BASTIA, France: The French government called for calm on Monday after fierce clashes left dozens of demonstrators and police injured on the island of Corsica, where anger over the assault in prison of a nationalist figure has reached boiling point.
Police reported 67 people injured during protests on Sunday, including 44 police, following scenes that onlookers described as akin to urban guerrilla war.
“The overnight scenes were extremely violent,” the chief prosecutor in the north Corsican town of Bastia, Arnaud Viornery, told AFP.
Police had to deal with a “quasi-insurrectional” situation, according to a statement by their union, SG Police.
Yvan Colonna is serving a life sentence for the assassination in 1998 of the top state official in Corsica, Claude Erignac.
He has been in a coma since being beaten on March 2 in jail by a fellow detainee, a convicted extremist.
The incident stoked anger on the island, where some see Colonna as a hero in a fight for independence from France.
He was arrested in 2003 after a five-year manhunt that eventually found him living as a shepherd in the Corsican mountains.
Demonstrations and riots have been ongoing since the prison attack, which protesters blame on the French government.
“French government murderers,” read placards at Sunday’s demonstrations. An estimated crowd of between 7,000 and 12,000 people took to the streets.
Colonna was jailed in the south of France. He is classed as a special status detainee which prevents him from being transferred to a Corsican jail.
In response to the unrest, Prime Minister Jean Castex has removed this status for Colonna and two other convicts, but this has failed to placate their supporters.
Hundreds of masked demonstrators hurled Molotov cocktails and rocks against police, who fired teargas and water cannon.
Clashes broke out in the afternoon and lasted late into the evening.
Prosecutor Viornery said protesters were using homemade explosive devices filled with gunpowder, lead or nails.
Police ordered people to stay indoors in Bastia where protesters set the tax office on fire with incendiary devices and damaged the inside of the main post office.
On Monday, Bastia was calm, with no visible damage done to shops, according to AFP reporters.
Corsica, the birthplace of Napoleon Bonaparte and one of the Mediterranean’s largest islands, has been French since the 18th Century.
It is known as the “Island of Beauty” for its unspoiled coastlines, spectacular beaches and mild climate, which have made tourism its main source of income.
But there have also been constant tensions between independence-seeking nationalists and the central government as well as murders between the island’s political factions.
“There is an expression of anger and indignation,” Gilles Simeoni, Colonna’s former lawyer and a pro-independence politician, said on Sunday.
“The entire Corsican people has been mobilized to protest against injustice and in favor of truth and a real political solution.”
One demonstrator at Sunday’s protest, Antoine Negretti, said, “Any violence will be the fault of the French government.”
Seven years of negotiations had yielded no result, the 29-year-old said. “But things have changed thanks to seven days of violence. Violence is necessary.”
French Interior Minister Gerald Darmanin said on Monday he will travel to Corsica on Wednesday for a two-day visit, seeking to “open a cycle of discussions” with all political forces on the island.
He condemned the recent violence and called “for an immediate return to calm.”
An Ifop poll published Sunday in the local Corse-Matin newspaper found that 53 percent of those questioned favored a degree of autonomy for Corsica, with 35 percent favoring the island’s outright independence from France.
Riots in Corsica over jailed nationalist leave dozens injured
https://arab.news/c4rwv
Riots in Corsica over jailed nationalist leave dozens injured
- Yvan Colonna is serving a life sentence for the assassination in 1998 of the top state official in Corsica, Claude Erignac
- He has been in a coma since being beaten on March 2 in jail by a fellow detainee, a convicted extremist
War powers resolution fails in Senate as 2 Republicans bow to Trump pressure
WASHINGTON: Senate Republicans voted to dismiss a war powers resolution Wednesday that would have limited President Donald Trump’s ability to conduct further attacks on Venezuela after two GOP senators reversed course on supporting the legislation.
Trump put intense pressure on five Republican senators who joined with Democrats to advance the resolution last week and ultimately prevailed in heading off passage of the legislation. Two of the Republicans — Sens. Josh Hawley of Missouri and Todd Young of Indiana — flipped under the pressure.
Vice President JD Vance had to break the 50-50 deadlock in the Senate on a Republican motion to dismiss the bill.
The outcome of the high-profile vote demonstrated how Trump still has command over much of the Republican conference, yet the razor-thin vote tally also showed the growing concern on Capitol Hill over the president’s aggressive foreign policy ambitions.
Democrats forced the debate after US troops captured Venezuelan leader Nicolás Maduro in a surprise nighttime raid earlier this month
“Here we have one of the most successful attacks ever and they find a way to be against it. It’s pretty amazing. And it’s a shame,” Trump said at a speech in Michigan Tuesday. He also hurled insults at several of the Republicans who advanced the legislation, calling Sen. Rand Paul of Kentucky a “stone cold loser” and Sens. Lisa Murkowski of Alaska and Susan Collins of Maine “disasters.” Those three Republicans stuck to their support for the legislation.
