Home > France to Impose Curfews to Quell Rioting

France to Impose Curfews to Quell Rioting

by Open-Publishing - Monday 7 November 2005
12 comments

Edito Demos-Actions Discriminations-Minorit. Police - Repression Governments France

By JOCELYN GECKER

France will impose curfews under a state-of-emergency law and call up police reservists to stop rioting that has spread out of Paris’ suburbs and into nearly 300 cities and towns across the country, the prime minister said Monday, calling a return to order "our No. 1 responsibility."

The tough new measures came as France’s worst civil unrest in decades entered a 12th night, with rioters in the southern city of Toulouse setting fire to a bus after sundown and pelting police with gasoline bombs and rocks. Earlier, a 61-year-old retired auto worker died of wounds from an attack last week, the first death in the violence.

Asked on TF1 television whether the army should be brought in, Prime Minister Dominique de Villepin said, "we are not at that point."

But at each step, we will take the necessary measures to re-establish order very quickly throughout France,'' he said.That is our prime duty: ensuring everyone’s protection.’’

The new measures followed the worst overnight violence so far, and foreign governments warned their citizens to be careful in France. Apparent copycat attacks took place outside France, with five cars torched outside the main train station in Brussels, Belgium. German police were investigating the burning of five cars in Berlin.

The violence started Oct. 27 among youths in a northeastern Paris suburb angry over the accidental deaths of two teenagers but has grown into a nationwide storm of burning and clashes with police. The mayhem is forcing France to confront anger building for decades in neglected suburbs and among the French-born children of Arab and black African immigrants.

The teenagers whose deaths sparked the rioting were of Mauritanian and Tunisian descent. They were electrocuted as they hid from police in a power substation, apparently thinking they were being chased.

President Jacques Chirac, in private comments more conciliatory than his warnings Sunday that rioters would be caught and punished, acknowledged in a meeting Monday with Latvian President Vaira Vike-Freiberga that France has not integrated immigrant youths, she said.

Chirac deplored the ghettoization of youths of African or North African origin'' and recognizedthe incapacity of French society to fully accept them,’’ said Vike-Freiberga.

France has not done everything possible for these youths, supported them so they feel understood, heard and respected,'' Chirac added, noting that unemployment runs as high as 40 percent in some suburbs, four times the national rate, according to Vike-Freiberga. Vandals burned more than 1,400 vehicles overnight into Monday, as well as churches, schools and businesses, and injured 36 police officers in clashes around the country, setting a new high for arson and violence, said France's national police chief, Michel Gaudin. Attacks were reported in 274 towns, and police made 395 arrests.This spread, with a sort of shock wave spreading across the country, shows up in the number of towns affected,’’ Gaudin said.

In terms of material destruction, the unrest is France’s worst since World War II - and never has rioting struck so many different French cities simultaneously, said security expert Sebastian Roche, a director of research at the state-funded National Center for Scientific Research.

The curfews being imposed to quell the rioting fall under a 1955 law that allows the declaring of a state of emergency. The law was passed to curb unrest in Algeria during the war that led to its independence from France.

Villepin said 1,500 reservists were being called up to reinforce the 8,000 police and gendarmes already deployed. The Cabinet will meet Tuesday to authorize curfews wherever it is necessary,'' he said.The multiplying acts of destruction, the destruction of schools and sports centers, thousands of cars set on fire, all of this is unacceptable and inexcusable,’’ he said. To all in France who are watching me, who are disturbed by this, who are shocked, who want to see a return to normalcy, a return to security, the state's response - I say it tonight forcefully - will be firm and just.'' Local government officials will be able to impose curfewsif they think it will be useful to permit a return to calm and ensure the protection of residents. That is our No. 1 responsibility,’’ the prime minister said.

Nearly 600 people were in custody Monday night, and fast-track trials were being used to punish rioters.

The first fatality was identified as 61-year-old Jean-Jacques Le Chenadec. He was trying to extinguish a trash can fire Friday at his housing project in the northeastern Paris suburb of Stains when an attacker caught him by surprise and beat him into a coma, police said.

