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.
___
Associated Press Writers Jamey Keaten, Jocelyn Gecjer, D'Arcy Doran and John Leicester contributed to this report.
Merci- incroyable! Had the feeling they were restricting which journos could cover the action.
Heck our own MSM barely reports it so why should we expect the French to do the same?
If some of these reports are true, there are zones in France which the government has already pretty much ceded to the Muslim gangs, places that have been no-go areas for the police for quite a while, even before these riots.
France as it existed for centuries ended 90 years ago.
Irony...
Irony...
Yes, those crazy, fun-luvvin, bomb-tossin' Yoots again, as per our exchange here:
http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-news/1513937/posts?page=164#164
It's amazing, when I was their age ( be that teen or twentysomething ) I had studies, jobs, and the occasional girlfriend to keep me out of trouble.
Of course, I lacked the fraudulent sense of entitlement & "outrage" that seems to infest these cowardly thugs, too.
Just before Verdun?
The government represents the people I say.
Because I've thought about that situation in France, upside down and inside out and over and under.
Maybe I'm wishful thinking, but I don't see this EVER, not EVER, happening in America.
And I mean this even if we had a pathetic government such as France. Which we do not. But if there was rioting and burning and general mayhem going on over several hundred towns in this country, even if we had a do-nothing "oh poor me" government, Americans, go with me here, would simply NOT tolerate it.
We'd be forming citizen patrols. Surely we'd be packing up our guns, patrolling the streets, marching and demanding that our police do their job. Of course our police WOULD be doing their job. Us citizens would be getting on their nerves so bad they'd HAVE to do it.
Yeah, we've had our own riots on these shores, but nothing, nowhere near, anything like this. This is not about a bunch of angry welfare recipients looking to get a free plasma TV's. This is an orchestrated urban warfare.
I don't see Americans sitting on their butts in this situation and biting their fingernails is what I'm saying here.
I could be wrong. I argue it's as much about the PEOPLE as it is the governments.
This is what happens when you take away the right to bear arms. The Government will not protect you so it is up to yourself to protect your property and loved ones. Don't let it happen here.
French roast
Meanwhile, the Sarkozy-bashing is all wrong. Sarkozy, it should be noted, ordered police not to fire at rioters. How can critics call him polarizing when, as the Los Angeles Times reported Monday, rioters have fired at police about half a dozen times, but police have not fired back?
Leach sees Sarkozy as a constructive force, who, unlike Prime Minister Dominique de Villepin, embraces the sort of Anglo-American free-market economic reforms that should raise employment levels and offer opportunity to the economically disenfranchised.
I shouldn't be thinking this, but what if operatives of PSA and Renault (the biggest car manufacturers in France) were paying these 'dissaffected youths' to torch cars in order to spike future sales?
Naahhh! Too far out.
Oh, by the way: from this site ...
Within France alone, there are 34 million vehicles on the road (including 28 million private and 5 million commercial vehicles), France is Europe's third largest market behind Germany and Italy. About 40 models of vehicles are constructed in 21 assembly plants. No fewer than 16 manufacturers are present within France and all of the world’s major component manufacturers have a presence within the country.
Amen.
The French might as well wave the white flag. Their approach is pretty worthless. What good is a curfew unless it is enforceable? I was in Detroit in 1968. I saw the National Guard simply shoot looters on sight. It was a war zone for a week. It was no fun at all. Over the last 37 years Detroit has been taken over by many of the same people who were in the streets buring the hell out of that town. Detroit today is a mere shadow of its former greatness, run by one of the most corrupt city political regimes in the US (second only to New Jersey sate government, or maybe Illinois.)
CHARLIE BOY WANTED TO BE A TAMPON.
Looks like he made it...
Curfews? What a laugh. Only the law-abiding observe curfews.
As the frogs receive the harvest of their hatred towards America and their love towards the jihadists, they become great targets for political cartoonists and the great graphic artists on FR.
Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.