French rioting spreads to Belgium, Germany
French President Jacques Chirac struck a more conciliatory note yesterday as rioting by French youths spread to almost 300 towns and police reported that the violence had claimed its first fatality — a 61-yearold man beaten to death while trying to put out a trash fire.
As urban unrest spread to neighbouring Belgium and Germany, the French government faced growing criticism for its inability to stop the violence, despite massive police deployment and continued calls for calm. Youths listen to Claude Dilain, the mayor of Clichysous-Bois, a suburb east of Paris, during a gathering to call for a halt to urban violence yesterday.
One riot-hit town in suburban Paris said it was preparing to enforce a curfew.
Chirac, in private comments more conciliatory than his warnings Sunday that rioters would be caught and punished, acknowledged that France has failed to integrate the French-born children of Arab and black African immigrants in poor suburbs who have been taking part in the violence, according to Latvian President Vaira Vike-Freiberga, who met yesterday with the French leader.
She said Chirac “deplored the fact that in these neighbourhoods there is a ghettoization of youths of African or North African origin” and recognized “the incapacity of French society to fully accept them.” Chirac said unemployment runs as high as 40 per cent in some suburban neighbourhoods, four times the national rate of just under 10 per cent, Vike-Freiberga said.
Today, Canada, the United States and several European countries have urged their citizens to be extra careful when travelling in France.
- The Associated Press (article du 24h)
As urban unrest spread to neighbouring Belgium and Germany, the French government faced growing criticism for its inability to stop the violence, despite massive police deployment and continued calls for calm. Youths listen to Claude Dilain, the mayor of Clichysous-Bois, a suburb east of Paris, during a gathering to call for a halt to urban violence yesterday.
One riot-hit town in suburban Paris said it was preparing to enforce a curfew.
Chirac, in private comments more conciliatory than his warnings Sunday that rioters would be caught and punished, acknowledged that France has failed to integrate the French-born children of Arab and black African immigrants in poor suburbs who have been taking part in the violence, according to Latvian President Vaira Vike-Freiberga, who met yesterday with the French leader.
She said Chirac “deplored the fact that in these neighbourhoods there is a ghettoization of youths of African or North African origin” and recognized “the incapacity of French society to fully accept them.” Chirac said unemployment runs as high as 40 per cent in some suburban neighbourhoods, four times the national rate of just under 10 per cent, Vike-Freiberga said.
Today, Canada, the United States and several European countries have urged their citizens to be extra careful when travelling in France.
- The Associated Press (article du 24h)
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