France Says It Will Deport Foreigners Convicted in Rioting
By MEG BORTIN,
International Herald Tribune
PARIS, Nov. 9 - France began implementing emergency curfews in trouble spots across the country today and stepped up its crackdown on urban violence, announcing that all foreigners convicted in the rioting would be summarily deported.
Overnight curfews for minors were declared in Nice and in several towns in Normandy. In Paris, a curfew will be imposed "if the situation requires it," the capital's police chief said.
The number of attacks decreased sharply overnight from Tuesday to Wednesday. There were 617 arson attacks on cars, down from more than 1,100 the previous night, Interior Ministry figures showed. Incidents were reported in 116 towns, compared with 226 the night before.
But the Interior Ministry spokesman, Franck Louvrier, said the ebbing of the disturbances had less to do with curfews than with tougher police action against rioters. "It's because of the arrests," he said, adding that 1,830 people had been detained since the rioting started, 280 of them in the night of Tuesday to Wednesday.
The expulsion measure, which affects even those foreigners living in France legally, was greeted with applause when it was announced at the National Assembly today by Interior Minister Nicolas Sarkozy, a spokesman for the minister said. It appeared to be aimed primarily at youths of North African and sub-Saharan African descent who have been involved in nearly two weeks of disturbances across France.
Mr. Sarkozy told Parliament that 120 foreigners had been convicted to date, and that he had asked regional officials "to deport them from our national territory without delay, including those who have a residency visa," Agence France-Presse reported. Asked how many people had been convicted overall in the rioting, the Interior Ministry declined to provide a figure.
Although the expulsion measure is bound to provoke controversy at a time of national soul-searching over France's treatment of its ethnic minorities, the decision may nevertheless meet with the approval of many French people dismayed by the violence and television images of their cities in flames.
An opinion poll by the CSA institute, published Wednesday in the newspaper Le Parisien, found that 73 percent of those questioned approved of the curfew measures, which were first enforced overnight Tuesday in the northern French city of Amiens.
The measures empower local authorities to clamp a curfew on 38 towns and regions, including Paris. Other places on the list included Marseille, Dijon, Toulouse, Strasbourg, Nancy, Rouen, Avignon, and the entire Ile-de-France region encompassing the Paris suburbs.
The breadth of the zones affected - from the English Channel to the Mediterranean, the Pyrenees to the Alps - provided a striking image of the spread of the turmoil throughout France for 13 consecutive nights since Oct. 27, when two youths died fleeing what they thought was a pursuit by police in a Paris suburb.
Most of the cities, including the run-down areas outside Paris where the car torching and gasoline-bomb attacks first erupted, will not immediately apply a curfew, France-Inter radio said.
The Paris police prefect, Pierre Mutz, said the capital would enforce a curfew "if the situation requires it," Agence France-Presse reported. The mayor of Paris, Bertrand Delanoe, said he believed a curfew would be a "disproportionate" measure, the agency added.
But Nice and the Normandy towns of Rouen and Le Havre will enforce a curfew for minors under the age of 16, and in another Normandy town - Evreux, where rioters staged particularly violent attacks Saturday night - a 10 p.m. to 5 a.m. curfew will apply to adults as well, the radio said.
The curfew decree was signed by Prime Minister Dominique de Villepin, whose center-right government has struggled to contain the worst outbreak of civil disorder since the worker-student protests of 1968.
As the new measures went into force, politicians who normally oppose the center-right government largely refrained from dissent. But left-of-center commentators were scathing, calling the emergency decree misguided and potentially inflammatory, and questions were being raised about the low profile kept by President Jacques Chirac throughout the disturbances.
"The absence of the president of the republic is extraordinary given what we are going through," Francois Bayrou, head of the centrist party Union for French Democracy, said Tuesday.
François Hollande, head of the opposition Socialist Party, criticized Mr. Chirac's absence on France-Inter radio today and dismissively asked whether he was even in the Élysée Palace, because he had not been seen much in recent days.
Mr. Chirac, who suffered what is believed to be a minor stroke in September, has made only one public appearance to comment on the riots since Oct. 27, and he appeared fatigued when he made a short statement Sunday.
Asked to comment, Mr. Chirac's chief spokesman, Jérôme Bonnafont, said: "The president is in excellent health. He is carrying on with his activities in a manner that is absolutely normal."
Mr. Bonnafont noted that Mr. Chirac had been very active over the past week, traveling to Alsace last Thursday, meeting with Kofi Annan, the United Nations secretary general, and other officials on Monday, and with Prince Albert of Monaco on Tuesday, as well as chairing the cabinet sessions held to discuss the emergency decrees. |
