“We are ready to go as far as autonomy” for Corsica, Interior Minister Gerald Darmanin said in an interview with Corse-Matin due out Wednesday, March 16. The daily’s website published salient excerpts from the interview on Tuesday evening.
The tenant of Place Beauvau will make a two-day visit to the island, Wednesday and Thursday, after two weeks of tension around the attack in prison of Yvan Colonna.
“The question is what is this autonomy? We need to discuss it”, added the interior minister. But the prelude to a discussion between Corsican elected officials and the government on the future of Corsica is a return to calm, Darmanin insisted: “There cannot be sincere dialogue in a democracy under the pressure of agricultural bombs and the presence, or omnipresence, of the forces of order”.
In this interview, the Minister also acknowledged a “responsibility of the State, as protector of the people who are under its responsibility, in this case prisoners”, in the aggression of Yvan Colonna. He also undertook to do “the truth about what happened” to the independence activist in the prison of Arles (Bouches-du-Rhône).
Sixty-seven injured in Bastia
On March 2, Yvan Colonna was the victim of a violent assault in a prison where he was serving a life sentence for his involvement in the 1998 assassination of Prefect Erignac in Ajaccio. He was still in a coma Tuesday “Very serious”according to his lawyer Patrice Spinosi.
His attacker, Franck Elong Abé, was serving a sentence for terrorism. He was indicted on March 6 for “attempted terrorist assassination”.
In Corsica, multiple demonstrations in support of Yvan Colonna were organized, in particular at the call of student and high school student unions, to cries of“murderous French state”. They were punctuated by clashes and violence. A new demonstration, on March 13 in Bastia, turned to “the riot”, according to the prosecution. Sixty-seven people were injured.