Issue No. 599
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15 - 21 August 2002 Issue No. 599 International |
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France cracks down on the extreme right
Last week's ban on the extreme-right group Unité radicale has drawn attention to the links between such activist groups and the mainstream French extreme-right parties, writes David Tresilian from Paris
In a move expected since the assassination attempt against French president Jacques Chirac during the Bastille Day celebrations last 14 July, the French government last week officially banned the extreme-right group Unité radicale (Radical Unit, or UR). A French government spokesman described it as a group that promoted "a deep hostility to all forms of immigration, its ideology being founded on the superiority of the white race and its hatred of foreigners being aimed particularly at the Jewish and Arab communities."
The move comes following the arrest of a 25-year-old militant of the UR, Maxime Brunerie, during the traditional military parade held on 14 July to celebrate Bastille Day, the French national day commemorating the fall of the Bastille Prison in Paris during the 1789 Revolution.
Brunerie had fired one shot from a rifle at President Chirac as his car moved past during the parade, bystanders then overpowered Brunerie before he was able to fire a second shot, and members of the security forces moved in to arrest him.
Brunerie was 150 metres away from the president at the time of the assassination attempt, having smuggled the rifle into the crowd in a musical-instrument case. The rifle used has a range of up to 200 metres.
The government's banning of the UR also comes following an enquiry into the hitherto little-known extreme-right group, concentrating on its possible links with the more mainstream French extreme-right parties. The banning also follows demands for the group's dissolution from French human rights- groups, including the Union of French Jewish Students, the J'accuse (I accuse) group and Movement against Racism and for Friendship among Peoples, all of whom last week applauded the government's decision.
Formal moves against the group were initiated on 28 July by the minister of the interior, Nicholas Sarkozy, under a 1936 law outlawing paramilitary groups and private militias, citing in particular Article 1 of the law which bans inciting "hatred and violence towards persons either because of their not belonging to a nation or of their not belonging to a particular race or religion".
The 1936 law has previously been used to ban French fascist groups and Algerian groups during the Algerian War of Independence, as well as extreme-right and left groups in 1968 and Corsican, Basque and Breton independence groups during the 1970s and 1980s.
Noting that the UR group, whose members are estimated to include between two and three thousand militants, has made effective use of the Internet in disseminating its ideas, the French courts last week also closed the group's Web site, two days following the government decree banning the group. Nevertheless, visitors to the site were last week being redirected to a new one carrying details of the group's plans for reconstitution under a different name, locating its Web site abroad out of reach of French jurisdiction.
Enquiry into the background of Maxime Brunerie, who until 14 July lived with his parents near Paris and was studying for a vocational qualification, has revealed the "porous" nature of France's extreme-right groups, raising fears that banning the UR will only cause militants to join one or other of the still- legal groups.
Brunerie, believed to be a member of the UR since some time after its creation in June 1998, had also been a member of the Groupe union défense (Union Defence Group, GUD) and the Mouvement national républicain (MNR), a splinter group of the Front National (National Front, or FN), whose leader, Jean-Marie Le Pen, beat the then-incumbent Socialist Prime Minister Lionel Jospin into third place in the first round of the country's presidential elections last April.
The MNR split from the FN in 1999 following disagreement between Le Pen and one of the FN's leading members and chief ideologists, Bruno Mégret, over the future direction of the party. Brunerie stood in local elections in Paris in March 2001 on the MNR list, coming seventh with 2.97 per cent of the vote.
Formed to link up extreme-right militants isolated by the disappearance of the neo-Nazi Parti nationaliste français et européen (French and European Nationalist Party, or PNFE), the UR also included former or current members of the GUD, the l'Oeuvre française -- Jeune nation group (French Young Nation) and the FN youth division among its membership. UR spokesmen Fabrice Robert and Guillaume Luyt are both prominent former members of the FN youth division, and until 1 August Robert was also a member of the National Council of the MNR.
Though MNR leader Bruno Mégret has reacted to the banning of the UR by distancing himself and his party from it, announcing the suspension of Fabrice Robert and Christian Bouchet from the MNR on 1 August by citing the "double membership" of both in the UR and saying that Brunerie was a "psychiatric case", doubts persist over the connections between radical extreme-right groups such as the UR and the more mainstream extreme-right parties.
Aside from Brunerie's and others' membership of both the MNR and the UR, as well as their connections with the FN youth division, French commentators have pointed to the common views of the extreme-right radical groups and the more mainstream extreme-right parties, asking whether it makes sense to ban the UR while allowing the FN and MNR freely to organise and stand for election.
The UR's political views, as expressed on the group's Web site and elsewhere, are a mélange of familiar European extreme-right and neo-Nazi themes, stressing "the defense of the French people and its historical identity in the face of ethnic mixing and cultural uniformity".
Such ideas, translated into the "national preference" policies of the FN and MNR, played a leading role in the campaign mounted by FN leader Jean-Marie Le Pen during the French presidential elections, when he took every opportunity to denounce immigration, "Americanisation" and the alleged corruption of the establishment political parties and politicians, notably that of President Chirac himself.
Summarising the views of the UR and other such groups, the French newspaper Le Monde quoted opinions such as, "we are not the servants of the Americans, and multiracial society is not our thing. Many nationalists (members of the FN) were overjoyed by the attacks on America (on 11 September 2001)." " We don't care; what we want is to throw out all the immigrants... and not to be swamped by extra-European immigration," read the UR statement.
Emphasising the neo-Nazi theme of the "white race" and the "national purity" of European culture, the UR, FN and MNR members quoted by the newspaper stressed the fact that "in the years to come, we will probably have to resort to illegal methods, but this will be a pan-European struggle."
Because of the connections between the UR and the French extreme-right parties, some commentators have questioned the motives of the government in banning the UR, while leaving the FN and MNR untouched. According to an editorial in the left-of-centre newspaper Libération last week, the move against the UR was designed to distract attention from the "threats to civil liberties represented by the Perben law", which has recently been introduced to address France's alarming levels of juvenile crime.
"At worst," the editorialist continued, banning the UR "is nothing more than a public-relations stunt designed to create the illusion of action."
Maxime Brunerie himself is currently in detention at a secure psychiatric unit outside Paris, where he was taken for psychiatric evaluation immediately after the 14 July assassination attempt. The results of the evaluation are not expected until September.
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