Policing the Gilets Jaunes.
At one of the weekly ‘act’ protests in Paris not far from La
Place Sainte Madeline plain clothes police ended up behind a wall of Gilets
Jaunes. As they tried to move away they ran into the back of Wilfried, a steelworker
from a small town in Burgundy who has recently had a child with his wife of
nine years. The policeman fell over at his feet and Wilfried, moving to try and
escape the ensuing chaos, spooked a policeman whose hair-trigger instincts led
him to shoot Wilfried in the face with a flashball at a range of just over a
metre.
Flashballs used primarily in France are rubber bullets that
are fired from weapons with the stopping power of a .38 calibre pistol. They can do real damage (as you can see here). There
is an unverified recent rumour that someone shot by one lost an eye. Wilfried
now sports a nasty scar on his forehead and experiences some symptoms of
psychological trauma. He continues to protest, but he is more cautious.
Axelle suffered 2 fractures to her jaw and was left with
second degree burns when she was shot in the face by a flashball. She was left
looking like someone had bunched a whole pack of cigarettes, lit them all, then
stubbed them out on her cheek. The shot to the face caused a trismus (an
involuntary contraction of her muscles) meaning she could barely open her
mouth. She is a waitress while she looks for a job and has become very vocal in
the campaign against police brutality since the incident. She says she was traumatised
by the incident: at the time she was convinced her cheek had burst.
Etienne, a railway worker was badly injured on the same day
that Wilfried was shot in the head. After hours of being teargassed in Paris he
found himself caught between the CRS
and the procession he was trying to join. He was there for 10 minutes as tear
gas canisters went off, without any major incident. But then, suddenly he
collapsed. He was carried away and given first aid. A subsequent hospital visit
revealed that the flashball that hit him had shattered his shin bone. He has to
take 90 days off work because of his injury and has had to cancel a holiday
with his girlfriend too. He can’t drive, so he can’t go and see his two
daughters who live with their mum. He has been made more rebellious by the
incident. He wants to carry on fighting the cause for justice. He’s a committed
anti-capitalist, but he acknowledges there are issues with the movement. He
says he wants to see the end of capitalism and the renewal of humanity. Like Wilfried
and many others, the repression has only reaffirmed his commitment to the
movement.
Teargas in Paris.Manon was on the climate march on the 8th, then
stayed around for the Gilets Jaunes. Her and two friends were walking away from
the city-centre at the time. The only indication she had been protesting was
that she wore her nurse’s coat and was carrying a first aid kit. When she was
shot, the protest was over and there was no crowd. She’s not even entirely sure
where it came from, only that it hit her in the foot. Such is the nature of the
flashball that the possibly accidental shot fractured her metatarsal. She has
filed a complaint, and has been forced to go on sick leave until early
February.
Flashballs are not the only weapons the CRS use to maim
protesting citizens. Siegried was a protestor on the roundabouts but decided to
go to Paris where the more impactful protests were. He made the journey back
from Paris to Vitry le Francois via Reims where he was treated for severe
injuries. Hundreds of tiny bits of plastic had peppered his skin and perforated
his ear drum. He had stood too close to a CRS tactical grenade when it went
off. Other people have been battered by truncheons and water cannons.
These were a handful of cases from Paris, but there are many
more wounded by the brutal apparatus of the security state trying to crush
their protests across the country. Jacques Pezet is a factchecking journalist
for Liberation and found 94 cases of severely injured Gilets Jaunes by January
14. His count was only those that could be verified with complete certainty.
The campaign group Desarmons-les and the journalist and documentary maker David
Dufresne have counted more.
Many people have made claims about the Gilets Jaunes and
fake news – antisemitism and conspiracy theories have been a problem within the
movement. This was how Jacques started looking into it: people kept coming to Checknews,
the department of Liberation that he works for, to see if the claims being made
online were true. He tells me that out of the compilations of injured Gilets
Jaunes that have been circulated, he thinks at least 8/10 are real: the others
are lacking in detail or are of poor photo quality making them difficult to
verify. In the beginning there may have been some fakery surrounding images
online, he says, but now there are so many people injured, particularly people
shot in the face by flashballs, that the people who wanted to fake things to
make a point have become redundant, their point has been made for them by the
facts.
He told me about David Dufresne’s thesis that the high level
of violence is due to inexperienced police officers being drafted in who
normally deal with hardened criminals like drug dealers, and who consequently
do not know how to respond to ordinary people. This is no excuse though for the
state maiming its citizens: use of flashballs is both unnecessary and shocking.
Given the number of severe head and facial injuries, you would never have guessed
that the police are not supposed to shoot people in the face with flashballs. But
they seem to feel that they can act with impunity. Currently the number of
inquiries into violence by police stands at around 60 and will increase as time
goes on. The campaign to disarm the riot cops is gaining traction in a way not
seen before, because even seasoned French protestors are alarmed by the
reaction they have been met with.
Many figures of the European establishment regard Emmanuel
Macron as the saviour of the European project. Yet his response to these
protests – violence, mass arrests and the reinstatement of national service for
16-year olds – would hardly be out of step with the more retrograde national
populist and authoritarian regimes. If Emmanuel Macron wants to save his
reputation, let alone Europe, he must start leading by example, ban the
flashball, and take these protests seriously rather than continuing to lapse in
moments of anger into diatribes about scroungers while he lets the riot cops
run riot against protesters.
Macron’s response suggests what other leaderless protest
movements across Europe will face as systems continue to collapse. The Gilets
Jaunes have arisen out of the profound inequality that is fracturing societies
across Europe. It is against that inequality that leaders must take a strongman
stance. There is nothing strong about attacking protestors who are just trying
to make their voices heard.