By French standards, Nadir Dendoune is a success story. The 33-year-old son of an Algerian immigrant labourer, born and raised in the housing projects of the Seine-Saint-Denis department, which exploded in rioting over the past week, Dendoune watched neighbours shooting up with syringes as a child and became a petty thief as a teenager, writes Lara Marlowe.
After two weeks in prison at the age of 17, "white people told my mother I was racaille (scum). My mother's tears set me in the right direction," he says. "Growing up in the banlieue [ suburbs] made me fearless. But if you have the slightest weakness, you sink."
After obtaining his French baccalauréat, Dendoune headed for Australia with a rucksack. He stayed eight years, doing odd jobs, and became a dual French-Australian citizen. In March 2003, he became a "human shield" during the US bombardment of Iraq, an experience he recorded in A Pacifist's War Diary, published last February.
In 2004, Dendoune's unusual record led the Centre de Formation des Journalistes (CFJ), France's most prestigious school of journalism, to award its Julien Prunet scholarship for an exceptional student to him. The centre accepts only 34 of 750 annual applicants, and gives only one full scholarship. By next summer, Dendoune will be a fully qualified journalist reporter d'images, a television journalist who is producer, reporter and cameraman rolled into one.
Dendoune would have no difficulty being hired by a French network, but he intends to return to Australia when he graduates. "In France, I'll always be an Arab," he says. "Over there, I have a French accent. I'm white. I don't want to spend the rest of my life being asked about my origins."
This week, Dendoune was carrying his television camera in the metro, on the way to an interview with the mayor of Paris, when he was stopped by two policemen. Africans and Arabs complain that they are frequently subjected to arbitrary identity checks - in slang, le délit de sale gueule (the offence of a dirty mug).
"They asked me, 'What are you doing with a camera?', because when they see an Arab with a camera, it's got to be stolen," Dendoune explains. "They said 'tu' to me. I said, 'It's vous'. I lost a quarter of an hour." The worst thing about such incidents, Dendoune says, is that he can never be certain that they are based in racism.
"But you always wonder. None of the other students at the CFJ has ever been stopped carrying a camera. Whenever I'm in a middle-class place, old ladies move their handbags out of my reach. I can't be certain it's because I'm an Arab, but I think so."
When he was growing up, Dendoune says, "I was seen as a potential mugger". But after September 11th, and more recently the London bombings, "people regard me as a potential terrorist. The look in their eyes is horrible. And now with Ni Putes Ni Soumises (Neither Whores nor Submissive - a feminist group from the immigrant suburbs) I'm considered a potential rapist. Thief, bomber, rapist; try to live with that. It's too much."