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Old March 17th, 2006 #1
Robert Bandanza
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Join Date: Mar 2006
Location: JUDEAware, originally MassaJEWsetts
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Default French Police Detain 300 Labor Protesters

French Police Detain 300 Labor Protesters
Hundreds Detained After Quarter of a Million People Demonstrate in France Against Labor Law

By JOHN LEICESTER

PARIS Mar 17, 2006 (AP)— Police detained some 300 people around France after nationwide student marches against a new labor law turned violent, as street cleaners cleared away torched cars Friday and the government braced for more protests.

A quarter of a million people took to the streets in some 200 demonstrations around the country Thursday, in a test of strength between youth and the conservative government of 73-year-old President Jacques Chirac.

Most of the violence and the arrests were around the Sorbonne university in Paris, where police fired rubber pellets and tear gas at youths who pelted them with stones and set cars on fire. Fifty-one police and riot officers were injured, and a total of 272 people were detained nationwide, 187 of them in Paris, the Interior Ministry said.

The country's main student union condemned the violence, which police blamed on fringe groups of radicals and anarchists and a few petty criminals who broke into a jewelry store in the melee. The clashes died down by late Thursday, and no major overnight violence was reported.

"There was a demonstration that went smoothly and then there were a few delinquents who came to pick a fight," Interior Minister Nicolas Sarkozy told reporters.

The next major test will come Saturday when unions and students march together.

If the government faces down the groundswell of protest, Chirac's prime minister and supposed preferred successor, Dominique de Villepin, and his ideas for revitalizing France will have scored a major victory heading into next year's presidential race.

If not, Villepin's presidential ambitions may be finished and the government's reforms discredited.

The students' anger focuses on a new form of job contract championed by Villepin that will allow employers to fire young workers within their first two years in a job without giving a reason.

The government says the flexibility will encourage companies to hire thousands of young people, bringing down unemployment rates that run at 23 percent among young adults and around double that in some of the depressed suburbs that were shaken by weeks of riots last year.

http://abcnews.go.com/International/...ory?id=1736642

(Page 2 of 2)

The job contract was one of the government's responses to that violence. But students fear it will erode France's coveted labor protections and leave the young by the wayside.

Villepin said Thursday that he was "open to dialogue, in the framework of the law, to improve the first job contract" but showed no sign of withdrawing the measure.

Thursday's protests in Paris began peacefully, with students whistling, chanting and beating drums. Later, however, tension mounted and police and rioters waged a back-and-forth battle amid acrid clouds of tear gas outside the Sorbonne on the Left Bank.

Several hundred youths threw Molotov cocktails, paving stones, metal crowd-control barriers, and tables and chairs taken from nearby cafes. Many cars were overturned or torched.

Associated Press Writer Jean-Marie Godard contributed to this report from Paris.

Copyright 2006 The Associated Press. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten, or redistributed.

http://abcnews.go.com/International/...1736642&page=2
 
Old March 17th, 2006 #2
alex
Left-wing NS
 
Join Date: Jan 2005
Posts: 1,062
Default

Sarkozy is blaming neo-nazis and extreme-leftists for the violence.He calls them both trash and thugs.

Its interesting times we live in.

All over Europe the mechanisms of problem solving in the capitalistic system fail and young people start to revolt.The law Villepin did pass is totally unsocial.

He thought it up for the immigrant youths to have better opportunities at the job market.But now the "native" young French are pissed off since the prospect of having a job for only two years and then being thrown on the streets again does not sound very good to them.

The massive anticapitalist movements of the extreme left and the extreme right will rise again all over Europe.

Quote:
Riots in France as Job Protests Heat Up

Police have detained nearly 300 people after students marches turned violent. French youth are angry: for days, protests have swept across the country as young people demand better occupational conditions.

Demonstrators overturned cars and threw petrol bombs at police who repelled them with tear gas and water cannons, as a show of force by hundreds of thousands of French students against the government over job reforms turned increasingly violent on Thursday.



Calm returned early Friday after demonstrators clashed with police on Paris's Place de la Sorbonne square in the Latin Quarter following a protest march.

Protestors also vandalized cafés amid scenes that left the area veiled in tear gas fumes and a bookshop in flames on the square, located near departments of the Sorbonne University.



