2023-10-05 19:49:32
The Minister of the Interior reveals new figures. Heard by the National Assembly’s commission of inquiry into small violent groups this Thursday, Gérald Darmanin indicated that 10,000 “ultra left” people were being monitored by state services, including “3,000 on S files”. .
According to him, this term does not designate “someone who necessarily commits reprehensible acts, but someone who can be in contact, who finances, or who is in very close contact with someone who could do so” . For Darmanin, the qualification refers to certain environmentalist demonstrators, black blocs, but also the zadists of Notre-Dame-des-Landes, as well as the activists against mega-basin projects, notably in Sainte-Soline.
In front of the deputies, the former mayor of Tourcoing specified that 5,300 individuals were listed as “Islamist” S and 1,300 were listed as “ultra-right” S. He then detailed their profile, many of them “lawyers, doctors, never the angry worker of the factory that is being closed”, or even “children from good families”. The notion of “S file” is regularly debated among specialists, with many judging that the executive brings together very heterogeneous realities under this qualification.
The minister also returned to the violence on the sidelines of demonstrations against pension reform as well as the violent clashes in Sainte-Soline between police forces and environmental demonstrators. The demonstration then brought together 6,000 to 8,000 people according to the authorities, 30,000 according to the organizers, who reported 200 injured, including 40 seriously, on the demonstrator side.
A report from the National Gendarmerie indicates that 5,015 tear gas grenades and 89 de-encirclement grenades had been fired, as well as 81 LBD shots delivered, including two by gendarmes on quad bikes. The Human Rights League, via a report, then pointed out the responsibility of the State and a “disproportionate use of weapons”.
Gérald Darmanin brushed aside these criticisms, judging that “the question is not to know” whether the police “have the right to use this violence. They have the right.” “The question is not whether there are injuries, sometimes deaths,” he continued. “Judging the success of a police operation (…) based on the consequences of the number of injured and possibly the number of deaths seems to me to be a bad media debate,” he further clarified.
Gérald Darmanin nevertheless clarified that the gendarmes and police officers “are not outside of investigations and trials” but that we must “accept the idea that they use violence to enforce the rules of law”.
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