antiwar lefty omissions: 'A will to pillage'
The violence is forcing France to confront long-simmering anger in its suburbs, where many Africans and their French-born children live on society's margins, struggling with high unemployment, racial discrimination and despair — fertile terrain for crime of all sorts as well as for Muslim extremists offering frustrated youths a way out.
France, with some 5 million Muslims, has the largest Islamic population in western Europe.
The town of Evreux, 60 miles west of Paris, appeared hardest hit by marauding youths overnight, national police spokesman Patrick Hamon said. Arsonists there laid waste to at least 50 vehicles, shops and businesses at a shopping center, a post office and two schools, he said.
That the shopping center was partially burned shows "there is a will to pillage," Hamon said. "This has been true since the start." Five police officers and three firefighters were injured in clashes with youths, he said.
Some 2,300 police poured into the Paris region to bolster security on what had been expected to be a restive Saturday night.
For the second night in a row, a helicopter equipped with spotlights and video cameras to track bands of youths combed the poor, heavily immigrant Seine-Saint-Denis region, northeast of Paris, where the violence began and has been concentrated. Small teams of police were deployed to chase youths speeding from one attack to another in cars and on motorbikes.
Arson attacks also were reported to the north, south, east and west of Paris, often in unlikely places such as the cultural bastion of Avignon, southern France, and the resort cities of Nice and Cannes, a police officer said.
Interior Minister Nicolas Sarkozy warned that those convicted could face severe sentences for burning cars.
“Violence penalizes those who live in the toughest conditions,” he said after a government crisis meeting.
Attacks also were reported in Nantes, in the southwest, the Lille region in the north and Saint-Dizier, in the Ardennes region east of Paris. In the eastern city of Strasbourg, 18 cars were set alight in full daylight, police there said.
Dozens of vehicles, two gymnasiums and at least three classrooms were set afire in the Seine-Saint-Denis region, outside Paris, local officials said. France-Info radio reported residents catching two 14-year-olds trying to light a fire in Drancy, northeast of Paris, and turning them over to police.
Attacks random, uncoordinated
The national police spokesman blamed the spread of the arson attacks on "hoodlums" carrying out "copycat" acts. There appeared to be no coordination between groups in different areas, Hamon said. But within gangs, youths were communicating by cell phones or e-mails.
Even nursery schools have not been spared the fury of those igniting unrest.
Five classrooms of the Sleeping Beauty Nursery School in Grigny, in the Essonne region south of Paris, went up in flames late Saturday along with two classrooms of another school, police said. It was at least the third school set ablaze in several days. In Acheres, on the edge of the St. Germain forest west of Paris, arsonists torched a nursery school late Friday.
The anger has also spread to the Internet, with blogs mourning the youths.
Along with messages of condolence and appeals for calm were insults targeting police, threats of more violence and warnings that the unrest will feed support for France’s anti-immigration extreme right.
“Civil war is declared. There will no doubt be deaths. Unfortunately, we have to prepare,” said a posting signed “Rania.”
“We are going to destroy everything. Rest in peace, guys,” wrote “Saint Denis.”
Sarkozy — blamed for inflaming violence with tough talk and calling troublemakers "scum" — visited the hard-hit Essonne region early Sunday to "give police support," he said.
The Associated Press and Reuters contributed to this report. |