Police said 46 officers were injured, including 11 hospitalized, in clashes in Paris and incidents elsewhere in French towns including Rennes and Toulouse left several other officers hurt.



Interior Minister claims current protestors are "copycats"



Interior Minister Nicolas Sarkozy laid blame for the riots on militants ranging from the extreme left to the extreme right, and including "hooligans" and "louts" from suburbs of Paris who had seen angry demonstrations earlier this year.



"There were a few hundred delinquents who came to fight," he told journalists after meeting police and firemen in central Paris. "Among them there were extreme left, extreme right, hooligans, and louts from a number of neighbourhoods."

The protests were organized in anger at the proposed First Employment Contract (CPE), a contested youth jobs measure. Unions, student groups and the political left say the CPE, which can be broken off without explanation in the first two years, is a license to hire and fire at will, and are demanding its withdrawal.



New job measure is causing the fuss



Prime Minister Dominique de Villepin, who championed the scheme as a key tool in fighting youth unemployment, faces the most serious test of his premiership as the wave of protests paralyzes dozens of French universities. The CPE is aimed at encouraging companies to recruit young people.



The Interior Ministry said 257,000 people took to the streets in up to 80 towns and cities across France, while some organizers set the figure as high as half a million.



Student leaders said that 120,000 people joined the march through Paris's Left Bank university quarter, although police said there were 30,000.



France has a tradition of protest movements

Large rallies were also held in Marseille, Lyon and Grenoble in the south and southeast, Bordeaux in the southwest, Rennes and Lille in the northwest and north, Clermont-Ferrand, Limoges and Angers in the centre and Strasbourg in the east.



Four people were arrested in the southern city of Toulouse after police dispersed a peaceful 9,000-strong protest.



Violence also erupted last week when riot police were called in to evacuate demonstrators from Paris' historic Sorbonne University. Student leaders described the protest movement -- which is backed by 68 percent of the public, according to a new poll -- as a "tidal wave".



Unions have called for a further day of protest on Saturday, when the head of the powerful CGT union, Bernard Thibault, has vowed to "step up a gear" in the stand-off with the government.



Strikes and sit-ins have spread to two-thirds of France's 84 universities with 21 closed and 37 others badly disrupted, according to the education ministry, with protests also reported in dozens of high schools.



France has one of Europe's highest youth unemployment rates



Not all students back the protest movement, however, and clashes

broke out in Toulouse as dozens of youths angry at the disruption to

their studies tried to dislodge protestors from the building.



France has one of the highest youth unemployment rates in Europe, with 23 percent of all young people out of work and the figure topping 50 percent in some of the high-immigration city suburbs hit by rioting late last year.



Villepin has said he was open to talks with labor leaders but insists the measure -- passed by Parliament as part of a broader law on equal opportunities drawn up after the riots in October and November -- will be implemented.



The escalating protests have revived memories of the May 1968 student uprising, and have been seen as the sign of a deeper malaise among young French people worried about their future.

http://www.dw-world.de/dw/article/0,...936683,00.html
__________________
In the age of Globalization,its not the international Left,but the nationalist Right,which is the true anticapitalist force,which will set restrictions on the international Capital and will secure and improve the nation-state as a social shelter.
 
Old March 18th, 2006 #3
alex
Left-wing NS
 
Join Date: Jan 2005
Posts: 1,062
Default

Another article which gives a better understanding of the situation in France:

Quote:
Liberté, Égalité and Job Sécurité

By Kim Rahir in Paris

The student riots currently gripping Paris look a lot like the unrest that hit France in the sixties. But the similarity is misleading: Instead of fighting against the old order as the country's students did back then, today's youth are fighting to protect it.

A bloodied policeman on the pavement, teargas canisters soaring through the air, smashed windows and steel fences. This week, Paris' famous student neighborhood the Latin Quarter has once again become the scene of violent confrontations between demonstrators and the police. The clashes started around the Sorbonne, which has been shut down by the authorities following strikes and forced occupations.

The protestors, who flocked to the Latin Quarter spontaneously from other Paris universities throughout the afternoon on Tuesday, were met by policeman stationed on Sorbonne Square. The first projectiles were thrown -- stones and bottles -- and the police responded by firing teargas. Though the images of violence have dominated the evening news, they remain the exception in what has largely been a peaceful protest movement, which has swept across the entire country over the past two weeks.

