French cabinet in crisis as riots erupt nationwide

French cabinet in crisis as riots erupt nationwide

Alex Duval Smith in Paris
Sunday November 6, 2005
The Observer

The French Prime Minister called a crisis meeting of ministers
yesterday after a ninth night of rioting across several of the
country's cities.

Violence had reached record levels and police said youths had begun
organising 'attack units'.

Dominique de Villepin called the emergency cabinet meeting to attempt
to regain the momentum and show a united front. He called on
ministers to speed up plans for urban renewal and asked the
influential imam of the Paris Mosque, Dalil Boubakeur, to appeal for
calm.

But it was beleaguered Interior Minister Nicholas Sarkozy who again
came in for attack. After his meeting with Villepin, Boubakeur
launched a veiled attack on Sarkozy's outbursts, in which he has
called the disaffected young men on housing estates 'louts'.
Boubakeur called on the government to 'pronounce words of peace'.

Police trade union official Gilles Petit said the rioters would 'stop
at nothing' in their attacks on state and council property: 'They are
organised into attack units that move around very quickly with tear
gas and petrol to sow terror.'

Sarkozy, who has used the 10 days of riots in the suburbs of major
cities as a platform for his hardline rhetoric on crime, said that a
record 258 alleged rioters had been arrested across the country on
Friday night. He added that 900 vehicles - the highest figure so far
- had been burnt on Friday night alone.

Sarkozy and Villepin are seen as the main candidates to head the
right-wing Union for a Popular Movement ahead of the 2007
presidential elections.

Boubakeur said the Prime Minister had assured him that the tear gas
canister that landed outside a mosque at Clichy-sous-Bois last Sunday
- an incident seen as having sparked fury in the suburbs - was not
thrown by police, even though it came from the force's supply.

After Villepin's crisis meeting, employment and equal opportunities
minister Jean-Louis Borloo said his €25 billion (£16.7bn) 'social
cohesion plan' - including a doubling of public housing in suburbs
and more development zones - was to be speeded up. Finance minister
Thierry Breton said members of the government were working 'hand in
hand' to end the crisis.

However, in contrast to Sarkozy's plentiful, inflammatory, rhetoric,
the outcome of Villepin's emergency meeting hardly gave the
impression of a government full of ideas.

Sarkozy, on the other hand, emerged combative, saying the government
was 'unanimous on the need for firmness'. In an article in today's Le
Monde, he defends his policies and hits back at socialist critics who
claim his cuts to neighbourhood policing budgets have aggravated the
mood on suburban housing estates.

'I am in favour of neighbourhood policing,' he writes. ' I was part
of the government in 1994 that created it. But this force cannot
exist at the expense of investigations and arrests.'

While the Socialist party has stopped short of calling for the
Interior Minister's resignation - a widely heard call in the suburbs
- a number of left-wing majors have called for him to go.

The socialist mayor of Gonesse in the suburbs of Paris, Jean-Pierre
Blazy, who is also an MP, said: 'He is incapable of ending the
violence that he himself has largely contributed towards creating.
After more than a week of trouble, the calm and order of which he is
the guarantor still have not returned. His wider security policies
are a failure.'

Guardian Unlimited © Guardian Newspapers Limited 2005

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