April 27, 2002	Saturday	Safar 13, 1423

PARIS, April 26: French extreme right leader Jean-Marie Le Pen has proposed that illegal immigrants be put in “transit camps” and then expelled, added heat to mounting protests over his bid to be France’s next president.

Le Pen made the suggestion in a television interview late on Thursday, saying voters in the runoff against conservative incumbent Jacques Chirac on May 5 should back the idea to stop France becoming “submerged” by foreigners.

“If we have to establish internment camps, we will set up transit camps where (illegal immigrants) can wait relatively comfortably to go home...because that is, I think, what the French people want,” he told the news channel LCI.

“If they want it, I ask them to say so on May 5, because without that our country will become submerged by immigration.”

France already has so-called “holding centres” where immigrants without proper papers are held pending a review of their cases, but anti-racist campaigners said Le Pen’s use of the word “camp” smacked of Nazism.

“It is totally obnoxious,” Mouloud Aounit, head of the anti-racist group MRAP, said. “It shows the true face of his National Front.”

“He didn’t use the word ‘camp’ by chance. He knows it conjures up what the Nazis did to the Jews.”

DAILY PROTESTS: Le Pen, a 73-year-old former paratrooper who once called the Nazi gas chambers a “detail” of history, surged into the runoff when he knocked Socialist Prime Minister Lionel Jospin into third place in last Sunday’s first round of the election.

More than 350,000 protesters, most of them youths, packed the streets in towns and cities across France for anti-Le Pen demonstrations on Thursday — the biggest turnout in a round of daily marches since Sunday, according to the Interior Ministry.

The protests, which Le Pen accuses Chirac of orchestrating, are expected to reach a climax on May 1 with trade union organizers of traditional Labour Day rallies hoping for a huge turnout to demonstration opposition to the extreme right.

Le Pen has called a rally of his own supporters in Paris for the same day, raising fears that there could be violent clashes.

Le Pen polled nearly 17 per cent of votes last Sunday and is widely expected to lose on May 5, with an avalanche of support swinging behind Chirac from mainstream political parties, activist groups and community organisations.

The anti-immigrant, anti-European Le Pen said he would see anything less than 30 per cent of the vote on May 5 as a failure, without excluding that he could win.

“Below 30 per cent, I would consider that as not a success, but I think I will do a lot better than that,” he told LCI.

Police on Friday said an explosion overnight had damaged the beachfront home of a local mayor of Chirac’s Gaullist Rally for the Republic (RPR) party in the town of La Ciotat, near the port city of Marseille in southern France.

The mayor, Patrick Bore, was out at the time and there was no immediate indication that the blast was tied to the election. Police said witn