France declares emergency as step to impose curfews

From staff and wire reports

France declared a state of emergency Tuesday to quell the country's worst unrest since the student uprisings of 1968 that toppled a government, and the prime minister said the nation faced a "moment of truth" over its failure to integrate Arab and African immigrants and their children.

But the situation still hasn't deteriorated enough for U.S. travel agents or the government to caution Americans not to go there.

The U.S. state department doesn't list France on its Web page of travel warnings and the French government is only cautioning travelers to be aware of the situation there, according to Carolyn Kempf of Elite Travel Agency in Cape Girardeau.

"So I'm not telling people not to go there, not at this time, because the government has not issued a state warning," she said.

Kempf said she has had no one cancel a trip there and was working on a booking to France Tuesday afternoon.

Still, Kempf said, she would tell travelers to France what she tells all those who are going abroad -- be aware of your surroundings.

"Anytime you travel abroad, use the same common sense you would use at home," she said.

Rioters ignored the extraordinary security measures, which began today, as they looted and burned two superstores, set fire to a newspaper office and paralyzed France's second-largest city's subway system with a gasoline bomb.

The measures, valid for 12 days, clear the way for curfews after nearly two weeks of rioting in neglected and impoverished neighborhoods with largely Muslim communities.

The state-of-emergency decree -- invoked under a 50-year-old law -- allows curfews where needed and became effective at midnight Tuesday, with an initial 12-day limit. Police -- massively reinforced as the violence has fanned out from its initial flash point in the northeastern suburbs of Paris -- were expected to enforce the curfews. The army has not been called in.

Nationwide, vandals burned 1,173 cars, compared to 1,408 vehicles Sunday-Monday, police said. A total of 330 people were arrested, down from 395 the night before

Local officials "will be able to impose curfews on the areas where this decision applies," Chirac said at a Cabinet meeting. "It is necessary to accelerate the return to calm."

The recourse to a 1955 state-of-emergency law that dates back to France's war in Algeria was a measure both of the gravity of mayhem that has spread to hundreds of French towns and cities and of the determination of Chirac's sorely tested government to quash it.

Prime Minister Dominique de Villepin said curfew violators could be sentenced to up to two months' imprisonment, adding that restoring order "will take time."

"We are facing determined individuals, structured gangs," Villepin told parliament on Tuesday.

"We must be lucid: The Republic is at a moment of truth," he said. "The effectiveness of our integration model is in question."

Nationwide, vandals overnight burned 1,173 cars, compared to 1,408 vehicles Sunday to Monday, police said. A total of 330 people were arrested, down from 395 the night before.

The violence erupted on Oct. 27 as a localized riot in a northeast Paris suburb angry over the accidental deaths of two teenagers, of Mauritanian and Tunisian descent, who were electrocuted while hiding from police in a power substation.

It has grown into a nationwide insurrection by disillusioned suburban youths, many French-born children of immigrants from France's former territories like Algeria. France's suburbs have long been neglected and their youth complain of a lack of jobs and widespread discrimination, some of it racial.

The violence claimed its first victim Monday, with the death of a 61-year-old man beaten into a coma last week. Foreign governments have warned tourists to be careful in France. Apparent copycat attacks have spread to Belgium and Germany, where cars were burned. France is using fast-track trials to punish rioters, worrying some human rights campaigners.

The resort to curfews drew immediate criticism from Chirac's political opponents. Former Socialist Prime Minister Laurent Fabius said the emergency measures must be "controlled very, very closely."

Communist Party leader Marie-George Buffet said the decree could enflame rioters. "It could be taken anew as a sort of challenge to carry out more violence," she said.

Rioters in the southern city of Toulouse ordered passengers off a bus, then set it on fire and pelted police with gasoline bombs and rocks. Youths also torched another bus in the northeastern Paris suburb of Stains, national police spokesman Patrick Hamon said.

Outside Paris in Sevran, a junior high school was set ablaze, while in the suburb of Vitry-sur-Seine youths threw gasoline bombs at a hospital, Hamon said. Nobody was injured.

Rioters also attacked a police station with gasoline bombs in Chenove, in Burgundy's Cote D'Or, Hamon said. A nursery school in Lille-Fives, in northern France, was set on fire, regional officials said.

In terms of material destruction, the unrest is France's worst since World War II. Never has rioting struck so many French cities simultaneously, said security expert Sebastian Roche, a director of research at the state-funded National Center for Scientific Research.

Business editor Scott Moyers contributed to this report.