2023-07-02 00:03:13
There are already five consecutive nights of riots in France in protest of the death on Tuesday of Nahel Merzouk, the 17-year-old teenager whose murder at the hands of the police has sparked a strong wave of violence throughout the country. At the moment, 121 detainees have been recorded, 45 of them in Paris, according to police sources cited by BFMTV.
An hour earlier, French President Emmanuel Macron decided to postpone his state visit to Germany and the Government announced the sending of police and gendarmerie reinforcements to Marseille and Lyon to try to restore public order. “Taking into account the internal situation, the President of the Republic has indicated (to German Federal President Frank-Walter Steinmeier) that he wanted to be able to remain in France for the next few days,” sources from the Élysée Palace explained. The state visit, the one with the highest protocol rank, has been postponed “to a later date”, without specifying when it will take place.
Steinmeier, who closely follows what is happening in France “with great attention”, hoped that “the violence in the streets will end as soon as possible and that social peace can be restored,” according to a statement from Berlin. Had the displacement taken place, Macron would have been the first French president to pay a state visit to Germany in 23 years. The last French president to do so was the conservative Jacques Chirac in 2000.
Macron’s trip to Germany, which was to have started today until Tuesday, should have served to relaunch the Franco-German engine, after the tensions in recent months between Berlin and Paris, which had led to the suspension of the Franco-German council of ministers. -German from last October. Officially it was due to agenda problems of the ministers, although in reality it was due to their substantive divergences in matters of defense and energy policy.
France has been the scene since Tuesday of a wave of violence. On Friday night, 1,311 people were arrested in riots, looting and clashes with law enforcement. Since the protests began on Tuesday, the number of detainees has risen to 2,367 across the country. 30% of those arrested are minors, according to the Ministry of Justice. The average age of the detainees is 17 years, although there are also children of 12 and 13 years among the rioters.
Only on Friday night there were 2,560 fires on public roads, 1,350 vehicles burned and 234 fires or degradation in buildings, according to French authorities. At least 10 shopping centers, 200 large supermarkets, 250 tobacconists, 250 bank agencies, as well as numerous clothing and sports stores and fast food restaurants have been vandalized, looted or even totally burned since Tuesday in France.
The French Government mobilized 45,000 police officers and gendarmes yesterday throughout France, of which 7,000 in the Paris region, to try to restore order, after the images of violence and looting went around the world, one year after the Olympic Games in Paris 2025. On Friday the police deployment was identical, but it did not prevent chaos. From a police station and surrounded by policemen, the Minister of the Interior, Gérald Darmanin, announced the sending of reinforcements to Marseille, Lyon and Grenoble, after being asked to do so by their mayors to try to restore order in these cities.
Police forces were overwhelmed on Friday in Marseille and Lyon in the face of so much violence and looting. «The balance of the night (Friday) is summed up in a single word: apocalyptic. We have had guerrilla scenes in the center of Marseille, the northern neighborhoods have also been affected by looting and burning of vehicles and garbage containers,” Rudy Manna, departmental secretary of the Alliance Police union in Bocas del Bocas, explained yesterday in statements to BFMTV. Rhone.
To prevent this from happening again, Darmanin announced the deployment in Marseille of the National Gendarmerie Intervention Group (GIGN), of five additional mobile force units and 200 riot police “with the aim of completely restoring public order.” To Lyon, they sent a riot control unit, the so-called CRS 8, specialized in urban violence, as well as units of mobile forces,
“It is the Republic that is going to win, not the rioters,” Darmanin said. The Interior Minister warned the violent: “The next person who touches a police officer or a gendarme who knows that they will be found and, I hope, will be firmly convicted,” Darmanin, who dreams of being prime minister, said before the cameras.
Marseille and Lyon did not decree a curfew, unlike other French cities that opted for it, such as Clamart. From the Marseille city hall they asked the merchants and restaurant owners to close their doors, they recommended the inhabitants to avoid the center and they asked the neighbors not to remove the garbage or debris to prevent it from being used by the violent to make bonfires. or as a thrown weapon. Public transport in Marseille was also suspended from 6:00 p.m. to prevent violent people from moving easily.
Fearing that the looting and destruction will spread to the center of Paris, many merchants in the capital covered their windows with boards yesterday afternoon to avoid breaking the windows and prevent their shops from being looted by hordes of violent people. At press time, there were calls on social media to descend on the Champs-Élysées, the great avenue in Paris.
After the death of Nahel, the confidence of the French towards the Police is maintained. According to an Ifop poll for the newspaper Le Figaro, 57% of French people trust or like the police. On the other hand, 32% of those surveyed feel fear or hostility towards the forces of order and 11% do not speak out.
Given the riots in recent days in the country, seven out of ten Frenchmen (69%) are in favor of the government decreeing a state of emergency in the country, while 31% are opposed to it. However, the French government has not yet done so, despite the fact that since the riots began, the right and the extreme right have demanded that they do so in order to restore order in the country. 69% of the French condemn the violence that France has experienced in recent days; 28% understand it, but do not approve: and 3% applaud it, according to the Ifop survey.
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In the midst of the chaos, Nahel was buried today, in privacy in the Mont-Valérien cemetery in Nanterre, the city on the outskirts of Paris where he lived alone with his mother. Following the Muslim rite, the funeral began at the local funeral home. Later, the mortal remains of the teenager were transferred to the Ibn Badis Mosque, where the salat janaza, the Muslim funeral prayer, was pronounced.
At the exit from the mosque, the coffin was transported in a hearse, which had great difficulty moving because of the crowd in the street. The tension was palpable throughout the tour. “Justice for Nahel” and “Allahu akbar” (Allah is the greatest), shouted those present, several hundred people who had packed the surroundings for a long time before the farewell. The municipal authorities installed a security cordon to prevent the concentrations from overflowing and there was also a specific service at the gates of the mosque so that the ceremony could take place in family privacy.
In fact, the lawyers had asked the press not to attend the funeral to provide relatives “with the privacy and respect they need during this difficult period.”
Nahel died last Tuesday from a point-blank shot when he was trying to flee from a police checkpoint in a yellow car that he was driving without a license through the streets of Nanterre. The officer who shot him, a 38-year-old brigadier, is in preventive detention and has been formally charged with voluntary manslaughter, after a video recorded by a witness questioned the first version of him given by the police officer. The police officer explained that he pulled the trigger because he feared for his life and that of his partner when Nahel accelerated the vehicle.
The third passenger in the car that the victim was driving explained yesterday to the BFMTV channel his version of what happened. Two policemen stopped the car and one of them asked Nahel to roll down the window. “Stop the engine or I’ll shoot you,” says the witness, whose identity has not been made public, that the agents told him, before the two hit him three times with the butt of their gun.
“Don’t move or I’ll shoot you in the head,” said the first patrolman. “Shoot him,” prompted the other. The friend explained that he was receiving the third blow from the rear when Nahel took his foot off the brake and the car, which was automatic, moved forward. The second agent fired and then the young man, wounded in the arm and chest, stepped on the accelerator. “I saw him dying. I was shaking,” recalled the witness, who fled after the vehicle hit a pole. He assured that he was afraid that the policemen would also murder him.
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