Trump’s latest comments followed earlier phone calls with the senators, which they described as terse. The president’s fury underscored how the war powers vote had taken on new political significance as Trump also threatens military action to accomplish his goal of possessing Greenland.
The legislation, even if it had cleared the Senate, had virtually no chance of becoming law because it would eventually need to be signed by Trump himself. But it represented both a test of GOP loyalty to the president and a marker for how much leeway the Republican-controlled Senate is willing to give Trump to use the military abroad. Republican angst over his recent foreign policy moves — especially threats of using military force to seize Greenland from a NATO ally — is still running high in Congress.
Two Republicans reconsider
Hawley, who helped advance the war powers resolution last week, said Trump’s message during a phone call was that the legislation “really ties my hands.” The senator said he had a follow-up phone call with Secretary of State Marco Rubio Monday and was told “point blank, we’re not going to do ground troops.”
The senator added that he also received assurances that the Trump administration will follow constitutional requirements if it becomes necessary to deploy troops again to the South American country.
“We’re getting along very well with Venezuela,” Trump told reporters at a ceremony for the signing of an unrelated bill Wednesday.
As senators went to the floor for the vote Wednesday evening, Young also told reporters he was no longer in support. He said that he had extensive conversations with Rubio and received assurances that the secretary of state will appear at a public hearing before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee.
Young also shared a letter from Rubio that stated the president will “seek congressional authorization in advance (circumstances permitting)” if he engaged in “major military operations” in Venezuela.
The senators also said his efforts were also instrumental in pushing the administration to release Wednesday a 22-page Justice Department memo laying out the legal justification for the snatch-and-grab operation against Maduro.
That memo, which was heavily redacted, indicates that the administration, for now, has no plans to ramp up military operations in Venezuela.
“We were assured that there is no contingency plan to engage in any substantial and sustained operation that would amount to a constitutional war,” according to the memo signed by Assistant Attorney General Elliot Gaiser.
Trump’s shifting rationale for military intervention
Trump has used a series of legal arguments for his campaign against Maduro.
As he built up a naval force in the Caribbean and destroyed vessels that were allegedly carrying drugs from Venezuela, the Trump administration tapped wartime powers under the global war on terror by designating drug cartels as terrorist organizations.
The administration has claimed the capture of Maduro himself was actually a law enforcement operation, essentially to extradite the Venezuelan president to stand trial for charges in the US that were filed in 2020.
Paul criticized the administration for first describing its military build-up in Caribbean as a counternarcotics operation but now floating Venezuela’s vast oil reserves as a reason for maintaining pressure.
“The bait and switch has already happened,” he said.
Trump’s foreign policy worries Congress
Lawmakers, including a significant number of Republicans, have been alarmed by Trump’s recent foreign policy talk. In recent weeks, he has pledged that the US will “run” Venezuela for years to come, threatened military action to take possession of Greenland and told Iranians protesting their government that ” help is on its way.”
Senior Republicans have tried to massage the relationship between Trump and Denmark, a NATO ally that holds Greenland as a semi-autonomous territory. But Danish officials emerged from a meeting with Vance and Rubio Wednesday saying a “fundamental disagreement” over Greenland remains.
“What happened tonight is a roadmap to another endless war,” Senate Democratic leader Chuck Schumer said at a news conference following the vote.
More than half of US adults believe President Donald Trump has “gone too far” in using the US military to intervene in other countries, according to a new AP-NORC poll.
House Democrats have also filed a similar war powers resolution and can force a vote on it as soon as next week.
How Republican leaders dismissed the bill
Last week’s procedural vote on the war powers resolution was supposed to set up hours of debate and a vote on final passage. But Republican leaders began searching for a way to defuse the conflict between their members and Trump as well as move on quickly to other business.
Once Hawley and Young changed their support for the bill, Republicans were able to successfully challenge whether it was appropriate when the Trump administration has said US troops are not currently deployed in Venezuela.
“We’re not currently conducting military operations there,” said Senate Majority Leader John Thune in a floor speech. “But Democrats are taking up this bill because their anti-Trump hysteria knows no bounds.”
Democratic Sen. Tim Kaine, who has brought a series of war powers resolutions this year, accused Republicans of burying a debate about the merits of an ongoing campaign of attacks and threats against Venezuela.
“If this cause and if this legal basis were so righteous, the administration and its supporters would not be afraid to have this debate before the public and the United States Senate,” he said in a floor speech.
