Posted on 11/03/2005 1:22:00 PM PST by Eurotwit
PARIS (AFP) - French Prime Minister Dominique de Villepin vowed his government "will not give in" to rioters, even as police braced for an eighth night of violence on the outskirts of Paris.
"I will not allow organised gangs to make the law in the suburbs," he declared in parliament.
More than 1,300 police were deployed to again do battle with groups of stone- and bottle-throwing youths that have torched hundreds of vehicles and vandalised buildings in rampages in low-income, high-immigrant districts since last week.
Interior Minister Nicolas Sarkozy, whose hardline law-and-order policies have been blamed for fanning the acts of defiance, said 143 people have so far been arrested in the clashes. More than two dozen police have been hurt.
In a serious sign of an escalation, four shots were fired at officers overnight Wednesday, though none struck their targets. A total of 315 vehicles were set fire to during the night, and a police station was ransacked.
The riots were sparked a week ago by the accidental electrocution of two teenagers who had hidden in an electrical sub-station to escape a police identity check in the suburb at the epicentre of the troubles, Clichy-sous-Bois.
Since then, they have spread, first to neighbouring suburbs and finally to every compass point around the French capital.
In many cases, the gangs of youths avoided direct confrontation with police, preferring to run away after setting cars or property on fire.
Often, though, police and firemen were targeted by thrown objects, ranging from stones to bottles filled with petrol. One fireman suffered second-degree burns to his face from a Molotov cocktail.
Sarkozy said the street violence that occurred in the most restive area, the northeastern region of Seine-Saint-Denis, overnight Wednesday "was not spontaneous, it was perfectly organized -- we are looking into by whom and how."
The interior minister, who harbours presidential ambitions, last month promised to wage a "war without mercy" on youth crime.
Some of the youths taking part in the troubles have responded by pledging to continue the "war" against the police "until Sarkozy resigns."
Villepin -- who cancelled a trip to Canada to tackle the crisis -- called the violence "unacceptable" and said restoring order was the government's "absolute top priority."
President Jacques Chirac on Wednesday called for calm, warning that an escalation would be "dangerous".
For sociologists and many commentators in France, the riots have laid bare the failure of successive government's policies in addressing the grim existence of those living in run-down public housing estates, some of them little more than ghettos where crime and gangs run rampant.
The country has 751 neighbourhoods officially classed as severely disadvantaged, housing a total of five million people, around eight percent of the population.
Conditions are often dire with high-rise housing, unemployment at twice the national rate of 10 percent and per capita incomes 40 percent below the national average.
Many of France's estimated five million Muslims live in those suburbs, and authorities were left wondering whether the end overnight Thursday of the Islamic holy month of Ramadan would bring more or less violence.
Either way, the riot ended almost as soon as it started.
Actually, the 45,000 figure is a "poli-typo," a wild exaggeration that can be explained away as a typographical error. It is a favorite device of lefty academics, who have an amazing propensity for adding zeroes when a higher figure would tend to discredit non-PC forces, and losing them when the truth works against communists, revolutionaries, or other favorite totalitarians.
Lefty polemicist Tom Gervasi was a master of this. His Arsenal of Democracy, an anti-Pentagon screed that should have won the Stalin Prize, contains literally hundreds of them, mostly concerned with exaggerating the cost and prevalence of American weaponry around the world.
I believe he's of Hungarian Jewish descent.
I think the cops would be the least of their worries. Try 100 times that number of pissed off citizens, who don't have to worry about rules of engagement, being placed on administrative leave, or being sued.
Islam exports its way of life to Western Europe. We tried to warn ya.
There ay go ..we have a winner folks..That's exactly the situation ..They have brought their sh*t hole society to Europe . Don't doubt it will happen here someday , especially if the Dems get in.
The French intensely dislike the Muslims
Really ? They been importing them for years and years .
Halliburton should demand payment in advance if they do.
Yes they did give him refuge-for all the good it ever did for them in the long run.Even though I personally hold the French in contempt for this and a host of other failings,we need to remember that they are a Christian{traditionally}nation under siege by the forces of evil and may need help.WE can not afford to allow Muslims to take over their country any more than we could allow Nazi Germany to occupy it.
Whoa, those are "some pictures". Not to trivialize the horror and criminal activity or anything, but I can just hear heavy metal blaring in the backgrounds of those shots, or maybe some Orc-music from the Lord of the Rings soundtrack :)
Let's hope the French shut this down, but do it even-handedly. A "whiff of grapeshot" is what they've been doing in the Ivory Coast, and it ain't cuttin' mustard. A heavy-handed (classic French anti-colonial/anti-minority tactic) response will just make matters worse. Get the Mooselimbs off the streets, but for the love of God, don't go in with rifles blazing.
Cut the frog cracks. This may be a neighborhood near you in the future.
You make a very good point. It's frustrating though, that we are continually faced with bailing them out, like a family member who makes poor decisions day after day and saddles us with the consequences. When do they learn, and at what cost to the rest of the world?
Sounds like "Devil's Night" in Detroit.
Somehow I'm having trouble cranking myself up into "sympathy mode".
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