Posted on 11/08/2005 1:21:52 PM PST by Simmy2.5
PARIS - President Jacques Chirac declared a 12-day state of emergency Tuesday, paving the way for curfews to be imposed on riot-hit cities and towns in an extraordinary measure to halt France's worst civil unrest in nearly four decades. Meanwhile, police said the nightly rioting that began Oct. 27 ago was showing signs of abating.
"The intensity of this violence is on the way down," National Police Chief Michel Gaudin said, citing fewer attacks on public buildings and fewer direct clashes between youths and police. He said rioting was reported in 226 towns across France, compared with nearly 300 the night before.
Prime Minister Dominique de Villepin reached out to heavily immigrant suburbs where the rioting began, tacitly acknowledging that France has failed to live up to its egalitarian ideals.
The state-of-emergency decree — invoked under a 50-year-old law — allows curfews where needed and will become effective at midnight Tuesday, with an initial 12-day limit. Police who have been massively reinforced as the violence has fanned out from its initial flash point in Paris' northeastern suburbs were expected to enforce the curfews. The army has not been called in.
The mayhem sweeping the neglected and impoverished neighborhoods with large African and Arab communities is forcing France to confront anger building for decades among residents who complain of discrimination and unemployment. Although many French-born children of Arab and black African immigrants are Muslim, police say the violence is not being driven by Islamic groups.
Discrimination is a "daily and repeated" reality in tough suburbs, feeding the frustration of youths made to feel that they don't belong in France, he said.
"We must be lucid: The Republic is at a moment of truth," Villepin said at an impassioned parliamentary debate Tuesday where lawmakers also spoke frankly about France's failings.
"The effectiveness of our integration model is in question," the prime minister said. He called the riots "a warning" and "an appeal."
Nationwide, vandals burned 1,173 cars overnight Monday to Tuesday, compared with 1,408 vehicles the night before, police said. A total of 330 people were arrested, down from 395 the previous night.
Local officials "will be able to impose curfews on the areas where this decision applies," Chirac said at a Cabinet meeting. "It is necessary to accelerate the return to calm."
The recourse to a 1955 state-of-emergency law that dates back to France's war in Algeria was a measure both of the gravity of mayhem that has spread to hundreds of French towns and cities and of the determination of Chirac's sorely tested government to quash it.
Curfew violators face up to two months imprisonment and a $4,400 fine, the justice ministry said. Minors face one month in jail.
Under the emergency decree, officials can put troublemakers under house arrest, ban or limit the movement of people and vehicles, confiscate weapons, and close public spaces where gangs gather, Villepin said. But he cautioned that restoring order "will take time."
The violence erupted Oct. 27 as a localized riot in a northeast Paris suburb angry over the accidental deaths of two teenagers, of Mauritanian and Tunisian descent, who were electrocuted while hiding from police in a power substation. It has grown into a nationwide insurrection by disillusioned suburban youths.
The unrest claimed its first victim Monday, with the death of a 61-year-old man beaten into a coma last week. Foreign governments have warned tourists to be careful in France. Apparent copycat attacks have spread to Belgium and Germany, where cars were burned.
France is using fast-track trials to punish rioters, worrying some human rights campaigners.
At one court in the northeastern Paris suburb of Bobigny, 60 riot-related cases were processed in one day and the court has called in three extra magistrates to deal with the overflow. The Justice Ministry said Tuesday that 52 adults and 23 minors have been sentenced to prison or detention centers.
The resort to curfews drew a cautious response from Chirac's political opponents.
The main opposition Socialists, through their parliamentary leader Jean-Marc Ayrault, said they did not oppose the use of curfews but also warned that they should not be used to hide suburban "misery" or become "a new mark of segregation."
Communist Party leader Marie-George Buffet said the decree could enflame rioters. "It could be taken anew as a sort of challenge to carry out more violence," she said.
Late Monday, rioters in the southern city of Toulouse ordered passengers off a bus, then set it on fire and pelted police with gasoline bombs and rocks. Youths also torched another bus in the northeastern Paris suburb of Stains, national police spokesman Patrick Hamon said.
Outside Paris in Sevran, a junior high school was set ablaze, while in the suburb of Vitry-sur-Seine youths threw gasoline bombs at a hospital, Hamon said. Nobody was injured.
