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helshades · 2 years ago

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@animentality; @odinsblog; @alfred-e-neuman; @le-dreadmau5; @evidenceofdespair...

French police kill.

French police mutilate.

French police terrorise.

I was only seven months old when he died, he was 22. He was born the same month as you, @a-room-of-my-own, in 1964, his mother’s youngest. The night Malik Oussekine died, on 6th December 1986, it was like the whole country’s heart stopped for a moment, and then every beat it took after that was shadowed by his memory. It is impossible in France to utter the words ‘police violence’ and not hear unspoken names: Malik Oussekine. Rémi Fraisse. ZIneb Redouane. Cédric Chouviat.

And now Serge, as I write these dreadful words, lying in a hospital bed. We don’t want him to join the unspoken list. We think of him, as he shadows the beat of our heart. We grow angrier.

Malik Oussekine died for the cause of being in the wrong place at the wrong time. Maybe he had the wrong sort of face, too. He hadn’t actually taken part in the demonstrations that had been shaking Paris that month, but he too was a student like the many who protested the Devaquet Bill that promised to rattle French universities. That night, Malik Oussekine simply exited his favourite jazz club when he was given chase by three ‘Flyers’, members of the dreaded motorised police squad created after the events of May 1968 to ‘clean up’ the streets by chasing down supposed rioters left over from a protest on a trail bike, one driving and the other using a long truncheon to lay blows to anyone he could reach.

There were witnesses to the crime, including a young civil servant who let Malik Oussekine enter his apartment building with him and attempted to come to his aid, but was beaten with batons as well. As he described the scene afterwards, three policemen launched themselves at the victim with inane brutality, landing great blows to his stomach and his back. In truth, when the emergency services arrived ten minutes later, Malik Oussekine was already dead; yet it was officially declared that he died in a hospital bed three hours later, to try to avert the crowd’s anger against the murderers, and the State. The truth was revealed by the Oussekine family’s sollicitor, reading a report from the head of the emergency services, four days later. Two days after Malik Oussekine died, the bill was dropped, and minister Alain Devaquet resigned, confessing to his ‘shock’ upon seeing this level of violence. Most of the political class spoke in unison to condemn the acts of those policemen. The Flying Squad was dissolved almost immediately.

Why am I telling you this?

Because there seems to be a pattern to this story, poisonous echoes to it, which began pulsing with insistence back in 2016 when the Companies républicaines de sécurité (C.R.S.) maimed several demonstrators during protests against the ‘Labour Law’, then-minister of Economy Emmanuel Macron’s pet project, which aimed to revoke many key points to the Labour Code to fragilise workers’ protection against abusive employers. Except this time, the bill became law; the following year, the young minister became a president. A year within his term, the ‘Yellow Vests’ took to the streets and the roundabouts of France. And then police repression became ferocious.

Warning: extremely graphic injuries, eye wounds, broken jaws, torn limbs, missing teeth, stitches, swelling, etc.

Le Mur jaune, 432 injured people out of 2,500 wounded accounted for amongst the ‘Yellow Vests’, 2018–2019.

When journalist David Dufresne launched his Twitter account to make an inventory of police violence in the Yellow-Vest demonstrations, the year was 2018, the month was the same as the one Malik Oussekine died. Every tweet would begin with the now infamous words: ‘Allo, place Beauvau? I’m calling to report a case of police violence...’ (« Allô, place Beauvau ? C’est pour un signalement. »). Beauvau Place being a common periphrasis to refer to the headquarters of the Ministry of the Interior—hosting the French equivalent to the British Home Secretary, or the Secretary of Homeland Security, in the U.S. (combined with the Attorney General).

‘Is it the father that cries within me? My first ever report dealt with a high-schooler from Bordeaux. The video showed a teenager lying on the ground after being shot in the face by a blast ball launched by a riot gun, and a policeman that orders the kid’s schoolmates to ‘shut the fuck up’. Two days prior, it was the 1st December protest on the Champs-Élysées and its attendant lot of badly-wounded civilians. Dozens by dozens, videos, photos and witness accounts would flow my Twitter thread. Nothing on the television; barely anything in the press. As a long-time observer of law and order maintenance, I found myself stunned, between, on the one hand, the unprecedented violence that lashes onto civilians during social demonstrations—unprecedented both in its brutality and its relentlessness—but also, on the other hand, the media silence surrounding such violence, and which, by keeping silence, gives free reign to such violence.’

David Dufresne.

Zineb Redouane was first to die in the Yellow Vest demonstrations because of police violence; yet, like Malik Oussekine, she had nothing to do with the actual protests. She was 80 years old. She died on 2nd December 2018, in a hospital bed, but she was killed by a policeman the day before, when he shot at her through her window as she was closing her shutters against the heavy clouds of teargas and the noise of the protests below. She was on the phone with one of her daughters then, who reported that her mother cried out that a policeman had aimed at her and shot at her—in her 4th floor flat. She was shot in the head with a teargas canister, and two 10-gram teargas capsules were officially found in her flat—but according to police sources speaking to reputable freelance journalists, in all likelihood, policemen cleaned up the flat from any incriminating evidence of more than one shot and of possible other types of projectiles. No policeman ever came forward to confess to the crime; none were denounced. Amnesty International has officially catalogued this affair as a case of unpunished police violence.

