Posts Tagged ‘France’

The Siege of Maubeuge, 1914

Thursday, September 20th, 2012

The French town of Maubeuge comprised a major fort sited on France’s northern border with Belgium on the River Sambre.

On the junction of no fewer than five railway lines the town was consequently considered a key strategic location hence the construction of 15 forts and gun batteries around it, totalling some 435 guns.  The town’s permanent garrison of 35,000 troops was initially bolstered by its selection as the advance base of the newly-arriving British Expeditionary Force under Sir John French.

With the retreat of the latter and the French Fifth Army on 23 August 1914 the town was cut off from Allied forces and came under siege by the Germans on 25 August.  The town was finally surrendered by General Fournier to the Germans some 13 days later (court-martialed after the war for this action the General was eventually exonerated).

The forts were effectively reduced by German heavy artillery which succeeded in demolishing one by one each of the key forts barring the progress of the German Army through Belgium – although in slowing the German advance the Schlieffen Plan was made to look increasingly risky.

Enhanced by Zemanta

Muslim Veil Ban Sparks Riot and Reflection in France

Friday, August 10th, 2012

Sixteen months after France passed a law making full-faced veils, also known as niqabs, illegal in the country, simmering resentment and outright protest still exists within the country’s Muslim community.

Just two weeks ago in Marseille, as a number of Muslim families celebrated the end of the Ramadan fasting period with midnight meals, two patrolling policemen happened upon a woman wearing such a veil. Standing in front of the Grand Sunna Mosque, the police challenged the woman’s niqab, demanding that she remove it. She refused.

As the confrontation grew increasingly volatile, young bystanders stepped in, claiming that the police had no business patrolling the predominantly Muslim neighborhood at the late hour, or accosting its citizens. Eventually, the police and dozens of bystanders got to pushing, and the scene exploded into what would later be called a riot during a meeting of France’s National Assembly in Paris. Police reinforcements poured in to quell the battle soon after it started, but the incident, which took place on July 24, remains the largest resistance to the veil ban since its implementation.

Though France’s larger and more moderate Muslim organizations have called for their followers to respect the law of the nation, more fundamentalist and radical Muslim worshippers have little respect for the rule. Grand Sunna, which had been converted from a simple storefront, is reportedly home to some of the Marseille’s more radical preachers.

“For young militants, this ban upsets them,” Nassera Benmarnia, who heads the local Muslim Family Union, told the Washington Post. “But most people just want to be left alone.”

France is home to Europe’s largest Muslim population, but the niqab ban has been supported unilaterally in the country’s politics. For the second consecutive year, the U.S. State Department condemned the ban as an infringement on freedom of choice in its annual report on religious freedom. The French Interior Ministry announced on the ban’s anniversary that 299 women had been given citations similar to traffic tickets for wearing full-face veils.

Similar bans are in the process of being put in place in Belgium and the Netherlands, reflecting a growing unease among Western Europe’s Christian majority. Cultural shifts are not the only source of tension between the two communities, as Muslim immigrants have been charged with burdening social service departments and taking work away from native citizens in the midst of the region’s economic crisis.

Enhanced by Zemanta

Illegal immigrant hitches a ride on Hipperholme school pupils’ coach during school trip

Saturday, June 23rd, 2012

PUPILS discovered an illegal immigrant under their coach after returning from a school trip to France.

The immigrant – now being housed at a detention centre – latched on to the bottom of the coach returning Hipperholme and Lightcliffe High School students home last week.

The Sudanese man was discovered at a service station in Northampton on the school’s return journey.

A UK Border Agency spokesman said: “A Sudanese man has been put in immigration detention until he can be removed from the UK.”

The school had taken pupils on a languages trip to France and they had stopped for petrol in Calais, which is when they think the man hid under the coach.

The coach was even checked by Customs Officials, but he managed to sneak through the checkpoints. And then he held on underneath the bus for the two and a half hour journey to Northampton.

The man was spotted by the driver and attempted a get away, but the coach driver was able to catch and keep hold of him until police arrived.

Helen Morgan, headteacher of Hipperholme and Lightcliffe, on Stoney Lane, said: “The students were never in any danger as he was under the bus but they felt quite sorry for him.

“I’m proud of the staff and the way they handled the situation”.

Enhanced by Zemanta

Three more charged with human smuggling in Tamil migrant ship case

Thursday, June 7th, 2012

Three more men, including two Canadians, have been charged with human smuggling, accused of organizing the ship that brought hundreds of Tamil asylum seekers to B.C. in 2010.

