Enough!! Send in the troops!
Posted on 11/05/2005 7:48:42 AM PST by Eurotwit
AUBERVILLIERS, France - Marauding youths torched nearly 900 vehicles, stoned paramedics and burned a nursery school in a ninth night of violence that spread from Paris suburbs to towns around France, police said Saturday. Authorities arrested more than 250 people overnight — a sweep unprecedented since the unrest began.
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For the first time, authorities used a helicopter to chase down youths armed with gasoline bombs who raced from arson attack to arson attack, national police spokesman Patrick Hamon said.
The violence, which was concentrated in neighborhoods with large African and Muslim populations but has since spread, has forced France to address the simmering anger of its suburbs, where immigrants and their French-born children live on the margins of society.
With 897 vehicles destroyed by daybreak Saturday, it was the worst one-day toll since unrest broke out after the Oct. 27 accidental electrocution of two teenagers who believed police were chasing them. Five hundred cars were burned a night earlier.
In a particularly malevolent turn, youths in the eastern Paris suburb of Meaux prevented paramedics from evacuating a sick person from a housing project, pelting rescuers with rocks and torching the awaiting ambulance, an Interior Ministry official said.
A nursery school was badly burned in Acheres, west of Paris.
The town had previously escaped the violence, the worst rioting in at least a decade in France. Some residents demanded that the army be deployed, or that citizens band together to protect their neighborhoods. At the school gate, Mayor Alain Outreman tried to calm tempers.
"We are not going to start militias," he said. "You would have to be everywhere."
Unrest, mainly arson, was reported in the northern city of Lille, in Toulouse in the southwest and in the Normandy city of Rouen. It was the second night that troubles spread beyond the difficult Paris suburbs.
In Suresnes, a normally calm town just west of the capital, 44 cars were burned in a lot.
On Saturday morning, more than 1,000 people took part in a silent march in one of the worst-hit suburbs, Aulnay-sous-Bois. One banner read: "No to violence."
Police detained 258 people overnight, almost all in the Paris region, and dozens of them will be prosecuted, Interior Minister Nicolas Sarkozy said after a government crisis meeting.
"Violence penalizes those who live in the toughest conditions," he said. "Violence is not the solution."
Most attacks have been in towns with low-income housing projects, areas marked by high unemployment, crime and despair. But in a new development, gangs have left their heavily policed neighborhoods to attack others with fewer police, spreading the violence.
Police deployed overnight in smaller, more mobile teams to chase rioters getting around in cars and on motorcycles, said Hamon, the police spokesman.
There appeared to be no coordination among gangs in different areas, Hamon said. Within gangs, however, youths communicated by cell phone text messages or e-mails and warned each other about police, he said.
Anger against police was fanned days ago when a tear gas bomb exploded in a mosque in Clichy-sous-Bois, north of Paris — the same surburb where the youths were electrocuted. Youths suspected a police operation, but Prime Minister Dominique de Villepin met Saturday with the head of the Paris mosque and denied that police were to blame.
The persistence of the violence prompted the American and Russian governments to advise citizens visiting Paris to steer clear of the suburbs.
In Torcy, east of the capital, looters set fire to a youth center and a police station, which were gutted, city hall said. An incendiary device was tossed at the wall of a synagogue in Pierrefitte, northwest of Paris.
A police officer at the Interior Ministry operations center said bullets were fired into a vandalized bus in Sarcelles, north of Paris.
Firefighters battled a furious blaze at a carpet warehouse in Aubervilliers, on the northern edge of Paris.
Right.
"The worst rioting in a decade..."
Why doesn't the writer name the riots and who was rioting? I don't remember any.
I heard a first hand report from the French Quarter that
Asian merchants there did the same post Katrina. Big rifles and shotguns deterred the looters effectively.
'The French have a real class system..."
Who are the upper classes? I'm interested. We know so little about the French social structure.
I am assuming the upper classes are government/academia. Unless some of the old aristocracy has come out of hiding...?
Yes, the Germans, the French, the British, the Dutch....
etc.
Until the WORLD unites against the Islamo-Nazis, what's happening today will look like a springtime stroll down the Champs-Elysees.
Oh man, wasn't that a great movie? It really freaked me out as a kid and the new version was a compliment to the original. Want terror? You got it...
I see what you're saying. It's a seige and sometimes it feels like we're surrounded. Enemies of freedom everywhere and there's really no place to run.
Cool movie reference. : )
Ah, they must have watched what happened in Toledo Ohio.
Zut Alors! Ze enemy is at ze gate! Eet eez time to launch "The letter of zerious dizappointment"...
.....If they try this nonsense in the U.S.A. there will be blood in the streets, theirs! .......
Get some old news papers from LA and Detroit...... nothing happened and the places were burned down. They burned the neighborhood stores from whence came their groceries.
The main effect was electing Maxine Waters.
http://www.timesonline.co.uk/article/0,,2092-1773987,00.html
“In France they might not earn as much (as in America) but they work a 35-hour week and they spend time with their families; isn’t that real family values?” ...
Donald Sutherland 9/11/05
Not sure, but they've certainly got stupid officials.
A second amendment would surely come in handy for the defenseless citizens now.
Maybe the helicopters are to be used for escape. As an alternative, maybe they're airdropping thousands of white flags on police lines.
Why haven't authorities started shooting rioters? It is long past time to impose order.
Not a chance! Especially the US. Sad to say, but I believe it will take a mushroom cloud to wake up the body politic in America.
Enough!! Send in the troops!
2. The French people decide to take matters into their own hands, and the French government, afraid of the people storming the Bastille after taking care of the problem, decides to do what it was elected to do.
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