Paris – Rioters fired shotguns at police in a working-class suburb of Paris on Sunday, wounding 10 officers as the country’s fast- spreading urban unrest escalated dangerously.
The shots came just hours after President Jacques Chirac called an emergency meeting of top security officials and promised increased police pressure to confront the violence.
“The republic is completely determined to be stronger than those who want to sow violence or fear,” Chirac said in the courtyard of Elysee Palace after meeting with his internal security council. “The last word must be from the law.”
But the violence, which has become one of the most serious challenges to government authority here in nearly 40 years, showed no sign of abating, and Sunday was the first time police officers had been wounded by gunfire in the unrest. More than 3,300 vehicles have been destroyed, along with dozens of public buildings and private businesses, since the trouble began Oct. 27.
On Saturday night alone, the tally reached a peak of 1,300 vehicles burned, stretching into the heart of Paris, where 35 vehicles were destroyed, and touching a dozen other cities across the country.
Fires were burning in several places Sunday night, and hundreds of youths were reported to have clashed with police in Grigny, south of Paris, where the shooting took place. On Saturday night, a car was rammed into the front of a McDonald’s restaurant in the town.
“We have 10 policemen that were hit by gunfire in Grigny, and two of them are in the hospital,” Patrick Hamon, a national police spokesman, said early this morning.
He said one of the officers hospitalized had been hit in the neck and the other in the leg but that neither wound was life-threatening.
Despite help from thousands of reinforcements, police appeared powerless to stop the mayhem. As they apply pressure in one area, the attacks occur in another.
“This is just the beginning,” said Moussa Diallo, 22, a tall, unemployed French-African man in Clichy-sous- Bois, the working-class Parisian suburb where the violence began. “It’s not going to end until there are two policemen dead.”
He was alluding to two teenage boys, one French-African and the other French-Arab, whose accidental deaths while hiding from police touched off the unrest.
While everyone seems to agree that the latest violence was touched off by the teenagers’ deaths last week, the unrest no longer has much to do with the incident.
“It was a good excuse, but it’s fun to set cars on fire,” said Mohamed Hammouti, a 15-year-old boy in Clichy- sous-Bois.
Most people said they sensed that the escalation of the past few days had changed the rules of the game: Besides the number of attacks, the level of destruction has grown to a shocking degree, with substantial businesses and public buildings going down in flames.
Residents of some high-rises have been throwing baseball-sized steel bocci balls and improvised explosives at national riot police below.
Many politicians have warned that the unrest may be coalescing into an organized movement. But no one has emerged to take the lead like Daniel Cohn-Bendit, known as Danny the Red, did during the violent student protests that rocked the French capital in 1968.
Though the majority of those committing the acts are Muslim, French-Arabs and French-Africans, the mayhem has yet to take on any ideological or religious overtones.
In an effort to stop the attacks and distance them from Islam, France’s most influential Islamic group issued a religious edict, or fatwa, on Sunday condemning the violence.
Young people in the poor neighborhoods incubating the violence have consistently complained that police harassment is mainly to blame. They say such harassment has pushed people’s patience to the limit.
“If you’re treated like a dog, you react like a dog,” said Diallo.