FRANCE: France will today begin deporting foreigners apprehended in 2½ weeks of rioting, the national police chief, Michel Gaudin, announced yesterday.
Mr Gaudin also said that the security situation "should normalise quickly" and that rioting was "in a big lull". Nonetheless, 374 cars were set alight in 163 towns and cities on Saturday night and in the early hours of yesterday. This represented a 25 per cent decrease from the previous night.
Earlier, the interior minister, Nicolas Sarkozy, issued a communiqué saying he was "delighted" that the council of state had rejected the appeal of the association "SOS Racisme".
SOS Racisme went to France's highest administrative body in a failed attempt to stop the expulsions, on the grounds that they constituted mass deportations. Mr Sarkozy insisted at the weekend that they were "perfectly legal and affect no basic liberties". Only 6 per cent of the 2,652 people arrested during the riots are foreign, and about half of them are minors, who cannot be deported.
Police sources said that the number of cars burned in the Paris region on Saturday night - 76 - was "normal". The interior ministry claims it is Mr Sarkozy's policy of mass arrests - not prime minister Dominique de Villepin's state of emergency and curfew - which is bringing the level of violence down. A total of 212 men were arrested overnight on Saturday; 206 overnight on Friday.
But unrest has continued in Lyon, Toulouse and Strasbourg. The most serious incident was a two-hour battle between youths and riot police on the Place Bellecour, the main square in Lyon, on Saturday afternoon - the first time such a confrontation has occurred in the heart of a major city.
Young men threw stones, bottles, rubbish bins and park chairs and benches at the CRS, who retaliated with tear-gas grenades. The rioters dispersed, but 72 cars were burned overnight in Lyon and surrounding areas in spite of a curfew for minors.
President Jacques Chirac yesterday "condemned with the most extreme firmness" the throwing of two Molotov cocktails at the mosque in Carpentras, southern France, during prayers on Friday evening.
Two policemen were seriously injured over the weekend, bringing the number of police hurt in the violence since October 27th to 118. One was badly burned on the face by a Molotov cocktail in Saint-Quentin, north of Paris. The other was hit by a pétanque (bowling ball) thrown from the top of a building at La Courneuve in Seine-Saint-Denis.
Police have continued to protest at the detention of one of their colleagues who was charged on Friday with beating a 19-year-old Arab named "Fouad A". Some police have gone on a "go-slow" strike, answering only the most urgent calls.
Mr Sarkozy's belief that the French want politicians to deal in a tough manner with rioters may be paying off. An opinion poll published by the Journal du Dimanche yesterday showed that 53 per cent have confidence in him "to solve the problem of the banlieues". Mr de Villepin is running a close second, at 52 per cent. By contrast, President Chirac came 7th out of 10 politicians, at 29 per cent.
In an interview with Le Monde, Emmanuel Todd, the historian and demographer credited with inventing the term "social fracture", which got Mr Chirac elected in 1995, said that the riots represented "a refusal (on the part of young people of Arab and African origin) to be marginalised".
The European Union has offered France €50 million to help it tackle problems in the suburbs affected by rioting, EU Commission president Jose Manuel Barroso announced yesterday.