Western Resistance

The disturbances, which had broken out for the thirteenth night on Tuesday evening, had above all touched the province and had run up a net loss of 617 vehicles burned and 280 arrests, which had forced the hand of the prefects to this morning put in place the state of emergency.

1,173 vehicles had been burned and 330 people arrested the previous night, some hours before the Council of ministers adopted on Tuesday morning a decree of application of the law of 3 April 1955, which institutes a state of emergency in France, authorising specially curfews and searches under the control of a judge.

The decree instituting the state of emergency "in effect from 9 November 2005 at 0 hours on the assembly of metropolitan territory" had been published Wednesday at dawn by the official Journal. The prefects could have decided the measures on the restriction of circulation of people and/or traffic, in specified places and boundaries, at set hours.

They could also institute zones of protection or security where the place of abode of persons would be regulated, and to forbid access to all or part of a department to all persons seeking to impede the actions of the public authorities.

A second decree stated that in certain cases the law of 3 April 1955 on the state of emergency "could" be put into effect in the whole or part of 25 departments, of which eight departments of Ile-de-France included Paris.

In these zones thus defined, the minister of the interior could take measures of assignment to residence or of "return of weapons".

The prefects could equally pronounce the provisional closure of theatres , forbidding alcohol or places of gathering and to order the forbidding of gatherings.

In addition, night searches could be equally ordered by the minister or by the prefects.

The measures contained in this decree will be applied in the capital "if the situation merits it", stated the prefecture of police (PP) on Wednesday, from which the mayor PS of Paris, Bertrand Delanoe, judged the principle of curfew "disproportional".

Underlining the " very important low-point" of the number of cars burned on the night of Tuesday/Wednesday, the director of the cabinet of Nicolas Sarkozy at the ministry of the interior, Claude Gueant, announced that 1,800 people had been arrested since the start of the unrest, the 27th October, and 178 people had been taken into custody.

According to the director general of the national police (DGPN), Michel Gaudin, 280 suspected trouble-makers had been arrested on the night of Tuesday to Wednesday and the number of communities touched by the violence lowered from 226 to 196. "There are less and less significant incidents", the night had been marked by "rather few incidents" aimed against the public interest, he has said.

At the heart of the forces of order, "the number of wounded had been particularly limited" according to Michel Gaudin, with one sole police officer being lightly injured.

In the provinces, 467 vehicles had been burned, whereas in the Ile-de-France, there had been 150 (as opposed to 240 the previous night) according to M. Gaudin.

According to Claude Gueant, 11,500 security forces had been "on the bridge" in the night, for instance, a thousand more than the previous night. Two hundred members of the national police reservists and a thousand reserve policemen had been mobilised.

In Nord department, 78 vehicles had been burned and 25 people arrested, all principally in the conurbation of Lille (63 vehicles burned), "better" by the standard of the three preceding nights, according to the prefecture of police.

In the Somme, where a curfew for minors under 16 years had been declared at Amiens and in the surrounding region from 0 hours to 6 am, seven vehicles had been torched. By virtue of the curfew, two minors had been intercepted by law enforcement officers and returned to their parents.

The urban violence had equally subsided in intensity in Grand Ouest, notably at Nantes and Rennes. In the departments of Grand-Est, the drop was significant.

As well, the third suspect implicated in the murder of a man battered to death at Epinay-sus-Seine (Seine-Saint-Denis), on 27 October, had been taken into custody Wednesday morning by the central commissariat of Limoges.

Finally, six persons have been arrested Wednesay morning in the district of Grande-Borne at Grigny (Essonne) in connection with the inquiry into the shooting of ball-bearing pellets on police on Sunday night.

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In a report from Middle East Online, Algerian youth are displeased with the curfew measures. The newspaper "le Monde" which is left-of-centre, said that

"exhuming a 1955 law sends to the youth of the suburbs a message of astonishing brutality: that after 50 years France intends to treat them exactly as it did their grandparents.

"The prime minister should recall that at that time the combination of misunderstanding, warlike posturing and powerlessness brought the republic to its worst ever moment."

The law of 1955 had been initially conceived to quell unrest and insurrection in Algeria, which was then a French colony. After a war, which went on from 1954 -1962, Algeria gained its independence, with brutality and high casualties on both sides.

An article from today's Le Monde states that though curfews were not brought into effect in the Parisian suburbs, which comprise greater Paris, or the Ile de France, several large towns had enacted curfews on the night of Tuesday/Wednesday, most notably Nice, Orleans, Le Havre, Rouens and Amiens.

A report from the Guardian details some of the anger of French immigrant youth in Sevran, in the banlieux of Paris, and the Times also explores the background to the curfew, and adds:

Dominique de Villepin, the Prime Minister, also announced a multimillion-pound package of measures to ease the plight of the descendants of the immigrants from the 1950s and 1960s whose anger has exploded on to the streets.

It includes the creation of a national anti-discrimination agency and 20,000 jobs with local government bodies for estate dwellers. The Prime Minister told parliament: "We must be clear - the Republic is at a moment of truth. What is in question is the effectiveness of our model of integration."

The riots are not just affecting France. It appears that alienation of Muslim youth is being vented in Belgium, in the towns of Ghent, Brussels and Antwerp, according to Xinhua Net. Up to 15 vehicles have been set alight in Brussels, two cars in Ghent, and in Antwerp two Belgian citizens "of immigrant background" were arrested for their suspected involvement with an arson attack. The youths, aged 17 and 19, were picked up after they visited a hospital. It is thought they became burned by their own fire-bomb. A truck was set alight in Antwerp by three people. The fire then spread to a bus.