Nadarajah Mahendran and Thampeernayagam Rajaratnam, both of Ontario, were indicted Monday of organizing illegal entry into Canada in violation of the Immigration and Refugee Protection Act. They are expected to be brought to B.C. in the coming weeks to face charges.

A third man, Sathyapavan Aseervatham, faces the same charge, which carries a maximum $1 million fine and/or life imprisonment.

The three new accused bring to six the total of people charged with allegedly organizing the voyage of the MV Sun Sea and the 492 Tamil passengers on-board between August 2009 in Sri Lanka, Malaysia and Thailand until it docked on August 13, 2010 in Esquimalt.

Two men — alleged ship owner Kunarobinson Christhurajah, 32, and Lesly Jana Emmanuel, who were aboard the vessel when it was intercepted by the Canadian navy — were charged in May.

They appeared in Vancouver provincial court Tuesday for a bail hearing.

Wearing red prison-issue uniforms, the two men stood in front of a judge, hands clasped, as a Tamil interpreter translated the proceedings.

Details about the alleged roles of the six men in the operation were heard in court, but are under a publication ban.

Christhurajah’s case was adjourned to a later date; he was taken back into custody. Emmanuel was denied bail.

Christhurajah’s wife, Mary Patrishiya, sat in the gallery with her brother and 13-month-old baby girl.

Having her husband arrested has been “very hard,” said a teary-eyed Patrishiya outside the courtroom.

“He’s crying all the time,” she said. “We don’t have anybody here.”

She said she and Christhurajah would like to stay in Canada because “there are a lot of problems” back home.

A sixth man — Sri Lankan national Thayakaran Markandu — is being extradited to Canada from France.

Both Markandu and Christhurajah appeared on the radar of Thai police when they were arrested — along with Mahendran and Rajaratnam, two of the new accused — in a Bangkok apartment raid in June 2010, a month before the Sun Sea set sail from Thailand with its human cargo.

Authorities found engine parts, sacks of food and other provisions they believed were going to be used for the sea voyage to Canada.

The men were released after paying a 10,000 baht fine.

Mahendran, a father of three, lives in Ajax, Ont. and runs a South Asian clothing shop in Toronto’s Tamil-Canadian community. Rajaratnam lives in Markham.

According to the Immigration and Refugee Board, as of April 30, six out of the 492 passengers have been accepted as refugees, 19 have been issued deportation orders, and a family of five has abandoned its refugee claims.

Enhanced by Zemanta

European Experiment Has Dubious Results

Friday, May 11th, 2012

In the space of two weeks, three European governments have fallen, sending seismic shock-waves across the continent and calling into question the experiment that has consumed its elites for decades: the construction of a centralized, socialist superstate known as “Europe.”

It may just be that the foundering of the coalition government in the Netherlands, the repudiation of Nicholas Sarkozy in France and the plunging fortunes of the two main Greek parties represents more than a rejection of austerity measures dictated by Brussels at the behest of the Germans.

rutte.jpg
Dutch Prime Minister Mark Rutte exits the royal palace after submitting his government’s resignation to Queen Beatrix on April 23.
(Getty Images)

To paraphrase Winston Churchill, these political developments are probably not going to end the creeping, sovereignty-crushing European venture or even mark the beginning of its demise. But they may just constitute the end of the beginning of the end of “Europe” as a single, transnational political enterprise.

To be sure, French voters elected socialist Francois Hollande, who favors the European Union and reflexively supports the vision of its founders that has seen it evolve from a trade pact to a community to proto-political union. Still, his electorate, like the Greeks and Dutch, wants no part of the EU’s main project at the moment — fiscal discipline and budgetary austerity.

The trouble is that such rebuffs threaten the wholesale unraveling of various financial houses of cards constructed in recent months by Germany’s Angela Merkel with help from her very-much-junior partner, France’s Sarkozy.

They have been aimed at giving the appearance of managing the yawning economic crises confronting EU members far beyond Greece — including Spain, Italy, Portugal, Ireland and, yes, France.

But as publics across the continent balk at taking the unpalatable medicine ordered up by Berlin and refuse to give up their unaffordable social services, short work weeks and long vacations, there seems little hope that the patient will recover.

