France set to use curfews to halt riots

France will impose curfews “wherever it is necessary” and call up police reservists to stop rioting that has spread out of its suburbs, the prime minister said today, calling a return to order “our No. 1 responsibility”.

France’s worst civil unrest in decades tonight entered a 12th night as rioters in the southern city of Toulouse set fire to a bus and then pelted police with petrol bombs and rocks.

Earlier, a 61-year-old man died of wounds sustained last week in an attack, the first fatality in the violence.

Asked on TF1 television whether the army should be brought in, Prime Minister Dominique de Villepin said “we are not at that point”.

But “at each step, we will take the necessary measures to re-establish order very quickly throughout France,” he said. “That is our prime duty: ensuring everyone’s protection.”

The new measures followed the worst overnight violence so far on Sunday-Monday. Foreign governments warned their citizens to be careful in France.

Apparent copycat attacks also spread outside France, with five cars torched outside the main train station in Brussels, Belgium. German police were investigating the burning of five cars in Berlin.

The violence started on October 27 among youths in a northeastern Paris suburb angry over the accidental deaths of two teenagers, but it has grown into a nationwide storm of burning and clashes with police.

The mayhem is forcing France to confront anger building for decades in neglected suburbs and among the French-born children of Arab and black African immigrants.

The two teenagers whose deaths sparked the rioting were of Mauritanian and Tunisian descent.

They were electrocuted as they hid from police in a power substation, apparently thinking they were being chased.

President Jacques Chirac, in private comments more conciliatory than his warnings on Sunday that rioters would be caught and punished, acknowledged in a meeting today with Latvian President Vaira Vike-Freiberga that France has not integrated immigrant youths, she said.

Chirac deplored the “ghettoization of youths of African or North African origin,” and recognised “the incapacity of French society to fully accept them,” Vike-Freiberga said.

France “has not done everything possible for these youths, supported them so they feel understood, heard and respected,” Chirac said, noting that unemployment runs as high as 40% in some suburbs, four times the national rate, according to Vike-Freiberga.

The curfews being imposed to quell the rioting fall under a 1955 law that allows the declaring of a state of emergency.

The law was passed to curb unrest in Algeria during the war that led to its independence from France.

Overnight Sunday-Monday, vandals burned more than 1,400 vehicles in France, as well as churches, schools and businesses. Clashes around the country left 36 police officers injured, National Police Chief Michel Gaudin said. Attacks were reported in 274 towns, and police made 395 arrests.

Gaudin said the “shock wave” of violence spreading across the country was evident in the number of towns affected, as the unrest appeared to be sliding away from its flash point in the Parisian suburbs and worsening elsewhere.

Villepin said 1,500 reservists were being called up to reinforce the 8,000 police and gendarmes already deployed. The Cabinet will meet on Tuesday to authorise curfews ”wherever it is necessary,” he said.

“The multiplying acts of destruction, the destruction of schools and sports centres, thousands of cars set on fire – all of this is unacceptable and inexcusable,” he said. ”To all in France who are watching me, who are disturbed by this, who are shocked, who want to see a return to normalcy, a return to security, the state’s response – I say it tonight forcefully – will be firm and just.”

Local government officials will be able to impose curfews ”if they think it will be useful to permit a return to calm and ensure the protection of residents. That is our number one responsibility,” the prime minister said.

Asked whether curfews would apply to everyone or just minors, he responded: “It applies to the entire territory.”

Nearly 600 people were in custody tonight and fast-track trials were being used to punish rioters.

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 away from violence-hit areas.

The first fatality was identified as 61-year-old Jean-Jacques Le Chenadec, who died after being beaten by an attacker.

The man, a retired car industry worker, was trying to extinguish a rubbish fire on Friday at his housing project in the northeastern Paris suburb of Stains when an attacker beat him into a coma, police said.

“They have to stop this stupidity. It’s going nowhere,” his widow, Nicole, told Associated Press Television News, speaking of the rioting youths.

France’s biggest Muslim fundamentalist organisation, the Union for Islamic Organisations of France, issued a fatwa, or religious decree, to try to halt the violence.

It forbade all those “who seek divine grace from taking part in any action that blindly strikes private or public property or can harm others.”