Do you know what changed since Malik Oussekine died? The press. The press doesn’t show police violence anymore; not most of the press, not mainstream media—90% of French press is privately owned by a dozen oligarchs, several of whom endorsed Emmanuel Macron’s first presidential campaign, paving a yellow brick media road for him which definitely led to both of his terms—and not even the public service. The words ‘police violence’ have become something of a taboo on any given television studio set. On the other hand, protesters are systematically depicted as imbecilic hordes of nationalists intent on swarming the tranquil Republic. Meanwhile, French riot police specialise in kettling peaceful demonstrations before demanding that people disperse—whilst they’re still stuck in the police-made impasse—and then gassing the helpless crowd abundantly, or beating anyone haphazardly, or even fining as many people as they can ‘to make numbers’.

It’s actually very difficult to account for all the wounded because there aren’t official numbers but one can only start from the 2019 assessment of the Yellow Vest protests and speculate on the growing numbers since especially January 2023. In March 2019, then-Chief of Police in Paris Michel Delpuech brought the Flyers back to life. His dreaded successor Didier Lallement then perfected the squad to create the ‘BRAV-M’ unit: the ‘Motorised brigade for repression of violent actions’. The initial version was understood as a short-lived affair, meant to be reconstituted only on the fly for the bigger days of protest, but Lallement made it a fixture. And the results aren’t exactly glorious.

Following David Dufresne’s numbers, the Yellow Vest wounded are between 2,000 and 3,000 (known to be injured because they reported their injuries at a hospital, in order notably to obtain a medically-sanctioned permit for a short sick leave), including over 80 severe injuries, 152 head wounds, 17 people who lost an eye as well as half a dozen blown-up hands. Some people partially lost the use of a limb, had their hearing impaired, had their teeth shattered by a blast ball in the mouth. Many people were shot almost point blank with riot guns, hundreds were gassed in the face. This is the ideal moment to inform you that the teargas used by French police is actually more concentrated than the one used by the American police. Seriously.

The Geneva Convention actually forbids usage of teargas in a military context, yet this toxic combat gas is legal for police use against civil unrest. Go figure.

Numbers are growing for the wounded, unfortunately, since January, Macron’s regime is only holding by a thread and that’s the hooligans masquerading as policemen. But this time, something has changed. The media are timidly starting to speak against him, probably under the pressure of underlings furious at their superiors for catering to the P.T.B.’s will for so long. The three quarters of the French population (95% of active workers) show prolonged support for the protesters, and refuse to welcome the official statements of ‘anarchists’ and the ‘ultra-left’ being the source of all that unrest.

Macron’s government is on its last leg and this is why police repression has taken a critical turn over the last two weeks. It all culminated on 24th March 2023 in Sainte-Soline, Deux-Sèvres, Nouvelle-Aquitaine, when 3,000 gendarmes and 200 police provoked a riot as 25,000–30,000 were come to protest the construction of one ‘megabasin’. As far as I know, over 200 protesters were injured, 40 of them severely so—we’re talking about people who had their faces shattered by police projectiles—and 2 are still in a coma.

It’s not just that gendarmes on quad bikes attacked the tail of the processions that were fleeing in panic, shooting at them with riot guns, that is raising controversy at present.

It is also the fact that the authorities prevented the emergence services from intervening on the site for several hours, even though volunteer medics who had been assisting the protesters repeatedly called the emergency services crying for help with clinical depictions of life-threatening wounds.

And then Interior Minister Gérald Darmanin lied about it, the head of the local emergency service (also an ardent support of Emmanuel Macron’s) lied about it, and then two separate newspapers releases audio recordings of the phone conversation between a volunteer doctor and emergency personnel, flatly stating that officials didn’t want them to attend to the wounded.

In passing, several (left-wing) elected representatives were present in the demonstrations at Sainte-Soline, and they formed a human chain around the wounded in the meadow, with their unmissable three-coloured scarves. Well, they were gassed all the same, with police clearly aiming at the wounded.

(Darmanin is now threatening to cut funding to the French branch of the International Federation of Human Rights Leagues.)

It’s only a temporary conclusion, as I really need to come up with a better, more detailed summary of whatever happened in Sainte-Soline, but I wanted to point something out before I finally go to sleep.

This is not about who’s got the worst police, or who’s got the most deserving cause. The current riots in France are not comparable to a movement like ‘Black Lives Matter’—the social uprising we’re facing has a different source and aim—and our respective politics are absolutely not interchangeable. This doesn’t mean that we do not stand in solidarity with one another as comrades, united against arbitrary state violence and the increasing attacks on our right to demonstrate and protest our governments.

#french riots #riots in france #sainte-soline #police violence #it's 3 in the morning again

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