Eyewitness to Paris riots charges police with deliberate provocation

As France’s political elite vacillated between empty promises of “action” on unemployment and threats of even more severe repression, a document published on the Internet by the anti-racist site Les mots sont importants (lmsi.net—Words are Important) provides an eyewitness account of police provocation on the Chêne-Pointu housing estate. That estate, in Clichy-sous-Bois, a suburb northeast of Paris, was home to the two youths whose electrocution while fleeing police October 27 set off the current wave of unrest.

The Web document alleges that a massive police operation was deliberately designed to exacerbate the conflict with the youth on the estate after initial riots following the deaths of the two teenagers had subsided.

The author of the account, Antoine Germa, a geography and history teacher, prefaces his account by saying, “I have been on several visits to Clichy-sous-Bois since Saturday morning to prepare a series of programmes with a France Inter radio journalist on the situation in Clichy-sous-Bois. The town has been in turmoil since Thursday 27 October.... This is what I saw, heard, understood and was told.”

He finds implausible, in the first place, the denial, by Nicolas Sarkozy, France’s right-wing minister of the interior, that police were chasing the youth. “Why [would the youths] go into that alley and climb a fence to hide in an EDF [state electricity company] transformer when their estate was close by?” he asks.

That night and the following night saw fierce rioting and battles with the heavily equipped CRS riot police.

However, on October 30, the day of a silent march in commemoration of the tragic deaths of Zyad Benna and Bouna Traore, mobilised by Muslim groups and the local mosque, “everything seemed calm throughout the day and the forces of the law kept out of sight.”

German continues: “On Saturday night, at the end of the fast [of Ramadan], at about 6:30 p.m., 400 CRS and gendarmes came...in cohorts like the Roman legions, at a run, visors down, shields on their arms and rubber and plastic bullet guns in their hands, they went through each street against an invisible enemy. At this time, everyone is eating and nobody is outside. Why this demonstration of force when the streets were particularly calm? ‘Police provocation,’ reply as one the local people.”

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http://www.wsws.org/articles/2005/nov2005/fran-n05.shtml