French urban unrest falls as emergency measures bite
By Jon Boyle
PARIS (Reuters) – Urban violence dropped for the third
straight night in France after the government adopted emergency
powers, but a controversy erupted over the interior minister’s
plans to expel foreigners caught rioting.
Two weeks of unrest in poor suburbs around France have
badly rattled the conservative government and prompted Prime
Minister Dominique de Villepin to invoke a 50-year-old law
allowing local government officials to impose curfews and other
restrictions.
The move coincided with a sharp fall in petrol bomb attacks
on cars, buses, public buildings and police by youths angered
by racism, unemployment and harsh treatment by police.
Many French people welcomed the government’s tough response
but Villepin also faced accusations of overreacting by reviving
a measure dating from Algeria’s war of independence against its
colonial master France.
“It’s calm. It’s subsiding,” said a spokesman for the
Seine-et-Marne department east of Paris.
The state’s top regional officials, or prefects, for the
Nice (south), Orleans (center), Evreux (Normandy), Rouen and
Amiens (north) areas were the only officials to impose limited
curfews.
“There are encouraging signs but there is no reduction in
the police presence,” an Interior Ministry spokesman said.
Overnight, youths torched 482 vehicles compared with 617
the previous night, and police said they had arrested 203
people, down from 280, according to Interior Ministry figures.
The poor suburbs of Paris where the riots erupted on
October 27 were largely quiet and none of the prefects there
took advantage of their new emergency powers to impose curfews.
Triggered by the deaths of two African-origin youths who
were accidentally electrocuted while apparently fleeing police,
the rioting also gave vent to festering frustrations among poor
white youths and French-born citizens of African and Arab
origin over a sense of exclusion from mainstream society.
FRESH STORM
Interior Minister Nicolas Sarkozy, accused by opponents of
stoking passions with his strong attacks on troublemakers,
caused a new controversy by telling parliament that about 120
foreigners convicted of participating in the unrest would be
expelled, even if they had residence permits.
“What we’re seeing is the restoration of ‘double
jeopardy’,” Pierre Henry, president of the Terre d’asile
association that works with immigrants, told the daily Le
Figaro.
Sarkozy won plaudits from pro-immigrant groups three years
ago when he abolished ‘double jeopardy’, a policy under which
convicted foreigners are expelled after serving their sentence.
In an effort to end the unrest, Villepin pledged on Monday
to restore some 100 million euros in funding for grass roots
associations working in tough neighbourhoods, and improve
prospects in education, the labor market and housing.
But left-wing critics say he went too far by invoking
emergency powers for 38 cities and suburban areas including
Marseille, Strasbourg, Lyon and the capital Paris.
“Most elected officials on the ground appear to have been
more embarrassed than relieved,” the left-leaning newspaper
Liberation said in an editorial. “They fear this measure will
further stir things up, or believe it to be either an
overreaction or totally useless.”
The measure has, nevertheless, won 73 percent support from
the public, according a poll in Le Parisien.
Fears that riots might erupt in other European countries
have helped push down the value of the euro and damaged
France’s image abroad, though Finance Minister Thierry Breton
said the economy had been unscathed.
“This has had no impact on the nation’s economy at the
macro-economic level,” Breton said on Europe 1 radio.
Opposition Socialists have voiced only muted criticism of
the emergency measures, which they used in the mid-1980s.
The sudden explosion of violence has also added a new twist
to the rivalry between Villepin and Sarkozy, possible
candidates to lead the right in the 2007 presidential election.
Villepin led Sarkozy in a new opinion poll published by Paris
Match.