Rioting in France Spreads to 300 Towns

Angela Doland, Associated Press

PARIS (AP) — Rioting by French youths spread to 300 towns overnight and a
61-year-old man hurt in the violence died of his wounds, the first fatality
in 11 days of unrest that has shocked the country, police said Monday.

As urban unrest was reported in neighboring Belgium and Germany, the French
government faced growing criticism for its inability to stop the violence,
despite massive police deployment and continued calls for calm. One riot-hit
town in suburban Paris said it was preparing to enforce a curfew.Meanwhile, governments worldwide urged their citizens to be careful in
France.

President Jacques Chirac, in private comments more conciliatory than his
warnings Sunday that rioters would be caught and punished, acknowledged that
France has failed to integrate the French-born children of Arab and black
African immigrants in poor suburbs who have been participating in the
violence, according to Latvian President Vaira Vike-Freiberga, who met with
the French leader on Monday.

She said Chirac ``deplored the fact that in these neighborhoods there is a
ghettoization of youths of African or North African origin'' and recognized
``the incapacity of French society to fully accept them.''

Chirac said unemployment runs as high as 40 percent in some suburban
neighborhoods, four times the national rate of just under 10 percent,
Vike-Freiberga said.

On Sunday night, vandals burned more than 1,400 vehicles, and clashes around
the country left 36 police injured, setting a new high for overnight arson
and violence since rioting started last month, national police chief Michel
Gaudin told a news conference.

Attacks overnight Sunday to Monday were reported in 274 towns and police
made 395 arrests, Gaudin said. The Justice Ministry said Monday that 27
people had been convicted in fast-track trials since the beginning of the
unrest.

Australia, Britain, Germany and Japan advised their citizens to exercise
care in France, joining the United States, Russia and at least a half dozen
other countries in warning tourists to stay away from violence-hit areas.

French Foreign Minister Philippe Douste-Blazy sought to reassure his
European counterparts about visiting his country, telling them at a meeting
in Brussels that ``France is not a dangerous country. France is still a
country where one can go.''

The victim was identified as Jean-Jacques Le Chenadec, a retired auto
industry worker who died after being beaten by an attacker. He was trying to
extinguish a trash can fire Friday at his housing project in the
northeastern suburb of Stains when an attacker caught him by surprise and
beat him into a coma, police said.

In the Paris suburban town of Raincy, the mayor was preparing to enact a
nighttime curfew expected to go into force Monday or Tuesday, said one of
his top aides.

Apparent copycat attacks spread outside France for the first time, with five
cars torched outside Brussels' main train station, police in the Belgian
capital said.

German police were investigating whether the overnight burning of five cars
early Monday in Moabit, a Berlin neighborhood with a large Turkish immigrant
population, was a copycat crime.

The mayhem started as an outburst of anger in suburban Paris housing
projects and has fanned out nationwide among disaffected youths, mostly of
Muslim or African origin, to become France's worst civil unrest in more than
a decade.

``This spread, with a sort of shock wave spreading across the country, shows
up in the number of towns affected,'' Gaudin said, noting that the violence
appeared to be sliding away from its flash point in the Parisian suburbs and
worsening elsewhere.

It was the first time police had been injured by weapons' fire and there
were signs that rioters were deliberately seeking out clashes with police,
officials said.

Among the injured police, 10 were hurt by youths firing fine-grain birdshot
in a late-night clash in the southern Paris suburb of Grigny, national
police spokesman Patrick Hamon said. Two were hospitalized, but the injuries
were not considered life-threatening. One was wounded in the neck, the other
in the legs.

The unrest began Oct. 27 in the low-income Paris suburb of Clichy-sous-Bois
after the deaths of two teenagers of Mauritanian and Tunisian origin. The
youths were accidentally electrocuted as they hid from police in a power
substation. They apparently thought they were being chased.

About 4,700 cars have been burned in France since the rioting began and
1,200 suspects were detained at least temporarily, Gaudin said.

The growing violence is forcing France to confront long-simmering anger in
its suburbs, where many immigrants and their French-born children live on
society's margins, struggling with high unemployment, racial discrimination
and despair - fertile terrain for crime of all sorts as well as for Muslim
extremists offering frustrated youths a way out.

France, with 5 million Muslims, has the largest Islamic population in
Western Europe.

Chirac, whose government is under intense pressure to halt the violence,
promised stern punishment for those behind the attacks, making his first
public comments Sunday since the riots started.

``The law must have the last word,'' Chirac said after a security meeting
with top ministers. France is determined ``to be stronger than those who
want to sow violence or fear, and they will be arrested, judged and
punished.''

France's biggest Muslim fundamentalist organization, the Union for Islamic
Organizations of France, issued a fatwa, or religious decree, that forbade
all those ``who seek divine grace from taking part in any action that
blindly strikes private or public property or can harm others.''

Arsonists burned two schools and a bus in the central city of Saint-Etienne
and its suburbs, and two people were injured in the bus attack. Churches
were set ablaze in northern Lens and southern Sete, he said.

In Colombes in suburban Paris, youths pelted a bus with rocks, sending a
13-month-old child to the hospital with a head injury, Hamon said, while a
daycare center was burned in Saint-Maurice, another Paris suburb.