Rioters also attacked a police station with gasoline bombs in Chenove, in Burgundy's Cote D'Or, Hamon said. A nursery school in Lille-Fives, in northern France, was set on fire, regional officials said.
French historians say the rioting is more widespread and more destructive in material terms than the May riots of 1968, when university students erected barricades in Paris' Latin Quarter and across France, throwing paving stones at police. That unrest, a turning point in modern France, led to a general strike by 10 million workers and forced President Gen. Charles De Gaulle to dissolve parliament and fire Premier Georges Pompidou.
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Associated Press Writers Jamey Keaten, Jocelyn Gecjer, D'Arcy Doran and John Leicester contributed to this report.
Thanks in advance for any information.
"And nothing seems to be able to stop riots. And the police plays a very difficult game because they know that if a young rioter (sometimes they are 11 or 12 years old...) is shoot dead or seriously injured, the situation would became even worse as you can imagine. Then, for the moment, they are obliged to limit their actions."
Thans this is the same as hinding behind women and children.
You have precisely described Intifada. It is a win-win for the insurrectionists. Or, more accurately, a lose-lose for those in power. France is becoming Israel. How ironic.
Any Turks?
Right. Diversity is not a solution. It is a fact. We have diversity whether it is a social program or not and it doesn't resolve any kind of problem. The islamists will also fail to solve the problem, and they won't win this war in any case. The islamists might well catalyze the destruction of the world. I would place blame on a particular group, and the islamists aren't it, although the islamists aren't helping in the slightest degree to solve the problem. This didn't have to get started, but now it seems to be well underway and it looks like all solutions will have to go on the back burner until the war is over.
That would depend on WHICH 27 million "Americans" revolted....
If it was an organized Muslim event -- including our ungrateful immigrants or welfare leaches ---- it wouldn't take 13 nights...
Remember, America is an ARMED society -- with 10s of Millions of trained former military that refuse to suffer dangerous fools that threaten life and property....
We would regard it as an opportunity to cull the gene pool.
I suspect it would also result in a mass exodus of both illegal and non-assimilating "guests"...
Semper Fi
I'd guess at intellectuals with either enough money to ignore the problem or enough immaturity to imagine that it does not exist...or the pseudo intellectuals who teach.
As in the first group to die once the Russian revolution was a fact(?)
Thank you for your informative report.
Such a great point!
What is happening in France today is EXACTLY WHY we have, and fight for, our 2nd Amendment.
Charlton said it best, "From my COLD DEAD HANDS...."
They could have mine. It's a Honda. It only has twenty miles on it. That's twenty as in two, zero. The transmission broke.
Oh, this is rich. I guess they must've been a kinder, gentler sort of molotov cocktail and a much friendlier car arson.
In several French towns, such as Amiens in the north, youths were not allowed to walk the streets unaccompanied until 6 a.m. They were also prohibited from buying fuel in an effort to stop them from making Molotov cocktails, officials said.
Does anybody seriously believe this is a deterrent? Does the media honestly expect us to believe the little jihadi's can't find an adult willing to buy petrol for them?
To send the army would be absolutely useless. Because it's not at all a civil war and because they don't have the know-how to deal with such a situation, which is an insurrection but, for the moment, no use have been made of lethal guns on both sides. Fortunately.
Seen from a distance, everything looks worse than it is. My out-of-state relatives thought LA was leveled in 1994 from the earthquake, but only a very tiny percentage of the structures were even damaged, never mind destroyed. The cameras are never pointed at perfectly intact buildings in disasters and riots.
But as you say, that doesn't mean it isn't an extremely dangerous situation. Don't know if you're aware but it has spread to Belgium and Denmark. Have heard rumors of Germany too but not confirmed yet.
Regardless of what long-term solution anyone believes in, whether more appeasement or ending the welfare state and deporting or jailing the nutbag clerics, if it gets to the point where it's clear that the "youths" believe they have the upper hand (they smell weakness, which is true or it wouldn't have lasted this long -- so I think that point is long past), then there are only two words that will stop this evil dead in its tracks:
1) Fallujah
2) Mass-deportation
Problem solved.
The France of the centuries before ended with The Great War.
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