Unfortunately, several other worrying factors are adding to the economic turmoil afflicting Europe at the moment. These include the following:

  • In many nations of the European Union, the chickens are coming home to roost as what has been in some nations a decades-long bid to offset declining birthrates among the native population by importing immigrant laborers transforms the host countries. Sarkozy’s fate was ultimately sealed by the decision of supporters of Marine Le Pen‘s anti-immigration National Front party not to vote for him in the second round of the French presidential election. Similar sentiments saw Greece’s fascist-sympathizing Golden Dawn party garnering roughly 7 percent of the polling this weekend at the expense of mainstream conservative and leftist parties.
  • Closely tied to concerns about the numbers of immigrants in one European country after another is the sense that many of them are Muslims who seek to impose the Islamic supremacist doctrine known as shariah where they now reside. As authors like Bat Ye’or, Mark Steyn and Bruce Bawer have observed, the trends are in the direction of such populations exerting disproportionate influence politically and establishing no-go zones and other privileged status. Such developments fuel a sense of inequity and outrage on the part of the natives.
  • Rising hostility towards “the other” in some parts of Europe is also bringing to the fore once again widespread anti-semitism. Jews are discouraged from wearing their religious garb in public as attacks on them and their synagogues have become more and more frequent and violent. Many are fleeing their native lands and those staying behind are becoming fearful — for good reason — to a degree they have not experienced since World War II.

For all these reasons, Europe may soon be in for another of the horrific cataclysms that have plagued it for nearly all of recorded history. In fact, we have become so accustomed to the tranquility and prosperity the continent has known for the past half-century that most of us forget that such conditions are very much the exception there, rather than the rule.

It is unclear how a new round of disorder or even war might be precipitated in Europe. And the mere threat of such a prospect may — as it has in the past — prompt a redoubled effort to shore up the European Union and its faltering common currency, the Euro. The forces being unleashed at the moment, however, may prove resistant to such exhortations to perpetuate what is increasingly perceived to be a punitive and anti-democratic enterprise.

Needless to say, if Europe once again descends into the vortex of economic privation, religious and/or ethnic “cleansing” and possibly strife that has happened so often there, our own tranquility and prosperitywill be jeopardized, as well. We must, however, resist the temptation to try to prop up the European Union as the solution to such prospects and invest, instead, in efforts to work with national governments there to make them more responsible, accountable and disciplined — something the project known as “Europe” has not been to date and can, as a practical matter, never be.

At the very least, we cannot expect that what emerges from the wreckage of profligate spending and subordination of sovereignty that is Europe will provide the reliable partners and robust militaries that we are told will permit us safely to reduce our own capabilities and burden-share with our allies.

If history is any guide, it is as likely that we will wind up fighting in Europe again — perhaps catalyzed by an ever-more-bellicose Russia once again formally led by Vladimir Putin — as that we will benefit from substantially greater help from that quarter.

Enhanced by Zemanta

Revenge blows

Saturday, May 5th, 2012

For three months, the Führer watched the criminal insanity of British air pirates. He gave the English people time to come to their senses and their catastrophic politicians time to see reason. But when finally the terror became ever more bold and their demands ever more impudent, the Führer gave the order to strike back. On 8 November 1940, the Führer said:

“You know that I have proposed to the world for years the cessation of bombing warfare, especially against civilian populations. Probably aware of what would come, England refused. Democracies are always clairvoyant. Well and good. Despite that, I have never waged war against civilians in this war. I allowed no night attacks on Polish cities. One cannot target precisely at night. I generally allowed attacks only during the day, and always against military targets. I did the same in Norway. I did the same in Holland, Belgium and France. Then it suddenly occurred to Mr. Churchill to attack the German civilian population at night. You know how patient I am. I watched for eight days. They dropped bombs on the people of the Rhine. They dropped bombs on the people of Westphalia. I watched for another fourteen days. I thought that the man was crazy. He was waging a war that could only destroy England. I waited over three months, but then one day I gave the order. I will take up the battle.”

After England’s first satellites fell, the British attempted, with the help of their notorious Secret Service, to bring about an explosion in the Balkan powder keg. Using the shortsightedness of a small clique in Belgrade, they succeeded in involving Yugoslavia and Greece in the war. But these peoples waited in vain for military assistance, as had all of England’s other allies. They, too, rapidly collapsed under the blows of the German military. Thus England lost its last positions on the Continent.

During all these months, Great Britain was able to do nothing else in its waging of the war than to stubbornly continue its air terror against German cities and villages. But the British air force was unable to carry on its program of annihilation, since it was struck by the ceaseless revenge blows of the German air force.