More than 50 of France's roughly 80 universities have been the site of blockades or student occupations. On Tuesday, the protests spread to high schools as well. The unrest has clearly caught French Prime Minister Dominique de Villepin off guard: only four months after last November's riots in the economically depressed Parisian suburbs, his conservative government is now faced with another youthful revolt. But instead of underprivileged kids with immigrant backgrounds, now the country's educated elites have taken to the streets.

The protests were triggered by a law making it easier for employers to sack young workers under the age of 26. Villepin presented the law as a measure for combating youth unemployment, which affects around 23 percent of young French citizens. The government considers it one of the most serious problems facing the country today. But the youth don't care much for Villepin's proposed solution.

"It's pure slavery," 23-year-old sociology student Clara exclaims. "Young people are being driven into social ruin." Clara and a handful of her fellow students have met on the campus of Nanterre University in western Paris in order to participate in the nation-wide "day of action" intended to keep the protests going. The mood outside the university -- a cluster of drab concrete buildings now hung with banners -- is like that at a picnic. "Impeach Villepin, put (Interior Minister Nicolas) Sarkozy on a charter flight," reads one slogan.

The universities are dominated by fear and uncertainty. "Sure, some people think this law doesn't concern them," one student says. "But that's not true at all. Job security will become a thing of the past at all levels if this law stands."

Fear about loosing social benefits

Lack of security -- "précarité" -- is what everyone is talking about. The student protest movement has no charismatic leader and no vision for society's future. Many of the demonstrators and strikers are not members of any political organization or party. "Many of them have never demonstrated before," one student says. But the new type of employment contract introduced by Villepin has created a common front of dissent. One flyer distributed by the students of Nanterre asks: "How are you supposed to find an apartment and build a future for yourself when you can lose your job from one day to the next?"

In other words, the life plans the young protesters perceive to be under threat are perfectly middle class. And even though many students point out that their parents were "on the streets in May '68" or predict that "red Nanterre will rise again," comparisons between then and now are hardly convincing. The students of 1968 protested against a bourgeois social order they felt oppressed by, systematically breaking one taboo after the other on their search for a new society. But the young people occupying the French universities today want to preserve the privileges and guarantees that were granted to earlier generations.

The stark contrast becomes very clear when the young protesters are asked what they think of the riots that shook the French suburbs in November of last year, when widespread feelings of frustration and despair found expression in a wave of violence, burning and looting. "That's definitely a different way of acting," sociology student Clara quickly notes. "Those were people who were just completely sick and tired of their situation -- maybe it's the same struggle somehow," says Cécile, without sounding very convinced. Then again, maybe it isn't at all.

Response to past riots

In part, Villepin's unemployment law is a product of the riots in November. It signals that the government wants to finally do something for the inhabitants of France's ghettos. The country's media have already picked up on a possible conflict of interest between the protesting students and the inhabitants of the suburbs. "If I have to choose between the new employment contract and unemployment, it won't take very long," French paper Le Parisien quoted a 19-year-old from the Paris suburb Mureaux.

But such remarks will offer little solace to Villepin. Mass demonstrations by trade unionists and students have already been announced for Thursday and Saturday. Still, the prime minister -- who along with his equally ambitious rival Sarkozy wants to run for president in 2007 -- is naturally doing his best to appear resolved and confident.

While foreign observers are asking themselves why the French seem to take to the streets every time they disagree over something, members of the political opposition are working to seize their opportunity. Ever since 2002, when right-wing extremist Jean-Marie Le Pen came second to Jacques Chirac in a presidential runoff, French voters have continuously bashed their government at the ballot box. Their rejection of the European Constitution during a referendum held in May of last year was only one of many such voter rebellions.

But neither the country's politicians nor their policies have genuinely changed. "It's time to start listening to what the French people are saying," Jean-Marc Ayrault, the leader of the socialist opposition said on Tuesday -- the same day he took the new employment contract to France's constitutional court. Legal experts believe the court may reject the law on technical formalities, which would allow the embattled government save face while getting the angry masses off the streets.

http://service.spiegel.de/cache/inte...406157,00.html
__________________
In the age of Globalization,its not the international Left,but the nationalist Right,which is the true anticapitalist force,which will set restrictions on the international Capital and will secure and improve the nation-state as a social shelter.
 
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