![]() ![]() Just after 3pm he gave a press conference at which he said the rally in the Place “brought together individuals who had not come to defend a cause but quite simply to wreck.” So “I decided to ban this demonstration from continuing” but, he added, “to keep it in the Place” even though “the scandalous destruction” going on “is very luckily limited in scope.” Just before 2pm the demonstrators were fully kettled and then at 2.23pm a tweet from the prefecture said Lallement has demanded the ending of the demo. As the pair announced their case, the Observatoire parisien des libertés publiques, set up by the Ligue des droits de l’Homme and the Paris barristers’ trade union, published a detailed report on what then happened. It was a building site with all the material lying around that any provocateur could pick up and use. They had not wanted to start the day at the Place, but Lallement insisted. In an action delayed by the epidemic, the two have now launched a court case against the Prefect hoping to trigger a full judicial investigation into how he ran the show that day. Instead of an anniversary rally that might have started a revival of the movement, the organisers, Priscillia Ludosky, whose on-line petition in the late summer of 2018 had set the Gilets jaunes ball rolling, and Faouzi Lellouche, who had conducted the negotiations with Lallement’s officers, got a carefully calculated, but utterly brutal, kick in the teeth. “Ah, well, we are not in the same camp, Madame.” You can see the exchange here and catch his “ ça suffit”, that’s enough, as he turns away from her and walks off. Lallement’s reply, caught on TV news cameras was chilling. Yes, this 61-year-old told the Prefect, I am a Gilet jaune, I live locally and help the victims, but, she added, referring to violence of the day before, “we did not do that”. How come, she asked him quite straightforwardly, you do not manage to arrest the “ Black blocs”, the handful of violent rioters present at many a trade union and Gilets jaunes rally for some five years now. The day after, while making a tour of inspection of the huge roundabout that is this Place, he was caught on camera in an unpleasant exchange with a local inhabitant who just happened to have been out shopping with a friend when he came by in full uniform. ![]() Something they could not do as the entire mass was trapped in the square by the surrounding police lines. These latter were grenades with a substantial explosive charge intended to force people to disperse away from the police using them. Instead of a march, thousands of demonstrators were kettled and, on the excuse of random destruction by a handful of hooligans, they were then subjected to the full panoply of French police weaponry covering the spectrum from an officer’s carefully aimed boot to tear gas grenades by the hundreds via a savage use of truncheons (the modern kind that spin on a handle, jab and strike) and generous doses of “ grenades de désencerclement”. After long negotiations, the organisers of this intended birthday party got Lallement’s agreement that they could assemble in the Place d’Italie toward the south east of the centre of Paris and then march off for a demonstration in streets away from the centre of the city. The worst of these occasions was on Saturday 16 November 2019, on the anniversary of the first demonstration called by what became “ les Gilets jaunes”. But once you get there, he often won’t let you leave. As the official responsible for running the policing system in the French capital, he is not very keen on you turning up at a demonstration. "Why are you so adamant about wearing a black mask? Why are you so insistent on wearing a black shirt? Have you ever worn a black mask," he told reporters who asked him why the police prohibited anything black, including black umbrellas, at public functions attended by Chief Minister Pinarayi Vijayan on June 11.Life with Didier Lallement is strange. So it is not clear whether the LDF convener has any idea what the colour black stands for in the history of modern political rebellion, or even about the Left, anti-establishment 'Black Bloc' protests that regularly sow chaos at major capitalist summits like the G20 and WTO and symbolically vandalises capitalist symbols like big banks and multinational chains.īut, like a rodent or a snake that could feel an earthquake long before the earth splits open from below, the politician in Jayarajan seems to have sensed something ominous in black. E P Jayarajan, when he was Kerala's sports minister, had mistaken the legendary Muhammad Ali for some Kerala sporting icon only he had any inkling of. ![]()
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