So close. And yet so far away. If you leave Basel via the border crossing to France, you end up in another world in less than half an hour’s drive. The journey leads to Les Coteaux in Mulhouse. The colossal apartment buildings immediately catch the eye – you feel surrounded.
People live close together here. In buildings that no longer do justice to this description. The dilapidated houses smell of mold and stale air.
Maghrebs, Turks and black Africans live in these blocks. The attempt to strike up a conversation with a group of loitering youths fails: they sell drugs. Buy – or run away. Especially journalists who want to film.
More talkative is a young Algerian (21) who was born in France and grew up in Les Coteaux. Light green jacket, track pants, electronic ankle strap. He has to be home downtown by 3:00 PM. Otherwise, problems threaten. He tells us that he never sold drugs. With a smile on his lips, he goes one step further: “No one sells drugs around here.”
“The police don’t come here to talk”
When it comes to the police, he doesn’t feel like laughing. He complains that the police officers nearby don’t turn on their Go-Pro cameras. “Because they know one of us is going to get tear gas or a baton.” In short: “The police don’t come here to talk.” There were seven, eight, nine cops on the road. “Never in twos or threes. Too dangerous.”
Another resident is less critical of the police than the young people from the neighbourhood: Brayan Varmaz (20). He works as a road worker in Oensingen SO and lives in the “Turkse Blok”, as he says himself.
His inventory of Les Coteaux is sobering: “The living conditions here are not good. It has many offenders, teens and young adults from the neighborhood. They spray the walls, spit everywhere, throw their garbage.” That’s not all: “There are a lot of drug dealers.” Varmaz also mentions stone attacks on the police: “It’s more the little ones who do it.”
Like Varmaz, Assia B.* (47) lives in the “Turkish block”. She lets us into the house. “The cupboards are broken, there are problems with the electricity in the corridors, there is mold in the apartments.” When the woman tells us, we are in an abandoned apartment. The floor is littered, a wall is smeared with a swastika. For B. it is clear: “It is a forgotten district.”
“Drugs are traded around the police station”
Elise Cataldi (53), director of the socio-cultural community center AFSCO, contradicts it: “Neither Mulhouse nor France have forgotten Les Coteaux. It is a neighborhood where people work.” For example in the field of school and cohabitation, as she says herself. “We are here to guide and try to solve these problems.”
This goal does not help to make the police officers stationed at a post in the district seem to have their hands tied. AFSCO President Christian Collin (81) explains: “Your role is administrative. If something happens in the district, don’t intervene.” Example: “Drugs are trafficked around the police station.” However, Collin knows: “Keeping the guys out of here won’t solve the problem. You will find a new place.”
That is why Mulhouse councilor Christelle Ritz (45) sees only one way out: “Get the young problem founders out of Les Coteaux and place them in a closed reform school outside the neighbourhood.” But the calculation of politics the state looks different, says the woman of the Rassemblement National: “They prefer to let the petty drug dealers do their thing – instead of cleaning up the banlieues. Because they are afraid of provoking nationwide uprisings.”
Ritz sees the failed integration as the cause of these banlieue problems: “Certain people in France with a migration background and mostly Muslim faith hate the country, the politics and the police.”
“It’s a Lawless Zone”
There are also such people in Les Coteaux. Hence her conclusion about the neighborhood: “It is a lawless zone.” Even if the Algerian foot chain reports otherwise, Ritz says clearly: “The police would like to act here. But politics forbids it.”
Jean-Marie Bockel (72), mayor of Mulhouse from 1989 to 2010, disagrees with the alderman: “There are no lawless zones in Mulhouse that the police cannot enter. I know this discourse, it has been going on all over France for 30 years.”
Bockel also knows the past of Les Coteaux, the district that was created in the 1960s: “In the beginning, the middle class lived in Les Coteaux: craftsmen, people in technical professions, civil servants.” These people gradually left the quarters. “They were replaced by an immigrant population. There were social problems and unemployment.”
During his time as mayor, a lot was invested in the district. “In the second half of my era it only got better. The work paid off. But of course: even in the present, not all is well in Les Coteaux.”
* Name changed