happened in Marseilles was an isolated incident,” said Kofi Yamgnane, who was in charge of integration matters for the previous Socialist government and is now head of the private Foundation for Republican Integration. “But the atmosphere in which racism is legitimized, an atmosphere created by the current French government, has made some believe they have the right to do things like that.”

The conservative government, however, says it does not oppose the principle of immigration in France, only the level.

“We accepted the fact of immigration when it was under control, and we even tried to help these immigrants,” said Robert Broussard, a senior official of the French Interior Ministry. “But, little by little, we began to realize that we were being inundated by it.”

About 3.5 million immigrants, making up slightly more than 5% of the nation’s population, live legally in France, according to government figures. That percentage has not changed much in the last decade, but the number of foreigners trying to get into France illegally has grown.

No one knows how many illegal immigrants are in the country, but last year 12,000 people were expelled for not having proper immigration papers. That was twice as many as the year before. And French border police intercepted and turned back 68,000 people trying to cross the frontier illegally.

The job of catching illegal immigrants at the border became even more difficult with a recent European Union agreement that virtually opened the frontiers of Western Europe.

Despite the spirit of open borders, France has created a new, 6,700-member police unit to take responsibility for screening the border for illegal entrants.

“We’ve always had illegal immigration, but what is new is that it has become professional,” said Broussard, the Interior Ministry official who heads the new unit. “These clandestine operations operate like travel agencies. It’s not innocent.”

The conservative government that came to power in France two years ago has taken a number of steps to crack down on illegal immigrants and make it more difficult for immigrants to live in France.

Police are empowered to stop and check the identity papers of anyone--which, in practice, has often meant people with dark skin. Also, children born in France to non-French citizens no longer receive automatic citizenship at birth. Instead, they must apply between the ages of 16 and 21.

And foreigners who marry French nationals must verify that theirs is a union of love, and not of convenience, by waiting a year before being considered for long-term residency papers. If they do not already have permission to be in the country, they can be expelled.

Many in France have seen those laws as a campaign against all immigrants, even law-abiding ones.

The Feb. 21 death of Ibrahim Ali at the hands of three National Front supporters seemed to symbolize all the threats facing immigrants.

Ali was one of an estimated 25,000 immigrants from the Comoros, a former French colony, who live among dozens of other immigrant groups in a wide band of northern Marseilles suburbs.

A quiet young man with no police record, Ali was studying masonry in school and was part of a neighborhood rap group known as B. Vice. He lived in a low-income apartment building with his mother, who works as a school custodian, his 20-year-old sister and his stepfather.

The night of the shooting, Ali and his friends had been at Mirabeau, a cultural center, where rap groups were rehearsing for an AIDS benefit concert. They left the center after 10 p.m. and, fearing they would miss the next bus home, decided to run the two miles to their bus stop.

As they ran along a four-lane road that winds through an industrial suburb of small factories, they came upon Lagier and his colleagues, who had just finished putting up their posters.

The three men, now in jail on charges of voluntary homicide, say they were frightened. They claim that they fired warning shots only when the youths surrounded their car. One of those shots, the men say, must have ricocheted and killed Ali.

But the youths deny threatening the men, and the fatal bullet showed no signs of ricochet damage, authorities say.

It had been fired by a .765-caliber handgun, a weapon so powerful that it was licensed to Lagier for use only on practice firing ranges.

The National Front has supported the men’s cause, contending that the incident was merely an accident and, moreover, an accident that was bound to happen in an area with so many immigrants.

“It’s a sad affair,” said Maurice Gros, director of the National Front office in Marseilles.

But, he added, his followers had expected trouble because they often come under verbal attack when they are putting up posters.

When “these blacks became aggressive, our men had no choice” but to fire their weapons in the air, he said, adding that “when the men went home that night, they had no idea that they had even hurt anyone.”

Bruno Goldnish, vice president of the National Front, told reporters that “the real criminals” are the politicians who let Comorians into Marseilles in the first place.

“It isn’t the thermometer that creates the fever,” he said.

The fever is real nonetheless. Thousands turned out last month for a protest rally here, filling the Canebiere, a fancy promenade near the yacht-filled port, carrying signs reading “Justice for Ibrahim.”

Christian Bruschi, the lawyer for Ali’s family, said he hopes the trial, which is months away, “will be more than just a simple trial of three bad characters. I hope it will show that this party’s racist policies led the way for this kind of act.”

One of Ali’s close friends, Ahmed Madi Moussa, a 20-year-old from Senegal who escaped injury the night of the attack, said the trial will show if “everything we’ve always been told about France--that it is a country where color has no significance--is true. If so, then justice will prevail.”

This tough, blue-collar city, France’s second largest, is the support base of the National Front.

In the last presidential election, the party’s 66-year-old leader, Jean-Marie Le Pen, drew 25% of the vote here, about twice his national average.

Marseilles has also long been the gateway to France for tens of thousands of immigrants, mostly North Africans from across the Mediterranean. Their large presence has given Le Pen a ready example for his loyal followers.

That northern ring of suburbs “is a place where France is not France anymore,” said Gros, the local National Front official. “We are no longer in our own country there. It’s a sort of extraterritorial land.”

Under the slogan “For a new protectionism,” the party has called for the expulsion of all immigrants.

The front’s main complaint is that immigrants are taking jobs that could be held by French workers, thereby contributing to the country’s 12.3% unemployment rate, the highest among the world’s top seven industrial nations.

The party itself has been a target of violence. A bomb exploded at its downtown Marseilles headquarters last year. And, a few days after Gros was interviewed by The Times, a bomb was thrown into his home garage. (It did not explode.)

Although the National Front is relatively small, its attitude toward immigrants is widely shared by supporters of the more moderate conservative coalition that controls the National Assembly, the country’s main governing body, and was responsible for passing the most recent slate of anti-immigrant laws.

Unless the opinion polls are wrong, the conservatives will also soon control the French presidency, held for 14 years by Socialist Francois Mitterrand.

An overwhelming majority support either Paris Mayor Jacques Chirac or Prime Minister Edouard Balladur, the two like-minded conservatives running for president.

Fode Sylla, head of SOS Racisme, an independent human rights group in Paris, contends that the new immigration laws passed by Balladur’s government already “have created a mentality that all foreigners are illegal. And that’s how this government has justified the oppression.”

In a recent French public opinion poll, more than 60% of the respondents described themselves as at least “a little” racist, while 31% said they were “not racist at all.”

“I often ask myself if this is still the country of the ‘rights of man,’ ” Sylla said, referring to the declaration of the French Revolution that has for so long shaped France’s attitude toward refugees and political exiles.

“Fundamentally, we are still a country of human rights,” Sylla added. “But there is a tendency to find scapegoats. And the country is very fragile right now.”

(BEGIN TEXT OF INFOBOX / INFOGRAPHIC)

Origin of Foreigners in France

It is impossible to accurately count illegal immigrants. But statistics on legal residents show a shift toward Africans and Asians since 1975.

* 1975

Europe: 61.1%

Africa: 34.6%

Asia: 3.0%

Others: 1.3%

* 1990

Europe: 40.7%

Africa: 45.4%

Asia: 11.8%