France Riot Watch: France to Impose Curfews to Quell Rioting

Firefighters extinguish a fire in a burning car in Gentilly, south of Paris, early Tuesday, Nov. 8, 2005. French President Jacques Chirac promised arrest, trials and punishment Sunday for those sowing ‘violence or fear’ across France.

The ASSociated Press has France to Impose Curfews to Quell Rioting

France will impose curfews under a state-of-emergency law and call up police reservists to stop rioting that has spread out of Paris’ suburbs and into nearly 300 cities and towns across the country, the prime minister said Monday, calling a return to order “our No. 1 responsibility.”

The tough new measures came as France’s worst civil unrest in decades entered a 12th night, with rioters in the southern city of Toulouse setting fire to a bus after sundown and pelting police with gasoline bombs and rocks.

Outside the capital in Sevran, a junior high school was set ablaze, while in another Paris suburb, Vitry-sur-Seine, youths threw gasoline bombs at a hospital, police said. No one was injured. Earlier, a 61-year-old retired auto worker died of wounds from an attack last week, the first death in the violence.

Asked on TF1 television whether the army should be brought in, Prime Minister Dominique de Villepin said, “We are not at that point.”

French Prime Minister Dominique de Villepin reads his notes in French TV channel TF1’s studio in Paris before the evening news November 7, 2005. Villepin’s TV intervention occurred after more than a week of rioting around Paris and in other regions. Rioters shot at police and torched more than 1,400 cars in the worst violence since unrest erupted in France’s poor suburbs 11 days ago, and a man beaten by a youth became the first fatality on Monday.

And this photo says it all:

French Prime Minister Dominique de Villepin (right) and Interior Minister Nicolas Sarkozy have so far failed to figure out how to stop the rioting.

Pitiful response by French government officials.

And they criticise the United States foreign policy?

Stay tuned…….