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 YEARENDER: In France, 2001 was a year of fear By Siegfried Mortkowitz Mon Dec 17 2001 19:19:38 ET Paris (dpa) - It did not take the repeated televised images of the September 11 terrorist attacks on New York City to make the French think about law and order at home. A startling rise in the crime rate, a wave of violent attacks on policemen and a series of high-profile murders of young women, graphically described by the French media, had already turned it into the most burning issue on the domestic political front. But the scenes of horror from New York City, shown over and over on French television for over a week, focused even more the minds of politicans and voters on the issue of security. So did, no doubt, the imminence of next spring's election presidential and parliamentary elections, which will largely be fought - and probably decided - on the issue of law and order. Just how mean the streets of Paris and other French cities had become was confirmed in a study published in June. It revealed that more criminal acts per capita were committed in France in the year 2000 than in that traditional hotbed of crime in the streets, the United States. The issue grew even hotter when, in July, the Chinese government and media warned its citizens not to visit Paris because of an alleged wave of violence against Chinese merchants and residents there. ``The Chinese who go to Paris must be careful,'' one Beijing newspaper wrote. ``Local criminals especially target tourist groups and members of school excursions, who are stripped of their possessions at airports, in the metro, in department stores and at tourist attractions.'' In July, nearly a year before upcoming presidential and parliamentary elections, President Jacques Chirac officially turned the growing public fear into a campaign issue. Speaking on national television during the French president's traditional Bastille Day appearance, the right-wing Chirac accused the left-wing government of Prime Minister Lionel Jospin of lacking the political will to fight crime. ``Every,aggression, every crime must be punished,'' Chirac said, ``This is what we call zero tolerance, as applied by Mayor Rudolph Giuliani of New York.'' This was not quite the first time the phrase ``zero tolerance'' was uttered by a politician in liberal France. Several years earlier, a member of the extreme right-wing National Front had had used the expression while calling for ``a different (law and order) policy, that of repression''. Then came September 11. The French government immediately intiated a state of high alert, undertaking such high-profile measures as dismantling public trash bins that could serve as hiding places for bombs and evacuating metro trains and stations whenever a suspect package was discovered. A few weeks later, two policemen were killed by a career criminal released from detention, apparently by mistake, by a French magistrate. Before he was apprehended, the suspect allegedly gunned down four more people during a botched robbery. Shortly thereafter, a distraught railway employee went berserk in the city of Tours, shooting to death four people. This prompted former interior minister and likely presidential candidate Charles Pasqua to declare that France was experiencing ``a wave of murders in the street without precedence'', and to call for the re-establishment of the death penalty, abolished in 1981. This is unlikely to happen. But after a year of fear, as was 2001, the traditionally permissive French are far more likely to listen to hardline solutions to crime in the street than ever before. |
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