[Translated from Le Monde (Paris)]

Special Edition

Banlieues in crisis

BANLIEUES IN CRISIS: SIGNIFICANT DECLINE IN ACTS OF VIOLENCE, FIRST CURFEWS
(With AFP and Reuters)

Le Monde (Paris)
November 9, 2005

http://www.lemonde.fr/web/article/0,1-0@2-706693,36-708075@51-704172,0.html

As the decree instituting the state of emergency "beginning on November 9, 2005, at 12:00 midnight over the entire territory of metropolitan France" was published in the Journal officiel, the number of acts of urban violence declined in the course of the night from Tuesday to Wednesday. For now, however, it seems difficult to establish a link between the imposition of the first curfew measures and a decline in fires and clashes with police.

A second decree specifies that certain provisions of the April 3, 1955, law on the state of emergency are applicable in all or part of 25 departments, among them the totality of the Île-de-France, including Paris.

With 573 vehicles burned and 204 arrests registered as of 4:30 a.m., the toll of the thirteenth night of violence appears down from preceding nights. According to figures from the Direction générale de la police nationale (DGPN), the decline is sharper in the regions (431 compared to 685) than in Île-de-France (142 compared to 175). The number of persons arrested is, on the other hand, up, with 204 at 4:30 a.m. compared to 151 the day before at the same time, for all of France. No police were wounded. These figures "show that the decline recorded the day before in Île-de-France" and "a sharp decline in the provinces" are continuing, according to the DGPN.

Nicolas Sarkozy's cabinet director at the ministry of the interior, Claude Guénat, spoke on Europe 1 of 617 cars burned during the night of Tuesday to Wednesday.

FIRST CURFEWS

Early Tuesday afternoon, the Somme prefecture announced it had declared a 10:00 p.m.-6:00 a.m. curfew for Amiens and the surrounding metropolitan area for unaccompanied minors under 16 would take effect Wednesday at midnight. Earlier, two UMP [Union pour la Majorité Présidentielle, the ruling party of President Jacques Chirac] mayors -- Serge Grouard in Orléans and Jean Marsaudon in Savigny-sur-Orge (Essonne) -- announced they were declaring curfews for minors. In Savigny-sur-Orge, five adolescents, according to the mayor's office around midnight, were ordered to return home. In some cases, the sale of fuel to minors was also forbidden.

In Île-de-France, the decline was quite marked, with about twenty vehicles burned in Seine-Saint-Denis, sixteen in Yvelines, fifteen in Seine-et-Marne and Val-d'Oise, less than ten in Hauts-de-Seine, nine in Essonne, including one belonging to the president of the Muslims' association of Corbeil-Essonnes at Les Tartarêts, who issued an appeal for calm on Sunday, and eight in Val-de-Marne.

In Lyon, the region's circulation of public transport was interrupted shortly after 10:00 p.m. over the entire network following several incident, notably the throwing of a Molotov cocktail at a metro station. In the city, two Russian journalists where harassed. A GPL [= Gaz de Pétrole Liquéfié, 'liquified natural gas'] urban transport bus carrying no passengers was attacked with Molotov cocktails and exploded in the banlieue of Bordeaux; no one was hurt.

Elsewhere, a 53-year-old man was gravely wounded late in the afternoon by a barbell thrown from a building in a neighborhood of Nice that has been affected for past four days by several acts of urban violence, though no certain link has been established to the violence. At 4:00 a.m, the area was still in a "critical state," according to police.

Several fires in public buildings were also reported: a kindergarten in Décines in the Lyon area, a nursery school in Miribel (Ain), a library in Châlon-sur-Saône (Saône-et-Loire), and, near Douai (Nord), the mediathèque in Auby, where the mayor's office was also damaged.

About one hundred residents of a public housing project in Outreau were temporarily evacuated after arson of six cars in the basement garage. Also in Pas-de-Calais, which had till now been spared and where the night was more troubled than before, a large furniture store burned, and the fire spread to a carpet store in a shopping center in Arras. In Dole (Jura), 24 persons had to leave their homes after nine buses burned in a hangar housing school buses.

In Grasse (Alpes-Maritimes), an office of the daily Nice-Matin was badly damaged by a refuse bin fire.

--
Translated by Mark K. Jensen
Associate Professor of French
Department of Languages and Literatures
Pacific Lutheran University
Tacoma, WA 98447-0003
Phone: 253-535-7219
Home page: http://www.plu.edu/~jensenmk/
E-mail: jensenmk@plu.edu