Tag Archives: Covid-19

Coronavirus diary day 87 – France’s history of racist policing, toppling statues and doves in Afghanistan

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Worldwide protests over the murder of George Floyd have given a new boost to campaigns against police brutality and racism in France. Ministers have promised action, while insisting that “France is not the United States”. But official France is still in denial over the nature and extent of the phenomenon.

In 1986 I came to France to take part in the massive marches that followed the death of Malik Oussekine, a student of Algerian origin who was killed by police during demonstrations against a right-wing government’s proposed education reform.

It was December and I remember the cold, the crowds and sleeping in a small flat in Belleville along with a crowd of other agitators from various European countries, there, like me, to convert the French to our view of how to fight racism and change the world. Our efforts were not rewarded with great success.

One night a group of us were arrested by cops on motorbikes, one of whom sported a very striking moustachewith waxed points and was particularly indignant about our attempt to flypost the walls of a bank.

We spent most of the night at the commissariat, pretending not to understand French, which wasn’t that far from the truth, and thus avoiding answering questions. The moustachioed cop was furious when his boss decided not to charge us and kicked us out onto the street, to find our way back to base as daylight broke on the boulevards.

The outrage that met Malik Oussekine’s death led to the education minister resigning and his education bill being dropped.

Two of the three cops who beat Oussekine, members of a motorbike squad like the ones who arrested us, were tried and found guilty of involuntary homicide. But they only received suspended sentences and, although disciplinary action was taken against both of them, one continued to work in the police force.

“After this parody of a trial … I have come to realise that in the country where I was born I will always be a second-class citizen,” Malik’s sister, Sarah, commented.

Shortly after I came to live in France, in 1993, a report appeared in the newspapers of a woman who spent the night in the cells after accusing a police officer of racism while he checked a young man’s identity papers.

A little later young black man died in detention in the police station near where I lived in Montmartre. There was a small protest march past the scene of his death but no great scandal.

Since then the deaths of youths from racial minorities have led to many protests and, on some occasions, riots, most notably in 2005 when the banlieue exploded nationwide after two teenagers were electrocuted while fleeing a police patrol.

Recently cops were caught on video racially abusing and maltreating an Egyptian migrant who had jumped in the river to escape their attentions. And the media have uncovered two Facebook groups where several thousand “guardians of the peace” shared racist and sexist comments, several revealing a certain amount of sexual insecurity and one coining the interesting slogan “Make Normandie Viking again”.

According to one study, 54% of police officers voted for Rassemblement National (formerly Front National) candidate Marine Le Pen in the second round of the 2017 presidential election.

This journalist’s tweet shows cops sporting far-right symbols while on duty.

France’s government-appointed rights defender, Jacques Toubon, a former right-wing justice minister who has taken his job far more seriously than many people expected him to, has called for records to be kept of identity checks by the police.

In a 2016 study his commission found that 80% of the blacks and Arabs interviewed were 20 times more likely to be checked than white people.

Toubon has just opened an investigation into the case of Gabriel, a 14-year-old Roma who claims to have sustained serious injuries to the left eye when he was kicked in the head after being detained for stealing a scooter.

Last month he delivered a report that found institutional racism in police treatment of a group of 18 youths, “black or Arab or pereceived as being so”, in a Paris district.

As he approaches the end of his term, he may wish to turn his attention to the case of four families in the Val-de-Marne town of Vitry-sur-Seine who have just filed complaints over the arbitrary arrest and racial abuse suffered by their 14-15-year-old sons last month. One of the boys hopes to become a police officer.

All of which would seem to imply that when mainstream-right politician Damien Abad denies there is institutional racism in the police force, Interior Minister Christophe Castaner accuses actress and singer Camélia Jordana of “shameful lies” when she says she doesn’t feel safe when faced with a cop or Prime Minister Edouard Philippe declares that the overwhelming majority of officers of the law are not racist, they do not have tremendous respect for empirical evidence.

Castaner this week responded to the latest protests against police brutality with a ban on chokeholds, an order that police oficers suspected of racism be suspended while an inquiry takes place, and a promise to make internal investigations more independent.

Despite Castaner’s assurance that “France is not the United States” and “there are no racist institutions or targeted violence”, that sent police unions into a lather of indignation, which ministers greeted with a frenzy of appeasement.