Enhanced by Zemanta

L IS FOR LISIN

Saturday, May 5th, 2012

Vladimir Lisin, 50, used to work in a coal mine in Siberia. Now he is worth an estimated £6bn, heads one of Russia’s largest steel-makers, enjoys shooting clay pigeons and chomping on Cohiba cigars, and is the country’s third-wealthiest individual. Lisin sold a seven per cent stake in his steel giant Novolipetsk to investors on the London Stock Exchange last year. The sale raised over £325m, and he still has an 83 per cent stake in the world’s fourth-largest steel-maker to fall back on. Married with three children, he has never dabbled in politics though he does pour some money into daily newspaper Gazeta. He worked his way up through the metals industry from the shop floor. In 1993 he became involved with Novolipetsk and steadily made it his own. While others were buying luxury cars or villas in France, he thought “it was time to buy up shares” in the metals sector, he told Kompaniya magazine. He keeps a low profile, but last year he was reported to have bought a sprawling Scottish hunting estate.

Enhanced by Zemanta

French Village Embraces an Extremist

Tuesday, May 1st, 2012

The drive to this picturesque village nearly 200 miles southeast of Paris winds through forests and farmland where hawks stand guard on roadside fence posts and egrets glide across empty pastures. With a population of just 60, Brachay’s residents say they are “the forgotten ones.”

One person did remember them: Marine Le Pen, leader of the far-right National Front party. The town thanked her with a record 72% vote in her favor during the first round of France’s presidential election last Sunday.

That day, Le Pen, 43, surprised the country by placing a strong third behind the two front-runners, President Nicolas Sarkozy and his Socialist challenger, Francois Hollande. Her 18% of the vote transformed the leader of the anti-immigrant nationalist party from an electoral also-ran into a key player in the runoff May 6.

With Sarkozy trailing in polls that give Hollande a lead of as much as 10 percentage points, the incumbent desperately needs to woo Le Pen’s supporters to save his political career. Consequently, the National Front’s pet themes—immigration, security and national identity among them—have shot to the top of the election agenda.

Le Pen has little interest in keeping Sarkozy, whom she detests, in power, and hopes that if he loses his right-of-center Union for a Popular Movement party will implode. With the National Front looking to pick up seats in parliamentary elections in June, the party aims to position itself as a credible opposition. But there is no love lost between Le Pen and Hollande either.

In Brachay, where stone cottages are clustered around a steepled church, a well-groomed central square and a large National Front poster, villagers were thrilled when Le Pen visited in early April. Suddenly they were not forgotten, but part of something much bigger.

But Le Pen did come, attracting neighboring villagers and winning over new admirers with what the mayor described as her accessible style and willingness to “get off her podium and talk to everyone.”

Immigrants “are a problem; they are becoming more and more numerous,” Gerard Marchand said. “Foreigners have seven to eight kids. We have two. In 200 years, who’ll be in whose home?”

Most villagers in Brachay struggle to make ends meet on about $1,300 a month, on average. “It’s true, we are the forgotten ones,” the mayor said.

European Union President Herman Van Rompuy has criticized what he calls the “winds of populism” blowing across Europe, fanned by “extremist movements.”

The Netherlands is heading toward a general election in September with Geert Wilders, leader of the anti-immigrant, anti-Islam Freedom Party, in third place and rising.

Farther south, debt-strapped Greece is witnessing the rise of the Golden Dawn ultranationalist movement.

A recent report by Amnesty International identified widespread prejudice in Europe. The human rights group said political leaders, rather than combating fear of Islamic extremism, have been pandering to prejudice against Muslims in a quest for votes.

Enhanced by Zemanta

Le Pen’s granddaughter Marion to run for Front National seat in parliament

Thursday, April 26th, 2012

She is the new face of the Le Pen clan.

Marion Maréchal-Le Pen, the 22-year-old grand-daughter of Jean-Marie Le Pen, the grand dragon on France’s far right, will run for parliament in June, according to the Paris dailyLe Parisien.

Currently a law-student, Maréchal-Le Pen’s aunt, Marine Le Pen, took a fifth of the vote in Sunday’s first-round of the presidential elections in France, the highest-ever score for the Front National in its 40-year history.

Maréchal-Le Pen tells Le Parisien that her campaign in the southeastern town of Carpentras to restore the honor of her grandfather. In 1990, the Front National, broadly associated with anti-Semitic and racist themes, was accused of desecrating a Jewish cemetery there.

“This candidacy is a bit a way of rehabilitating him. His honor was sullied in this matter but it was never cleaned in public,” Maréchal-Le Pen was quoted as saying.

Maréchal-Le Pen unsuccessfully ran for regional office in 2010. The national broadcaster France 3 aired this interview with her before the vote:

According to Reuters, the elder Le Pen, who passed the leadership of the party he founded to his daughter Marine last year, had himself been expected to run in Carpentras, which is north of Marseille.

“I won’t be a candidate for the parliamentary elections,” Le Pen was quoted as saying. said. “I will soon go there [Carpentras] and present Marion and all the candidates in the Vaucluse region. I will help her campaign.”

