Thousand cars torched in latest French riots(Paris/France burns, Live Thread Night #11)

PARIS (Reuters) - Gangs of youths torched 1,300 vehicles overnight in the 10th consecutive night of violence in Paris's poor suburbs and major French towns, despite the deployment of thousands of extra police.

Cars were burnt out in the historic centre of Paris for the first time on Saturday night. In the normally quiet Normandy town of Evreux, a shopping mall, 50 vehicles, a post office and two schools went up in flames.

Authorities have so far found no way beyond appeals and more police to address a problem with complex social, economic and racial causes.

Evreux mayor Jean-Louis Debre, a confidant of President Jacques Chirac and speaker of the lower house of parliament, told France Info radio:

"To those responsible for the violence, I want to say: Be serious ... If you want to live in a fairer, more fraternal society, this is not how to go about it."

The deaths 10 days ago of two youths apparently fleeing police ignited pent up frustrations among young men, many of them Muslims of North and black African origin, at racism, unemployment, their marginal place in French society and their treatment by the police.

"Many youths have never seen their parents work and couldn't hold down a job if they got one," said Claude Chevallier, manager of a burned-out carpet depot in the rundown Paris suburb of Aulnay-sous-Bois.

But authorities now say the rolling nightly riots are being organised via the Internet and mobile phones, and have pointed the finger at drug traffickers and Islamist militants.

Overnight, 1,295 vehicles were torched across France, the highest total so far, police said. An extra 2,300 officers have been drafted in.

Seven police helicopters buzzed over the Paris region through the night, filming disturbances and directing mobile squads to incidents. Overnight, police made 349 arrests.

The number of incidents in the Paris region was similar to the night before, but in the provinces it was up sharply.

The violence has tarnished France's image abroad, forcing Prime Minister Dominique de Villepin to cancel a trip to Canada, while Russia and the United States have warned their citizens to avoid Paris's troubled suburbs.

Villepin has combined a call for an end to the riots with dialogue with community leaders, youngsters and local officials, and has promised an action plan for 750 tough neighbourhoods.

"I'll make proposals as early as this week," the weekly Journal du Dimanche quoted him as saying.

But it remained unclear what could stop the violence, though some opposition parties have suggested a symbolic measure -- the resignation of Interior Minister Nicolas Sarkozy.

Accused of stoking passions by calling troublemakers "scum", Sarkozy has ignored calls to quit. A survey published on Sunday indicated his public image was holding up, even if many disapproved of his strong language.

Villepin also has ambitions to be the right wing's presidential candidate in 2007 and has tried to position himself as a much more consensual figure than Sarkozy; the effect on the crisis on his ratings is still unclear.

With no end in sight to the nights of wailing sirens, acrid smoke, stone-throwing and destruction, residents from all ethnic backgrounds are tiring of the unrest.

"My kids can't sleep at night," said a mother named Samia in Aulnay-sous-Bois. "They hear explosions, they see fires and they think they're in a war. When the slightest thing happens, they get anxious and say 'Mama, what's going on?'"

Article from AFP:

France vows tougher security response as riots escalate
06/11/2005 21h44

http://www.afp.com/english/news/stories/051106214454.2cv36kr1.html

PARIS (AFP) - President Jacques Chirac said restoring public order was his government's "absolute priority," even as the worst rioting France has seen in decades broke out for the eleventh straight night with shots fired at police.

"Those who want to sow violence of fear, they will be arrested, judged and punished," Chirac vowed.

He was speaking after chairing an emergency meeting of key ministers which, he said, "took a certain number of decisions to bolster the action of police and the courts, because today the absolute priority is restoring security and public order."

But there was no sign an end to the rampages that have occurred nightly since October 27, spreading out from Paris to most major cities around France..

Worse, the violence took on a more dangerous tone, with police coming under attack in several locations.

In Grigny, south of Paris, some 30 officers were hurt, two seriously, when assailants fired at them with buckshot, police said.

A car was also used as a battering ram against a police station in the Grand-Mare suburb in the western city of Rouen.

In the southern city of Toulouse, police had to fire tear gas grenades to push back a mob throwing stones and bottles.

"These individuals seem to be looking for contact with police, and they are attacking us, unlike during the other nights," a senior officer told AFP.

