Socialist Outlook : SO/08 - Winter 2005

France

No to the state of emergency!

Ligue Communiste Revolutionnaire

We must stop it in its tracks - Joint declaration initiated by the LCR (French section of the Fourth International)

Confronted with a revolt born of the accumulation of inequality and discrimination in the suburbs and poor neighbourhoods, the government has just entered on an extremely serious new stage, escalating its law and order policy. Even in May 1968, where the situation was much more dramatic, no emergency law was used by the government. The proclamation of the state of emergency is a response, based only on repression, to a revolt whose causes are profound and well known.

Over and above the disastrous symbolic message that will be sent out by the reference to the Algerian War, what is involved is not only a ‘curfew’ – although this in itself is already entering into a logic of war. The law of April 3rd, 1955 authorises banning orders for, ‘any person seeking to impede, in any way at all, the action of the organs of the state’, the placing under house arrest of, ‘any person whose activity appears dangerous for security and public order’, the closing of, ‘meeting places of any kind’ and the banning of, ‘meetings whose nature can provoke or perpetuate disorder’. The government has even envisaged searching premises at night. It can, furthermore, ‘adopt all necessary measures to ensure the control of the press and of every kind of publication’, and authorise military jurisdiction alongside ordinary judges.

It is necessary to stop the violence and re-establish solidarity in the suburbs. Does that mean subjecting them to an emergency legislation inherited from the colonial period? We know where the well-known cycle of provocations and repression leads, and what results it can produce. The suburbs do not need a state of emergency; they are in desperate need of justice, respect and equality.

Signed by:

Citizens’ Alternative, Association of Moroccan Workers in France (ATMF), CEDETIM, Homeless Committee, CRLDHT, FSU (main teachers’ union), LCR (French section of the Fourth International), League for the Rights of Man (LDH), MRAP (anti-racist movement) French Communist Party (PCF), Union of Lawyers of France, Magistrates’ Union, Union Syndicale Solidaires (a trade union confederation, regrouping among others the SUD unions), the Greens.

8 November, 2005

Press statement by LCR spokesperson Olivier Besancenot

Defy the curfew!

The decisions announced by M.de Villepin, yesterday evening on TF1 [main television channel], are intolerable. Instead of responding to the social emergency, he has resuscitated a law dating from the colonial epoch, from the Algerian War, which gives prefects the power to decree a curfew on all or part of the territory of a borough and to suspend a certain number of civil liberties. Already, the mayor of Raincy - the town that spends 2.6% of its budget on house building - in the vanguard of the repression, has jumped the gun by decreeing such a measure in his town. In this situation the LCR calls on people to defy the curfew by demonstrating in the towns or the neighbourhoods, if necessary at night, where a curfew is decreed by the prefect. The LCR calls on all left wing and democratic organisations to organise these demonstrations together.

8 November, 2005

The Ligue Communiste Revolutionnaire is the French section of the Fourth International.

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