The news agency said about 30 percent in the town voted for the National front in Sunday, putting the party narrowly behind that of incumbent French president, Nicolas Sarkozy. It is the only town in France to have a local council from the far-right party.

Enhanced by Zemanta

Angry EU voters, citizens rebel against austerity

Wednesday, April 25th, 2012

For more than a year, European Union officials have called for austerity, austerity and more austerity as a means to solve Europe’s debt crisis. Now people who don’t want to pay the price are taking their fight from the streets to the ballot box.

Governments have fallen, more are at risk and in some places, a stark streak of nationalism is on the rise that could swing Europe ever deeper into a fortress mentality.

At stake is the future of the continent, where countries rich and poor are struggling with mountains of debt and moribund economies — a toxic combination that often seems to require contradictory remedies of belt-tightening and economic stimulus.

Increasingly, the long focus on austerity is convincing Europeans that the German-led mantra of fiscal responsibility is creating a vicious circle of more misery leading to lower growth — leading to even greater debt distress.

“What is happening in Europe is the austerity drive is actually slowing down the necessary rebalancing of European economies,” said Simon Tilford, chief economist at the Center for European Reform.

Austerity measures aimed at balancing national budgets have led to drastic spending cuts by governments across the continent, including layoffs and pay cuts for government workers, slashing of key services including welfare and development programs, as well as tax hikes to boost government revenues.

Many in Europe have had enough of this harsh medicine.

In France, President Nicolas Sarkozy, one of the architects of the EU’s response to the financial crisis, is in danger of being turned out of office in next month’s runoff with Francois Hollande — a Socialist who is promising not to cut, but to increase public spending by €20 billion ($26.3 billion) by 2017.

Hollande is also promising to re-negotiate a much-vaunted budgetary pact among 25 EU countries meant to enforce national fiscal discipline.

Greece votes in elections next month in which fringe parties hostile to international bailouts requiring steep austerity are expected to make big gains — possibly endangering efforts by the current technocratic government to rein in the nation’s debt.

And the Netherlands’ 18-month-old conservative coalition resigned this week after it failed to agree on cutting its own budget deficit to meet the EU limits it had demanded so fiercely of other countries.

Beyond that, in the Czech Republic, almost 100,000 people rallied in Prague’s downtown Wenceslas Square last weekend to protest government reforms and cuts, calling on the government to resign in one of the biggest demonstrations since the fall of communism. And earlier this year, tens of thousands of Romanians bitter about savage public-sector wage cuts took to the streets and the government collapsed.

Analysts say it’s no surprise that people are fed up.

“I don’t think there are any examples of countries accepting endless austerity and downward standards of living,” Tilford said. “There has to be light at the end of the tunnel.”

Voters may have good reasons to reject unrelenting cuts. But in their desire to avoid pain, they may also be prompting politicians to put off decisions that Europe must take to remain competitive globally.

Many experts say government protections for workers need to be loosened — for example, by making it easier for employers to hire and fire workers — in order to halt the flight of jobs from Europe to regions deemed more business-friendly.

And the anger appears to be driving voters to the extremes. In the first round of the French presidential election last weekend, nearly one voter in five cast their ballot for the National Front, a hard-right party previously known primarily for its anti-immigraton platform.

That, along with the 11 percent showing by far-left candidate Jean-Luc Melenchon, shows a high level of anger, said Piotr Kaczynski, a research fellow at the Brussels-based Center for European Studies.

“The big winners of the French elections are the extreme parties — extreme right and extreme left,” which together won more than 30 percent of the vote, Kaczynski said.

The rise of the fringes is not limited to France. In Greece, the neo-Nazi Golden Dawn party is marching ahead in the polls — and may win a dozen or so seats in parliament.

And it was a right-wing politician stridently critical of Islam who brought down the government of Dutch Prime Minister Mark Rutte this week. Geert Wilders, whose support was critical to Rutte’s minority government, decided to withdraw his support over the government’s budget-cutting plans.

“With the Rutte government’s resignation, the pro-cyclical austerity course in Europe has once again proven to be the biggest disposal program for governments in recent history,” Germany’s Financial Times Deutschland commented in an editorial Tuesday.

German Finance Minister Wolfgang Schaeuble criticized Wilders’ actions in acid tones.

“We have always known that, if one votes for radical right-wing euro-skeptic parties and xenophobes, one makes democracy not more stable but more unstable,” Schaeuble said. “That can be seen now in Holland. So my advice is, don’t vote that way.”

Enhanced by Zemanta