Gangs attack buses ahead of Paris riots anniversary

Three buses have been attacked and burnt by gangs of youths on the outskirts of Paris as tensions deepen before the anniversary today of the outbreak of three weeks of violent riots in poor French suburbs.

In one incident, a driver and his passengers were forced to leave a bus at gunpoint in Bagnolet, just east of Paris, early yesterday. The bus was then driven through a barrier into a housing estate and burnt.

In other attacks, west and south of Paris, on Wednesday night passengers scrambled off buses after they were set alight with inflammable liquid or molotov cocktails. A fourth bus, or coach, was burnt while empty and parked.

The attacks, and another incident in which youths stoned cars on a busy dual carriageway south of Paris, suggest youth gangs in some suburbs are making a deliberate attempt to provoke new clashes with police.

This hardly comes as a surprise. One of the French internal security services, the Rénsignements Generaux, warned this week that "most of the conditions" which produced "collective violence" in poor, multi-racial suburbs across France last year remained unchanged.

But local mayors and youth workers are hopeful there will be no more than a few scattered outbreaks of "anniversary" violence. Outside the Paris area, there has been little trouble. Most of the deprived housing estates around the capital - including those in and near Clichy-sous-Bois where last year's disturbances began - have been relatively calm.

The Interior Minister, Nicolas Sarkozy, has given instructions that police should avoid entering the "territory" of youth gangs in the days approaching the anniversary. He has also criticised a series of "12 months on" articles and programmes in the French media as an invitation to resume rioting.

All the same, a heavy-handed police raid with racial overtones, in Evry, south of Paris, appears to have been at least partially responsible for the outbreak of bus burnings. Police entered a café on Monday and demanded to see the papers of the middle-aged customers of African and north African descent. Argument broke out and police used tear gas and made several arrests. A bus was burnt by youths in the nearby estate that night in retaliation for what they called an "attack on our fathers". The more recent bus attacks seem to have been more planned, "copy-cat" incidents.

Last year's riots started after two youths, aged 17 and 15, were electrocuted in a power sub-station at Clichy-sous-Bois, north-east of Paris, while fleeing police. Over the next three weeks, the car-burning and attacks on public buildings - by brown, black and white youths - spread to the suburbs of almost every large town or city in France.

The government has since promised hundreds of millions of euros investment in deprived estates and new measures to prevent job discrimination against people of Arab or black origin. Activists and social workers claim little has been done to reign in the casual racism of many of the police deployed in the banlieues, or suburbs.

There are also signs of divisions in the government on how to treat the anniversary. M. Sarkozy believes it should be ignored. He is reported to have criticised bland, anniversary comments by the Equality Minister, Azous Begag, inviting his colleague to "learn to shut his mouth".

The Prime Minister, Dominique de Villepin, also chose to defy the Sarkozy doctrine of silence yesterday and held his monthly press conference in the heart of the outer Paris banlieues, in Cergy-Pontoise. He promised "immediate and exemplary" punishment of the youths involved in the bus attacks.