BY NAT LONDON
PARIS - The French government is moving towards a confrontation with the unions concerning its plans to freeze wages of public workers and gut medical care and other social programs. At the same time, under the pretext of "combating terrorism," which Paris blames on groups of immigrants from Algeria, the government has called out the army to patrol railroad stations, airports, and frontier posts.
Prime Minister Alain Juppé says that this is in response to a series of bombings that started in July and have already claimed seven lives and injured 170 people. Bombs have gone off in crowded Paris subway cars and tourist districts. Unexploded devices have been found in street markets and on the rails of the super-fast TGV train.
The French government claims the attacks have been carried out by Algerians linked to the Armed Islamic Group (GIA), which has been fighting to overthrow the Algerian military regime in a civil war that has claimed nearly 40,000 lives. There has been little evidence, however, linking the GIA to the attacks.
An "anti-terrorist" operation, code-named Vigipirate, has been put into action. The plan has been previously used during the U.S.-led war against Iraq in 1991 and during an earlier wave of bombings in France in 1986. The plan allows the use of the army to patrol public areas designated by the government. Vigipirate prohibits parking cars in front of any public building and forbids students forming "crowds" in front of schools. The government has so far invoked only the first set of these provisions. The actual text of Vigipirate is classified as a state secret.
Two million identity checks
Justice Minister Jacques Toubon has proposed new
measures to reinforce existing "anti-terrorist" laws passed
in 1986. If his new proposal becomes law, "aiding an
undocumented foreigner" will be added to the list of
terrorist acts. Existing laws already allow the police to
hold people accused of "terrorist acts" up to four days
without a lawyer and without any charges being filed.
Trials for terrorism will be held before professional
judges without a regular jury. Penalties for attacks
against police, the army, and other "represen-tatives of
authority" will also be increased.
Juppé has announced that nearly two million identity checks have been done by French police since the start of the bombing campaign. In addition, 10,000 people have been expelled from the country or refused admittance at the border.
These identity checks are openly done on a strictly racial basis. Workers who look African or North African report being stopped by police four or five times a day to have their papers examined. The checks are often accompanied by racial insults and occasionally by violence from the police. As a result, many workers of immigrant origin have stopped going out after work and reduced shopping for food and other necessities to a strict minimum. Some report being refused service at bakeries, grocery stores, and other shops.
There have also been numerous police raids throughout France on small groups associated with the main Algerian opposition group Islamic Salvation Front (FIS) and the GIA. Sometimes these have been accompanied by press conferences at which the police present large stocks of weapons, which they claim they seized during these raids. Supporters of the Salvation Front and the GIA say that the police raids in France are designed to weaken the efforts to build an opposition to the Algerian regime among more than 1 million Algerian immigrants in France.
At the same time, French president Jacques Chirac announced that he and Algerian president Liamine Zeroual would be meeting in New York just prior to the Algerian presidential elections. Many Algerian immigrants and others have accused Paris of supporting the Algerian military regime, which took power after the Algerian government refused to recognize the results of elections that resulted in a majority for the FIS in 1991.
Book bannings
On September 11, four French editors denounced the
government's decision to ban a book on the current fighting
in Algeria. Published in Switzerland, and entitled White
Book on Repression in Algeria (1991-1994), the narrative
presents eyewitness accounts of arbitrary arrests, torture,
and executions by the Algerian police and army.
Last April, the French government banned another book by the Egyptian theologian Youssef Qaradhawi. The official decree banning the book said it was "a threat to public order because of its clearly anti-Western tone and ideas it contained that are contrary to basic republican laws and values."
On September 13, the FIS executive committee in exile formally denounced "with the greatest energy the blind and barbarian [bombing] attacks... which have targeted innocent civilians." On October 10, FIS representative in Washington Anouar Haddam denied that either the Salvation Front or the GIA were behind the attacks. He told the French daily Le Figaro that a communiqué attributed to the GIA, in which the group allegedly claimed responsibility for the bombings, "was false." Haddam said that the real organizers of the bombing campaign were "without any doubt men from the Algerian government's military security."
