Paris Riots Spread, Shaking French Government
Paris Riots Spread, Shaking French Government
Agence France-Presse (France)
The French government was reeling after nearly a week of suburban rioting outside Paris spread to other areas around the capital, laying bare what observers said was the country's failure to address deep problems of poverty and immigration.
Gangs of stone-throwing youths clashed with police and torched 180 cars overnight in several towns north and west of Paris in an escalation of dusk-to-dawn violence that has raged since last Thursday following the death of two teenagers in the northeast suburb of Clichy-sous-Bois.
Thirty-four people were arrested in the rampages, which have so shaken authorities that President Jacques Chirac came forward to call for calm and vow to investigate the teens' deaths.
"Tempers must calm down," a spokesman quoted him as telling his cabinet.
Chirac warned that "an escalation of disrespectful behaviour would lead to a dangerous situation" and asserted that "there can be no area existing outside the law" in France.
Prime Minister Dominique de Villepin put off indefinitely a trip to Canada originally scheduled for Wednesday to call an emergency meeting of ministers to discuss the problem and attend a parliamentary session in which he called the violence "extremely serious".
He told ministers that "the government will ensure public order and will do so with the necessary firmness."
He said he was counting on Interior Minister Nicolas Sarkozy -- who cancelled a trip next week to Pakistan and Afghanistan to deal with the situation -- to "take the necessary measures."
In all, more than 80 people have been arrested and two dozen police hurt since the start of the riots last week.
They were triggered by the accidental electrocution of two youths, aged 15 and 17, who had scaled an electrical relay station's walls to escape a police identity check in the street.
Since then, tensions -- punctuated by the nighttime confrontations -- have increased in the low-rent, high-immigrant suburbs that surround Paris.
The firing of a police teargas grenade against a mosque in Clichy-sous-Bois during clashes late Sunday also sparked rage in the suburb's large Muslim community.
The grievances have been further fuelled by Sarkozy's hardline law-and-order policies.
The interior minister, who is also leader of France's ruling UMP party, has made no secret of his ambition to succeed Chirac in 2007 presidential elections.
Just one week before the riots exploded, he promised a "war without mercy" on violence and petty crime in the suburbs.
The opposition Socialist Party criticised Sarkozy's rhetoric, and accused the government of "creating an explosive situation" in the suburbs.
Observers saw the riots as a sign of the growing divisions in French society -- Muslim immigration, poverty, declining education standards in downtrodden areas and joblessness.
The left-leaning newspaper Liberation said successive governments had "broken their noses on the reality of the ghettos, often minimized and often forgotten in their priorities."
But in an interview with Le Parisien newspaper Wednesday, Sarkozy defended his tough policies by saying that some poor suburbs had come under "the rule of gangs, of drugs, of traffickers" and that his measures had brought down crime by eight percent a year.
"The feeling of exclusion, illegal immigration and the high level of unemployment creates considerable problems," he said, asserting that "firmness, but also justice" was needed.
Suburbs such as Clichy-sous-Bois suffer from unemployment rates more than twice the national average, which is already relatively high at around 10 percent.
Tuesday night's violence included fewer of the direct clashes between youths and police seen on previous nights in Clichy-sous-Bois, police and municipal sources said.
But while that suburb was relatively calm under the presence of several hundred police, outbreaks of trouble in other areas overwhelmed officers.
Cars were torched and police reported sporadic incidents involving groups of youths in Val-d'Oise to the north of the capital and Seine-et-Marne to the southeast, with lesser violence reported in Yvelines to the west.
Similar violence has gripped poor Paris suburbs at least 13 times in the past decade following the deaths of local youths by accident, by police or by neighbours, according to an AFP tally.
A French sociologist, Michel Wieviorka, told AFP that such rampages were "the _expression of desperation, of anger and a feeling of injustice."
They came about, he said, because "France doesn't know how to cope with the faltering of its republican model of integration."
Agence France-Presse (France)
The French government was reeling after nearly a week of suburban rioting outside Paris spread to other areas around the capital, laying bare what observers said was the country's failure to address deep problems of poverty and immigration.
Gangs of stone-throwing youths clashed with police and torched 180 cars overnight in several towns north and west of Paris in an escalation of dusk-to-dawn violence that has raged since last Thursday following the death of two teenagers in the northeast suburb of Clichy-sous-Bois.
Thirty-four people were arrested in the rampages, which have so shaken authorities that President Jacques Chirac came forward to call for calm and vow to investigate the teens' deaths.
"Tempers must calm down," a spokesman quoted him as telling his cabinet.
Chirac warned that "an escalation of disrespectful behaviour would lead to a dangerous situation" and asserted that "there can be no area existing outside the law" in France.
Prime Minister Dominique de Villepin put off indefinitely a trip to Canada originally scheduled for Wednesday to call an emergency meeting of ministers to discuss the problem and attend a parliamentary session in which he called the violence "extremely serious".
He told ministers that "the government will ensure public order and will do so with the necessary firmness."
He said he was counting on Interior Minister Nicolas Sarkozy -- who cancelled a trip next week to Pakistan and Afghanistan to deal with the situation -- to "take the necessary measures."
In all, more than 80 people have been arrested and two dozen police hurt since the start of the riots last week.
They were triggered by the accidental electrocution of two youths, aged 15 and 17, who had scaled an electrical relay station's walls to escape a police identity check in the street.
Since then, tensions -- punctuated by the nighttime confrontations -- have increased in the low-rent, high-immigrant suburbs that surround Paris.
The firing of a police teargas grenade against a mosque in Clichy-sous-Bois during clashes late Sunday also sparked rage in the suburb's large Muslim community.
The grievances have been further fuelled by Sarkozy's hardline law-and-order policies.
The interior minister, who is also leader of France's ruling UMP party, has made no secret of his ambition to succeed Chirac in 2007 presidential elections.
Just one week before the riots exploded, he promised a "war without mercy" on violence and petty crime in the suburbs.
The opposition Socialist Party criticised Sarkozy's rhetoric, and accused the government of "creating an explosive situation" in the suburbs.
Observers saw the riots as a sign of the growing divisions in French society -- Muslim immigration, poverty, declining education standards in downtrodden areas and joblessness.
The left-leaning newspaper Liberation said successive governments had "broken their noses on the reality of the ghettos, often minimized and often forgotten in their priorities."
But in an interview with Le Parisien newspaper Wednesday, Sarkozy defended his tough policies by saying that some poor suburbs had come under "the rule of gangs, of drugs, of traffickers" and that his measures had brought down crime by eight percent a year.
"The feeling of exclusion, illegal immigration and the high level of unemployment creates considerable problems," he said, asserting that "firmness, but also justice" was needed.
Suburbs such as Clichy-sous-Bois suffer from unemployment rates more than twice the national average, which is already relatively high at around 10 percent.
Tuesday night's violence included fewer of the direct clashes between youths and police seen on previous nights in Clichy-sous-Bois, police and municipal sources said.
But while that suburb was relatively calm under the presence of several hundred police, outbreaks of trouble in other areas overwhelmed officers.
Cars were torched and police reported sporadic incidents involving groups of youths in Val-d'Oise to the north of the capital and Seine-et-Marne to the southeast, with lesser violence reported in Yvelines to the west.
Similar violence has gripped poor Paris suburbs at least 13 times in the past decade following the deaths of local youths by accident, by police or by neighbours, according to an AFP tally.
A French sociologist, Michel Wieviorka, told AFP that such rampages were "the _expression of desperation, of anger and a feeling of injustice."
They came about, he said, because "France doesn't know how to cope with the faltering of its republican model of integration."
posted by impresario | 11:21 AM
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