The Prism 2049
matters is that the New France is born.”
France’s president resigned last night after thousands of angry and impoverished protesters took to the streets of Paris in a revolt against the government’s handling of a devastating economic crisis.
His quit after two days of rioting and looting that left at least twenty two dead and scores of protesters injured in cities around the country.
The president resigned after opposition parties refused his request to form a coalition amid the most severe civil unrest for more than a decade.
He will be replaced provisionally by the Gaullist president of the senate, until the national congress chooses a successor to rule the nation until elections are called. The crisis sent jitters through the international markets.
Harrowing images of unrest were transmitted round-the-clock to a stunned populace. In Paris, a police officer guarding the doors of the congress from demonstrators trying to storm the building was killed by a pavement stone hurled by a protester.
“We are bunkered in here,” said a TV journalist broadcasting from inside congress. “The legislators can't leave and nobody can get in.”
His resignation came half way through his term of office. Arriving in office on a campaign based around the slogan "I know I'm boring’, he had promised to end the rampant corruption under his flamboyant Gaullist predecessor, who drove a red Ferrari and was reputed to have had a string of affairs with French starlets. But his own government soon became bogged down in corruption charges similar to those once made against his predecessor, and his abrupt end in office came with his popularity rating at four percent in the polls.
In Paris yesterday, mounted police fought running battles with demonstrators demanding the president’s resignation. Teargas and water cannons were deployed
Several hundred people were in a standoff with police last night in the Place de la Republique. The demonstrators included a middle-aged woman who, despite having had one of her toes hacked off by a horse's hoof, still railed against the government’s starvation plan.
“France is empty,” said another protester. “My children want to leave this country, there is no future here, and our politicians are too corrupt.”
Among the dead was a boy of fifteen was reportedly shot during the riots in Lille in the north of the country. Other victims were thought to have been shot by shopkeepers trying to deter looters by firing into the crowds.
Markets across the world were last night watching to see whether the crisis would have a domino effect in other economies in Europe.
In a desperate attempt to bolster his survival chances, he had spoken to the nation yesterday, asking the opposition Gaullist party to join him in forging a new economic programme to assure social peace. He had pledged to hang on to his post.
The unrest erupted after the country's free market programme turned sour. In the past two years France has felt the pressure of a deepening political, social, and economic crisis. Hampered by strikes called by Gaullist labour unions, France lurched towards a default this year from its loans as the BCE imposed ever-tighter conditions. Unemployment soared and now stands at over twenty percent especially amongst the New French and recent Settlers.
Wednesday night’s riots forced the resignation of the economy minister behind the austerity package. “He resigned after he saw five thousand people banging pots and pans outside his home,” a source close to the former minister said.
The spontaneous gathering outside the minister’s apartment in the exclusive Paris inner suburb of Neuilly brought together people from all social classes, who kept up a constant clatter from around eleven on the Wednesday until the Friday morning.
The pots and pans marches had been preceded by two days of food riots, with groups of up to over two thousand unemployed people breaking into supermarkets around the country.
“We’re coming back and we’ll be bringing all our neighbours,” screamed mother to workers in a supermarket in a well to do district, after the mob had accepted free food in place of looting the store.
“The real looters are in the government,” said an opposition deputy, talking to the protesters at Place de la Concorde.
The Riots
Police blasted mainly middle-class, peaceful protesters with tear gas and youths looted and set fire to the Assemblé Nationale in Paris in a night of protests over the week-old Gaullist government's handling of the country's economic crisis.
Parliament was dissolved by the president and general elections were called. When the results of the first round were’ announced on the TS the Renaissance Party held the lead. Enraged supporters of the left and centre poured into the streets in spontaneous demonstrations. Though the election was entirely democratic abstention was high, well over forty five percent. The demonstrators howled against the Renaissance Party and their leader.
The second round was two weeks away and the left organised massive demonstrations in support of their candidate that inevitably ended in violent confrontation.
Things can change quickly; look at what happened with the Soviet Union, when it collapsed the countries of Central Asia returned to the middle ages in less than five years, no law, no order, no government, no public services, no health system, no work, no pensions, no food, no nothing, just chaos. What was interesting was that those who initially helped the Islamist movements soon understood that they had nothing to offer, why because they had known a better system in spite of its faults.
In reality the French political system was fragile, at the mercy of a man, a party, a religion, a doctrine, which was capable of casting aside the country’s institutions in a brief moment of time, imposing a regime of terror as do revolutions, which are the consequence of explosive change due to external aggression, severe economic crisis or profound conflict in society caused by new factors, such as population movements bringing ethnic conflicts due to cultural, linguistic and religious factors. Such were the events that beleaguered France at the beginning of the third millennium of the Christian era.
Thousands of pot-banging demonstrators, some wrapped in French flags, swarmed to the National Assembly in the Place de la Concord at two in the morning, calling for an end to crippling cash restrictions, a corrupt legal system and complaining that the new government was no better than the last.
When a group of chanting, bare backed youths climbed the palace entrance gate, police fired tear gas, rubber bullets and water cannon into a crowd that included elderly people and children. The clashes came barely a week after bloody street riots forced the President to resign and left many dead.
As the protest degenerated, men threw rocks and stick at riot police and smashed the windows of several city centre banks. Fires burned in the streets around Place de la Concorde and youths broke into the parliament building, a few blocks from the Elysée Palace, lighting fires and smashing windows until they were forced out with tear gas. Local television reported seven policemen injured in the clashes.
The middle classes helped bring down the government with a massive protest. With the return of familiar faces from previous Gaullist governments, many feel their call for not only a new economic policy but also a new class of politician went unheeded.
“We had a revolution. But all we got is just more of the same. Just more of the same corrupt politicians stealing from our pockets,” said one of the demonstrators, wearing goggles to protect his eyes amid clouds of tear gas.
The government seemed unprepared for more public unrest and protesters easily reached the palace front gates and climbed onto its lower windows. The newly nominated cabinet chief who had been forced out of politics in 1991 by a corruption scandal, resigned amid the protests.
People from wealthy districts of Paris marched spontaneously on Friday evening after a day of chaos in the country's struggling banks. Queues of irate people clamoured for their money after a weeklong freeze on basic transactions such as clearing cheques was lifted.
“The government has changed but the econ
omic policy is just as bad. They are not letting us get our money out of the bank. They are keeping our deposits captive,” said a government worker with his wife and son in the Place de la Concorde. “This is the worst summer in our history.”
The French struggled to cope with a monthly five hundred euro cash restriction introduced to prevent people from withdrawing their salaries or their savings out of the banks as it hurtled towards a disastrous crisis. The Bank of France rejected appeals to end the cash restrictions.
Partition
According to the French authorities, Oussama Benoum was a visitor in his own country, a Short Sojourn Worker in the SRZ of the Toulon enclave, in a one of its working class suburbs near the naval shipyards.
He had been born in Toulon which had been populated by a high percentage of people of North African settler descent like that of his grandparents. It was over ten years since his family had he been forcible deported to Algharb where he had searched in vain for a job in Medina Hurriya, a name that he had never accepted. What ever happened to him he could have never consider himself as anything else other than French, he neither liked Medina Hurriya or the majority of people who lived there. Even worse for him were its totalitarian government that was no better than that of France.
After endless negotiations and