They have to stop this stupidity. It's going nowhere,'' his widow, Nicole, told Associated Press Television News, of the rioting. France's biggest Muslim fundamentalist organization, the Union for Islamic Organizations of France, issued a religious decree against the violence. It prohibited all thosewho seek divine grace from taking part in any action that blindly strikes private or public property or can harm others.’’

Youths firing fine-grain birdshot injured 10 police in a clash Sunday in the southern Paris suburb of Grigny, national police spokesman Patrick Hamon said. Two were hospitalized, but their lives were not considered in danger. It was the first time police had been injured by weapons’ fire.

Churches were set ablaze in northern Lens and southern Sete, Hamon said. In Colombes in suburban Paris, youths pelted a bus with rocks, sending a 13-month-old child to the hospital with a head injury, he said.

Associated Press Writers John Leicester, Angela Doland and D’Arcy Doran contributed to this report in Paris. (AP)

http://www.guardian.co.uk/worldlatest/story/0,1280,-5399087,00.html

Forum posts

  • Has France surrendered yet?

    • Not yet, I believe they are attempting to set a record.

    • Ah well, at leeast the cops will have fat wage packets, with all that overtime, and the fire-crews, and the scrap metal dealers, and the garages, they will be rubbing their hands.... and the middle classes will call for more cops, and the government can ask for more taxes.....

      Might not be so good for the tourism though :}.

  • These Muslims Youths are out of control.............France needs to crack down on their extremist nature!!!!

  • The responses on this string are very atypical of this site. It seems that those who decry each and every perceived American racism have very little to say about the French Intifada. It must have caught them by surprise. I guess they assumed that France’s policy of kissing Saddam’s ass would innoculate them to Islamofascism.

    They should pay attention to Winston Churchill, who warned the nations of Europe not to feed the crocodile in the hopes that it will eat them last.

    MTT

    • Personally as an American I am more concerned at the moment about how my OWN FASCIST goverment leaders are behaving and who they are in Bed with (Sharon, Blair, Howard) While France appaently shipped in tons of immigrants for cheap labor, now that they aren’t ’needed’ France has reaped what it has sown IMO.

      I wonder just when the Crime Family elitists here will set off their own race riots though by killing some kid in the wrong southern California community. AS The Bush/Cheney Neo-CON Fascists and even their predecessors have set up things with overcrowding and poverty for the illegals they intentionally LET IN constantly for cheap illegal California labor, it seems they might well let The Terminator exploit this for their next big Fascist response to another False Flag. I can see Arnold now with his 50 Cal leading and 1000’s of fascist supporting Robo-Cops putting the jack boot to the throat of provoked Citizens. These neo-CONS aren’t likely going to stop on their own until they either ARE stopped or they have America and The Bill of Rights TOTALLY in their death grip!

    • Obvious point: fascists cling to power indefinitely. When Bush, Blair, Howard, et al. leave office pursuant to the laws of their respective liberal democracies, and you are proven wrong in your name-calling, will you at least have the honesty to admit it?

      MTT

    • A more obvious point:

      Fascists cling to power as long as they can until they are STOPPED.

      I am not a partisan though and I fully realize even if (God forbid) Hillary or some other NWO stooge replaces dictator Bush the march into fascism (TOTAL gov control of our lives) will carry on barring the people rising up and stopping it. Totalitarianism is just as evil whether it comes in the form of TOTAL Communist control or TOTAL Fascist control.

      As for this freedom loving American, I want NEITHER.

      Are you ready for your verichip implant so the Fed can track you 24/7 because they ’know how you should live your life better than you do???

      BIg brother is watching....

  • Hello,

    I’m French, it’s not very funny a curfew.
    in fact, it’s not funny at all that a military solution has been decided because there is no real danger except burning cars.
    You can laugh, but an anti-racist women from then MRAP has been shot dead the 15th november, and everything in france looks like a future fascist country.

    good luck for you,

    jy DENIS (france)