In a dramatic early-morning display of force, French special forces abseiled from helicopters on Wednesday and stormed a Corsican ferry that had been hijacked by sailors protesting against plans to privatize the island's shipping line.
Five Puma helicopters carrying about 50 officers raided the Pascal Paoli, a combined cargo and passenger ferry run by the ailing, state-owned SNCM ferry company, which was lying off the Corsican port of Bastia after being commandeered by militant trade unionists in Marseille on Tuesday.
A 10-strong team from the GIGN, an elite rapid intervention force, overcame the 30 unarmed sailors, a naval spokesman said. The interior ministry hailed the joint army and navy operation as "fast, efficient and non-violent."
PHOTO: AFP
The mutineers were handcuffed, locked in the ship's cabins or forced to kneel on deck, and arrested for hijacking, a crime that carries a maximum sentence of 20 years in jail.
But the show of force did little to quell the violence between police and protesters in Marseille and Bastia.
For Corsican nationalists, the long and increasingly brutal conflict is about far more than the government's plan to sell a majority stake in the heavily loss-making SNCM to a French investment company, Butler Capital Partners (BCP).
Some 200 riot police were deployed in the island's northern port of Bastia on Wednesday after four hours of violent clashes on Tuesday night in which 1,000 trade unionists and nationalists fought running battles with the police.
A strike call by the powerful CGT union also paralyzed France's largest port, Marseille. Shipping workers voted to extend a crippling 24-hour strike, leaving 28 large carriers stranded and blockading access to a major petrochemicals complex and the key oil port of Fos-sur-Mer.
BCP has said it will reorganize the shipping line, which carries 1.25 million passengers a year between Marseille and Corsica, and could sack up to 400 of its 2,400-strong workforce. Despite receiving 70m euros (US$84.4 million) from the state each year as an "agent of territorial continuity" [keeping Corsica part of France], the line loses around 20 million euros annually.
But for the radical CGT union and its partner, the STC, which has close links to Corsica's small nationalist movement, the struggle for control of SNCM has come to symbolize the island's broader struggle for independence from the mainland.
Corsica has been plagued by bombings, shootings and other mainly symbolic attacks by a small but determined separatist movement since 1975.
The cause enjoys little support among islanders but has proved a significant thorn in the side of several governments in Paris.
The regional prefect in Provence-Alpes-Cote d'Azur, Christian Fremont, urged the militants to go back to the table. He told French radio: "This ferry company is extremely fragile. The specter of bankruptcy looms. Now it is up to everyone to sit down and talk again. It is the only way to resolve this crisis."
But Jean Brignole of the STC union said Corsicans had "long understood what the stakes are here ... The fate of the SNCM is not the fate of a company and of its employees, but that of all Corsica and of its maritime transport system."
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