Crowds hold anti-riot rallies in France as unrest eases – Times of India

NANTERRE: Crowds gathered at town halls across France on Monday to show solidarity with local governments targeted in six nights of violence touched off by the fatal police shooting of a 17-year-old in suburban Paris. The unrest, which appeared to be easing on Sunday night, was driven by a mainly teenage backlash in the suburbs and urban housing projects against a French state that many young people with immigrant roots say routinely discriminates against them.
Monday’s anti-riot demonstrations – called a “mobilisation of citizens for a return to republican order” — came after the home of the mayor of a Paris suburb was rammed with a car, prompting widespread outrage. In all, 99 town halls have been attacked in the violence, the interior ministry said. In a statement, an association of the mayors noted that areas “everywhere in France are the scene of serious unrest, which targets republican symbols with extreme violence”.
In the municipality of l’Hay-les-Les Roses in the southern suburbs of Paris, hundreds of people gathered Monday to support Mayor Vincent Jeanbrun, whose wife and one of his young children were injured when thecar packed with explosives rammed into his home early Sunday while they slept. It was an unusually personal attack that authorities said would be prosecuted as an attempted homicide.
There has been little in the way of organized protests beyond a march last week for Nahel, the 17-year-old of Algerian descent who was killed on Tuesday in the Paris suburb of Nanterre. Instead, the anger has manifested in young people targeting police, with both sides using increasingly aggressive tactics. Interior minister Gerald Darmanin took aim at families who had allowed children to wreak havoc on the streets, saying the average of the 3,354 people arrested over the past weekwas 17 with some as young as 12. “It’s not up to the national police or the gendarmerie or the mayor or the state to solve the problem of a 12-year-old setting fire to a school. It’s a question of parental authority.” The interior ministry said 157 people were arrested overnight, down from over 700 arrests the night before and over 1,300 on Friday night. Three police officers were injured, while 300 vehicles were damaged by fire, it added.
French President Emmanuel Macron was meeting on Tuesday with mayors of 220 towns from across the country. Across France, 34 buildings – many of them linked to the government – were attacked from Sunday into Monday, along with 297 vehicles.
Seeking to quell what has become one of the biggest challenges to Macron since he took office in 2017, the interior ministry again deployed 45,000 police and gendarmes nationwide overnight Sunday to Monday, the same figure as the previous two nights. Meanwhile, relatives of Nahel have urged calm. His grandmother said on Sunday the rioters were using his death as an excuse to cause mayhem: “We don’t want them to smash things up. Nahel is dead, that’s all there is.”