minorities in danger
In an interview with Le Monde on May 30 2002, Nicolas Sarkozy, France's recently appointed «Minister of Internal Affairs, National Security and Civil Liberties», declared: «I wasn't given this job to analyze the situation. I'm here to stop violence and provide French people with the most important of liberties: safety.» Whose safety is he talking about? Probably not ours, which has for long been threatened everyday physically by an arsenal of laws that either target us or forget us. Threatened by the recent resurgence of repressive ideologies since April 21. By the hunting down of foreigners, the ban on drugs, the violence of the penitentiary system. By the insults - racist, sexist, homophobic - that go unpunished. By the scorn shown towards our protest that AIDS is an emergency. For us, as a minority group, Sarkozy's «safety» means nothing more than danger.