The French government yesterday approved an extension of emergency powers for three months in order to subdue a wave of rioting in poor city suburbs around the country.
Meeting under the chairmanship of President Jacques Chirac, the Cabinet agreed on a bill to maintain the state of emergency which came into effect last Wednesday under a 50-year-old law. The bill will be put to parliament today.
Chirac said the extension was "a strictly temporary measure which will be applied only where it is strictly necessary," according to government spokesman Jean-Francois Cope.
PHOTO: AP
The state of emergency applies in most of the country's riot-hit towns and cities, but has been invoked sparingly by the authorities.
Some 30 localities are under nightly curfews for under 16-year-olds, and two temporary bans on public gatherings have been imposed in Paris and Lyon.
Chirac was to deliver a televised address to the nation yesterday evening on the subject of the suburban riots of the last two and a half weeks. The president, who has only spoken twice in public since the start of the trouble on Oct. 27, has been criticized for not appearing to take a lead role in defusing the crisis.
Figures from Sunday night indicated that the trouble is continuing to subside. Despite a marked decrease in unrest, the Cabinet proposed a bill yesterday allowing a 12-day state of emergency to be prolonged until mid-February, Cope said.
The measure empowers regions to impose curfews and conduct house searches. Cope said the bill, which must be approved by parliament, would leave open the possibility of ending the state of emergency before three months are up, if order is restored.
Overnight, the number of car-torchings -- a barometer of the unrest -- dropped dramatically, with youths setting fire to 284 vehicles, compared to 374 the previous night, police said yesterday. The unrest has decreased steadily since France declared a state of emergency on Wednesday.
"The lull is confirmed," national police spokesman Patrick Hamon said. A week ago, 1,400 cars were incinerated in a single night.
The 18 nights of arson attacks and riots -- set off by the accidental electrocution deaths of two teens who thought police were chasing them -- began in Paris' poor suburbs, where many immigrants from North and West Africa live with their French-born children in high-rise housing projects.
France's worst unrest since the 1968 student-worker protests is forcing the country to confront decades of simmering anger over racial discrimination, crowded housing and unemployment.
In scattered attacks overnight Sunday-Monday, vandals in the southern city of Toulouse rammed a car into a primary school before setting the building on fire.
In northern France, arsonists set fire to a sports center in the suburb of Faches-Thumesnil and a school in the town of Halluin.
A gas canister exploded inside a burning garbage can in the Alpine city of Grenoble, injuring two police officers, with three other officers were injured elsewhere.
In the next few days, France is expected to start deporting foreigners implicated in the violence -- a plan by law-and-order Interior Minister Nicolas Sarkozy that has caused divisions in the government.
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