Maybe not all French coppers are bastards, though. A young participant in one of the Facebook groups complained that none of the women at his police station would go out with him if he revealed his fascist sympathies.

Much kerfuffle about the toppling of the statue of a Tory slave-trader in Bristol last weekend.

I seem to remember certain moments when knocking down statues was widely hailed as a Good Thing, in Iraq in 2003, for example, or in eastern Europe after the collapse of the Soviet Union.

A statue of Saddam Hussein is toppled in Iraq in 2003

Read my account of Iraq after Saddam’s fall here.

Members of the French government have assured us that the statue of Colbert, the minister under Louis XIV who drew up the Code noire, the legal framework for slavery in French colonies, will remain in place.

In world virus news, over 1,000 doves are reported to have died in Mazar-e-Sharif, the north Afghan city that is home to a beautiful mosque where they nest on the roof.

Doves in front of the mosque in Mazar-e-Sharif Photo: Tony Cross

They have starved to death because lockdown has meant nobody is feeding them, as they were when I visited the city in 2009.

Lockdown has meant that some 30 doves die every day, according to the mosque’s imam Photo: Tony Cross

Legend has it that they flock there because the mosque was built at the site of the tomb of Ali, the prophet Mohammed’s cousin and son-in-law. His body is said to have been put on a camel that walked to the city and then died there. Historians do not agree with this account.

France’s Covid-19 death toll now officially stands at 29,319, up 23 in 24 hours. 11,678 people are in hospital, down 283, with 933 patients in intensive care, down 22. 71,832 people have been discharged from hospital, 326 of them yesterday.

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Coronavirus diary day 74 – France relaxes anti-Covid fight despite the spitters and litterbugs

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It will be back to nearly normal for most of France next Tuesday but Parisians will have to drink their coffees en terrasse and wait a while before they can go to the gym, the theatre or Disneyland. Meanwhile, the government suspects us of having squirreled away too much money during lockdown and wants us to spend it for the sake of the economy.

You wouldn’t think posters asking people not to throw masks, gloves and paper hankies on the ground during an epidemic would be necessary, would you?

“We protect you not the pavement”, poster in Champigny Photo: Tony Cross

But apparently some people can’t even make it to a rubbish bin just one step away.

Street scene, Saint Maur des Fossés Photo: Tony Cross

Then again, some people around here spit in the street. Not best practice.

Despite the health and safety delinquents’ best efforts, we seem to be making progress fighting the virus. The Ile-de-France region around Paris is out of the red and into the orange and the rest of the country is green for go, Prime Minister Edouard Philippe told us yesterday as he announced phase 2 of déconfinement.

Here are some of the measures he outlined:

  • Numbers in schools will be limited throughout the country, above all in the Paris region. Parents who have had enough of their kids during lockdown will be able to enjoy a certain liberty in the summer – colonies de vacances (holiday camps) can reopen.
  • Happy couples can trip to the mairie for civil marriages, although probably with a restricted number of guests. The number of people attending a funeral remains limited to 20.
  • Museums and art galleries will reopen throughout the country but visitors will have wear masks. There are some quite pretty patterns out on the street, mind, so perhaps it will add to the aesthetic experience.
  • Beaches and watersports centres will reopen. While theatres, amusement parks, gyms and swimming pools will be in business again in the green zone, they will remain closed until 22 June in the Paris region.
  • Restaurants and bars will reopen in the green zone but we will only be able to drink or dine out front in the Paris region.
  • Discos and casinos are “discouraged” until 21 June, which, given the news of new clusters among clubbers in South Korea, seems like a good idea.
  • Cinemas will remain closed until 22 June, the operators having insisted that they should all reopen at the same time.
  • Travel will be possible all over France,the 100km limit on journeys being abolished even for potentially toxic Parisians.
  • The controversial Stop-Covid tracking device will be open to voluntary subscription from 2 June. Some opposition parties believe it is a foot in the door for the surveillance state. The right-wing Républicains couldn’t agree among themselves and voted for in the lower house and against in the Senate. Macronist orators appealed to parliamentarians’ patriotism, boasting that they weren’t using apps made by Californian big-tech, like the Germans, but had commissioned a French version, like the Brits, the only other Europeans to have their own nukes, as one minister pointed out.

