PARIS, Nov 9: Attacks by rioters in France dropped sharply for the first time in nearly two weeks of rampages as a state of emergency took effect on Wednesday, raising hopes the worst unrest the country has seen since May 1968 might be receding.
Though violence still flared around some 100 towns overnight, with 617 cars torched and 330 people arrested, police recorded ‘a very significant drop’ in intensity, said a senior interior ministry official, Claude Gueant.
It came after President Jacques Chirac’s cabinet allowed powers to certain regional prefects to impose curfews and widen police search-and-seizure tactics.
The northern town of Amiens immediately applied the measure, and on Wednesday, the western towns of Rouen, Le Havre and Evreux, and the French Riviera region said they would follow suit.
Three other areas — the town of Orleans and the Parisian suburbs of Raincy and Savigny-sur-Orge — used a different administrative procedure to declare municipal curfews on Tuesday night.
The prefect of the Seine-Saint-Denis region northeast of Paris, where the troubles began on Oct 27, said he would not order a curfew after the violence diminished for the third successive night, though 26 vehicles, a school and a warehouse were still set alight.
In Paris itself, police said they had no plans for emergency measures but that could be changed ‘if the situation requires it’.
The capital has largely been spared. Since a peak on Saturday, when 32 cars were destroyed and 30 people arrested, only ‘between 10 and 20 cars’ have been burned each night, a police spokesman said.
Blogs calling for attacks on the Champs-Elysees and near the Eiffel Tower have gone unheeded.
Even if not quite extinguished nationwide, police and other officials said the troubles were clearly down.
In the southern city of Toulouse, which saw serious unrest at the start of the week, police reported only 21 burnt cars and six arrests. “The intensity has fallen markedly,” said a senior official.
Police in other major cities such as Strasbourg, Lille, Nantes and Rennes also recorded a sharp decrease and the Paris suburbs were relatively calm.
Fire service reinforcements brought to the capital have been withdrawn due to the “extremely clear” fall in the number of arsons in the Paris region, the interior ministry said.
Since it began, the unrest has left one civilian dead and dozens of police injured, caused hundreds of millions of euros (dollars) in damage and cast a cruel light on the failures of the French integration of immigrants from its former African colonies.
The explosion of violence has been carried out by youths mainly from the Arab and black communities that dominate poor out-of-town estates.
SPILLOVER IN BELGIUM: Unknown vandals torched 17 vehicles in Belgium overnight, authorities said on Wednesday, amid growing fears of a spillover of violence sweeping neighbouring France.
The attacks were the third night of such incidents in Belgium, and marked an increase after a total of seven cars were burnt on Sunday and Monday nights.—AFP