Arsonists also set fire to cars and trash cans in the cities of Nantes, Orleans and Rennes, and youths clashed with police in the southern city of Toulouse as the meeting was ending.

Prime Minister Dominique de Villepin, who attended the emergency meeting with Interior Minister Nicolas Sarkozy and the ministers for defence, justice, the economy and education, said more police would be deployed wherever required.

There will be "a reinforcement of security forces anywhere in the country if it is necessary," he said.

"We will not accept any lawless zone."

The renewed violence, which has already raged on the outskirts of Paris and most of France's other major cities, and even in the heart of the capital itself, has gone on unabated despite the deployment of thousands of police.

More than 800 people have been arrested and 3,500 vehicles torched, mainly in the working-class, high-immigration suburbs of Paris that are at the centre of the troubles.

Most of those arrests and arson attacks occurred over the weekend. Fifty-one cars were destroyed or damaged in central Paris itself overnight Saturday, and 30 youths were arrested, many of them while they were preparing fire-bombs.

Unrest has now flared in up to 200 city suburbs and towns, including areas around Nice, Lille, Bordeaux and Montpellier, police said.

A police chief, Frederic Aureal, said his officers were encountering an unprecedented hostility from gangs, which he described as "prepared, structured, armed".

"We have come face-to-face with people who have attacked us with picks, petanque balls, many Molotov cocktails," he said.

Police overnight Saturday discovered a petrol-bomb factory south of the capital with 50 bottles ready for use. Ski masks were also found.
Firemen try to put out a burning car in a Toulouse neighbourhood

Police helicopters fitted with cameras and searchlights were being used to pursue youths who start fires then race away on scooters.

Officers were also breaking down doors in public housing estates to get offenders.

So far, no one has been killed in the unrest, which was sparked by the electrocution deaths of two teenagers who hid in an electrical sub-station in northeastern Paris to escape a police identity check.

But at least two people have been badly burnt by Molotov cocktails: a fireman, and a handicapped woman unable to get off an ambushed bus.

A 61-year-old was also in a coma after being hit by an assailant in a public housing estate, and a South Korean female TV reporter was kicked unconscious by assailants in a northern suburb on Saturday.

Youths, in interviews, have boasted that they were intensifying the violence because of a sort of "competition" between gangs from different suburbs to get media attention.

They have also expressed anger at Sarkozy, who described delinquents in the suburbs as "rabble" and vowed to clean up crime in the neighbourhoods "with a power-hose."

The United States, Britain, Canada and Russia have all warned their citizens against travelling through some of the worst-hit areas of Paris.

This some video camera footage I'd like to seen played.

It's from babelfish web translation:

Those which live the district for a long time will remember, them, of dead of this man like nightmare. Those from here will remember that, Thursday October 27 2005 around 4 p.m., Jean-Claude Irvoas, commercial in a company of urban furniture, had stationed his car street of Marseilles - while asking its wife and her 16 year old daughter to await it inside -, time to take a photograph of a standard lamp which he wanted to add to his catalogue. Some will have even kept the newspaper cuttings of the time telling the arrival of three young people of the district come to tear off its camera to him, the scuffle, the blows with three against one and the anguish of this 56 year old man, the head broken against a kerb of pavement.The whole of the scene being filmed by a camera of video surveillance.

http://www.babelfish.altavista.com/babelfish/trurl_pagecontent?lp=fr_en&url=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.lefigaro.fr%2Fmagazine%2F20051104.MAG0007.html%3F213913

They're probably not that poor. My daughter is a cop in a Western US city, and when she goes into ghetto apartments they have a couple of new SUVs out front and a huge plasma TV as their centerpiece. These people, btw, are on welfare, or at any rate, the holder of the apt. (either a single woman or an elderly person) is technically on welfare or receiving SS or SSI payments.

There was a study about 5-6 years ago when I was living in NYC that showed the amount of economic activity in Harlem compared to the recorded amount of income entering. Nowhere close. Much more buying power than income, and you know that folks don't come in from the burbs to buy sneakers on 125th St.

That said, this has nothing to do with income. The black riots really had to do with wanting to get what the Koreans had worked for - without staying up all night behind a cash register to get it. Once the rioters got a few goodies, they were happy.

But this is ideological, even though the rioters themselves may not be fully aware of it.

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