Spend! Spend! Spend! is today’s message from the government.

Consumer spending is down by a third and the authorities don’t approve.

Despite unemployment soaring to 20%, they believe there are 60 billion euros we would have spent, had we not been confined to our homes, stuffed under our collective mattress.

The call will be a disappointment to the celebs and scientists who signed an appeal to dial back on consumerism in the aftermath of the epidemic. Some of the signatories raised eyebrows, given that they do ads for companies like Lancôme (Juliette Binoche, Penelope Cruz), Dior (Marion Cotillard, Isabelle Adjani), Chanel (Vanessa Paradis), Armani (Cate Blanchett), Versace, H&M, Dolce & Gabbana (Madonna) or Kia and American Express (Robert de Niro).

France’s Covid-19 death toll now officially stands at 28,662, 66 yesterday. 15,208 people are in hospital, down 472 in 24 hours, with 1,429 in intensive care, down 72. 67,191 patients have been discharged from hospital, 607 of them yesterday.

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Coronavirus diary day 72 – War of the masks: Covid-19 weaponised in council election campaigns

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The River Marne from the Pont du Petit Parc between Joinville-le-Pont and Saint-Maur-des-Fossés Photo: Tony Cross

Afternoons on the river Marne are pretty busy these days – teenagers canoeing or sitting on the banks smoking dope, a young woman playing her mandolin while being filmed (I think that should be available on social media by now), fishermen, boules players, sunbathers and walkers, not all respecting social distances and not all wearing masks.

The market has been at the centre of a war of the masks this week.

It pitches the Communist Party (PCF) against the mainstream right’s candidate for mayor, Laurent Jeanne He hopes to dislodge the left in the second round of council elections, currently in a state of suffragium interruptum (I think I got the Latin right) due to the epidemic.

Last Friday, Jeanne, who is a regional councillor, was joined by a team of his supporters in handing out masks provided by the regional authority at the entrance to the market.

The PCF claims he told punters that he has taken the initiative because “the town council is doing nothing”. It has in fact distributed 70,000 masks – two per household – in our letterboxes, set up an improvised medical centre in a gym and distributed over 3,000 food parcels.

Jeanne denies uttering any such slander and claims that the mayor, Christian Fautré, ignored an invitation to join him on Friday’s distribution, preferring to hand out leaflets at another market.

The local opposition parties have accused Fautré and friends of hogging the anti-virus spotlight, rather than observing a local-level union sacré against the epidemic. That appears to be true and to have caused some dissent in the current majority’s ranks.

The left-wing list led by the PCF, which is fighting to keep hold of the mayor’s position, won 34.92% of the vote in the first round of local elections, while the right-wingers came out in front with 39.76%.

Which might explain why the battle for credit in the anti-Covid fight is so intense.

Renault is planning to lose 5,000 jobs by natural wastage, according to Le Figaro.

This is despite the government’s announcement of an aid package, which pushed up the company’s value on the Paris Bourse by 17% this morning.

An announcement that the carmaker, which was privatised in 1990 and is now 15% state-owned, aims to save two billion euros and close some plants in France prompted the Macron government to promise aid on condition that production is transferred to electric and hybrid cars and there is more production in Europe.

No mention of public transport.

Having suffered badly during lockdown, clothes shops have announced that more than 14,000 jobs could go.

French “growth” in the first quarter of 2020, Source: Insee

France’s economic activity is estimated to have slumped 21% during the Covid crisis, according to national statistics institute Insee. That’s actually an improvement on the 33% estimate on 7 May and Insee reports some recovery in companies’ morale, which hit rock bottom last month, but not in consumer confidence.

There has been some confusion over the national Covid-19 statistics, almost certainly because of the correction of inaccurate figures on deaths given by care homes.

But the general trend is good – fewer cases reported, less pressure on the hospitals and numbers in intensive care down.

France’s Covid-19 death toll now officially stands at 28,530, 73 in the past 24 hours. 16,264 people are in hospital, down 534, with 1,555 in intensive care, down 54. 65,879 patients have been discharged from hospital, 680 of them yesterday.