Only hours before the scheduled meeting between Chirac and Zeroual, the Algerian president canceled the talks claiming that Chirac had intervened in Algerian internal affairs.
Police raids
Police raids were organized throughout the Lyon region
on September 9 as government representatives announced that
they had another suspect in one of the bombings, 25-year-
old Khaled Kelkal.
Kelkal was born in Algeria, grew up in the Lyon suburb of Vaulx-en-Velin, and had recently spent two years in prison for petty theft. He had no known ties to any Algerian groups. A huge manhunt was organized. Kelkal was finally located hiding in the hills west of Lyon.
When the police caught up with Kelkal, he was shot in the leg and in one hand. Seeing that he was still moving, one of the police officers yelled, "Finish him off! Finish him off!" and Kelkal was shot dead. The entire scene was filmed and broadcast by television cameras.
The next day protests and violent clashes took place between police and young people in Vaulx-en-Velin. Hundreds took part in Kelkal's funeral and protest demonstrations of youth of immigrant origin took place in a number of other cities as well.
Minister of the Interior Jean-Louis Debré announced that the "Group Kelkal" had been dismantled and that it had been responsible for all of the terrorist bombings in France. But on the day after Kelkal's funeral another bomb was found in Paris. Several days later a bomb went off in a train in Paris injuring 29 people.
The new bombings were followed by an increase of 4,500 in the Vigipirate forces - which already stood at 20,000 police, 2,500 soldiers, and 9,000 customs agents.
Protests and `national unity'
A declaration by four trade-union confederations,
including the General Confederation of Labor (CGT), the
French Democratic Confederation of Labor (CFDT) and the two
education unions, the FSU and the FEN, called for actions
by workers on October 24 demanding that "all forces should
be mobilized so that the authors of these cowardly attacks
should be captured and judged." There were no reports of
any actions in workplaces in response to the call.
Similar positions were taken by the Socialist Party and the French Communist Party. A general atmosphere of "national unity" and calls for increased police measures has prevailed, bringing together parties supporting the government and parties in the opposition as well as union officials and representatives of other organizations.
On October 24, soldiers armed with machine guns were called out to patrol buses and trolleys in Strasbourg after young people in several neighborhoods with large immigrant populations threw stones at the police and broke windows.
Afraid of a direct clash between the army and local youth, the Socialist Party mayor of Strasbourg, Catherine Trautmann, called for the removal of the troops and for widening the role of the police. Authorities finally withdrew the troops after two days of widespread criticism that the army was being used in a situation that went beyond the Vigipirate mandate. But the government continues testing the possibility of widening the use of troops to "maintain order."
Assault on students
The same day that the troops were pulled out of the
buses in Strasbourg, the CRS riot police brutally assaulted
a peaceful student occupation of the rectorat; the regional
offices of the Ministry of Education, in Rouen. University
students there have been holding large demonstrations
demanding 12 million francs supplementary funding for their
school. A student strike has effectively blocked the
university since the beginning of the school year.
In the middle of the night, riot police entered the rectorat, which was being occupied by 300 students. The students were handcuffed, clubbed, pulled by their hair and thrown down the stairs. One of the students told France- Info radio later, "The police treated us as if we were terrorists."
The increasingly "muscled" approach by the conservative government comes at a time of deepening social tension. Paris has announced a wage freeze for 1996 for all public workers. Some three-and-a-half million strikers responded to the government's action with a one-day strike on October 10, while hundreds of thousands of workers demonstrated. Unions are now discussing plans for a second strike.
Two weeks after the public workers' one-day action, Chirac finally dropped any pretenses of backing wage increases for workers and announced a two year battle to reduce the budget deficit by reducing spending on social welfare programs. The Social Security system of public health care was at the center of his attack.
He said that he had not been elected to "be popular" but "to do a job." Financial analysts welcomed Chirac's action. Jean-Francois Mercier, an economist at Salomon Brothers, warned that "public opinion" could be a problem. "The next few months will be marked by labor tensions and wage demands, but the government will probably not yield to the pressures," he predicted.
The CGT and CFDT unions have already called for national demonstrations on November 14 when Chirac puts his Social Security bill to a vote in parliament.