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Coronavirus diary day 70 – Macron’s health reform consultation – don’t get your hopes up

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The government is to start a consultation on salvaging the health service this afternoon. It will be by videoconference, Coronavirus oblige. The choice of chair does not bode well for anyone hoping for revolutionary action.

“Healthworkers for a new health service”, a poster from May 1968

Ministers have dubbed the event the “Ségur de la santé”, puzzling at least one reader of Le Monde, who asked its journalists “What is a Ségur?”.

“Factories occupied”, a poster from May 68

The nickname is a reference to French political folklore. In 1968 De Gaulle’s ministers negotiated with union leaders to end the general strike that brought the country to a halt (sound familiar?). The meeting took place at the Labour Ministry in the rue de Grenelle, so were referred to by that name.

Since then governments who have wanted to give the impression they were launching some momentous initiative in consultation with the little people – the Sarkozy government’s emission of hot air on the  environment in 2007, for example – have referred to them as “Grenelles”, regardless of whether they took place in said street or not.

This time round some bright spark has got with the times and named the meeting after the address of the Health Ministry, avenue de Ségur, even though most of the participants will not actually be going there but e-intervening.

The meeting is to be chaired Nicole Notat, not a good sign that anything very radical will come out of it. Notat was leader of the CFDT union confederation from 1992 to 2002 and an enthusiastic practitioner of the strategy of ingratiating itself with employers and governments by undermining more militant action by other unions.

On the other hand, the mood in the hospitals appears to be potentially insurrectional, as Le Monde’s tweet of healthworkers carrying a banner calling for a “general dream” (it’s a play on words with the French word grève for strike) indicates:

Here a doctor accuses the government of torpedoing the negotiations by choosing Notat, failing to invite unions and trying to scrap the 35-hour week in exchange for pay rises:

The consultation starts at 3.30pm today and will last into July.

A slight reversal of the downward curve in hospital admissions took place yesterday. Seven more patients were admitted nationwide. The number in intensive care continues to decline and most experts seem to think a second wave unlikely. This week should be a decisive test of whether that is so.

France’s Covid-19 death toll now officially stands at 28,367, up 35 in 24 hours. 17,185 people are in hospital, up seven, with 1,655 in intensive care, down 10. 64,617 patients have been discharged, 70 yesterday.

This is day 70 of this diary, which you can celebrate as you wish. I am going to stop posting every day but will keep writing regularly, so watch this space (and tell your friends to do so too).

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Coronavirus diary day 65 – Now they order a billion masks!

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The French government is to order one billion masks from local manufacturers. To which the only possible reaction is, what took you so long?

Having told the general public that we didn’t need masks when the epidemic first hit, the government now declares itself worried that France is dependent on international suppliers.

There are four medium-sized companies producing 10 million masks a week locally at the moment but they are working at near full capacity.

The government wants production to rise to 50 million a week by the end of the year and says that will mean the country will be able to supply health professionals and patients who have Covid-19, although not the general public despite the fact that we are now urged to wear them to avoid the spread of the disease.

So the Finance Ministry has finally got round to requisitioning companies that have the capacity to produce this vital product – four of them. One, Brocéliande, which is owned by supermarket chain Intermarché, actually manufactured masks in the past but presumably stopped doing so when previous governments ran down the programmes launched during the bird flu epidemic.

Macron yesterday told BFMTV that the country never ran out of masks and people only thought that was the case because of “an error of communication”.

There were shortages, he admitted, but “Let’s collectively be honest enough to admit that in March, and even more so in February or January, nobody was talking about masks and we would never have thought we would have been forced to restrict their distribution to healthworkers.”

Which isn’t the way everybody remembers it.

In a victory for trade unions, Amazon has given up fighting court orders to tighten up anti-virus measures in consultation with workers’ representatives and reopened its warehouses in France.

With Europe’s car industry hard-hit by anti-virus lockdowns, Renault has announced a plan to save two billion euros, which will involve closing three small factories and “restructuring” or closing Flins, which employs 2,600 workers, according to Le Canard Enchaîné.

There’s a lot of talk about not returning to pre-virus levels of pollution, which would mean keeping the demand for new cars down, not to mention reducing air travel and other super-polluters.

To avoid an anti-green backlash, it’s vital to guarantee income to laid-off workers and plan centrally to provide jobs in ecologically friendly industry.

France now has nine different political groups in parliament. A two-party system it ain’t.

The new group has been formed by 17 MPs who have left Macron’s LREM, having apparently just realised that the millionaire former banker and budget-balancing economy minister lacks a certain commitment when it comes to social and ecological matters.

Macron’s 2017 presidential bid put an end to the dominance of the centrist Socialists and mainstream right in its successive incarnations. But even before that the country had a proliferation of small parties, largely because of the electoral system.

Most members of the smaller parties would have found a home in larger bodies in the UK or the US but leading a small party can be a politically profitable affair. You can usually bag a ministry or two when a government of your general political persuasion is formed (not to mention the considerable wealth the Le Pen family has accrued by establishing dominance in the hate market).

The latest mini-split deprives LREM of its absolute majority in parliament but Macron will be able to rely on the support of François Bayrou’s Modem and other liberal flotsam and jetsam. On top of which, the new group is not actually declaring itself to be part of the opposition but rather “independent”, so no big problems for the president there.

Encouraging signs in the statistics since lockdown ended, with the death toll, admissions to hospitals and numbers in intensive care all down. But experts say it is too early to judge whether the trend will continue.

Green = Hospital discharges, Yellow = In hospital, Red = deaths, Orange = In intensive care
Source: Mapthenews

France’s Covid-19 death toll now officially stands at 28,022, 217 in the last 24 hours. 18,486 patients are in hospital, down 547, with 1,894 in intensive care, down 104. 62,563 people have been discharged from hospital, 835 of them yesterday.

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Coronavirus diary day 64 – Forest bathing and religious assembly in an epidemic

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I went walking in the woods. For the first time since lockdown started.

Frogs croaked in the ponds, the sun dappled the ground and I couldn’t believe how loud the birdsong was.

The Japanese have a phrase – shinrin-yoku (forest bathing) – for going to nature recharge your batteries (to use a very unnatural metaphor). It works.

I was not alone. There was a group of pensioner-ramblers, some teenagers doing exercises by their car (the pensioners applauded them), families, groups of friends and cyclists – more people than usual on a weekday, perhaps because people want to stretch their legs and breathe the air of the woods after two months’ lockdown. And perhaps because many workers are still laid off or have lost their jobs, allowing them the small compensation of time to enjoy the natural world.

The forest, the Forêt de Notre Dame, is easy to get to from the towns that sprawl along the main road out of Paris to the east.

On sunny weekends, lockdown permitting, families come from the housing estates and residential streets to picnic on the grass in front of the Château des Marmousets. Smoke from barbecues grilling meat and veg for meals in French, Portuguese, Antillais and north African styles floats over a pond and a paddock for horses.

 Adventurous visitors can visit an 18th-century ice-house sunk into the earth behind the château.

The very urban shopping centre I visited on my way back was also busier than usual. Queues in front of a games store and more shoppers than usual in the organic supermarket I went to. No photo of this. I had my hands full of fruit and veg.

The Conseil d’état has overruled the government’s ban on services in places of worship during the state of emergency, judging it “disproportionate” and a “serious and manifestly illegal” violation of religious freedom.

The case was brought to the council by a number of Catholic groups, including far-right organisations that were active in the campaign against gay marriage. They run a permanent campaign to prove that it is they, not Muslims, who are victims of discrimination due to secular and Islamic “Cathopobia”.

Some Catholics took particular offence at Interior Minister Christophe Castaner’s remark that one can pray on one’s own. The Conseil d’état agreed with them, declaring collective worship an essential part of religious freedom.

Protestants, Jews, Muslims and other religious persuasions have gone along with the government’s guidelines during the crisis.

So Catholics will be able to celebrate Pentecost in groups, although not in such large assemblies as the evangelical service that was party responsible for Covid-19’s virulence in the east of the country. The ban on assemblies of more than 10 people rests in place and was mentioned in the council’s ruling.

France’s Covid-19 death toll now officially stands at 28,239, 131 yesterday. 19,025 people are in hospital, down 346 in the past 24 hours, with 1,998 in intensive care, down 89. 61,728 patients have been discharged from hospital, 515 of them yesterday.

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