The role of the gendarmes and police at the protest in south-west France that led to the death of 21-year-old botany student Rémi Fraisse in the early hours of October 26th is coming under ever-closer scrutiny. Mediapart can reveal that gendarmes fired or threw around 400 grenades in that one night at the Sivens dam site, including the 'offensive' grenade blamed for killing the student.
It has also emerged that the prefect in the Tarn département or county gave the orders for gendarmes to show “extreme firmness” in their handling of the protesters, even though there was an agreement that policing of the planned demonstration would be “discreet”. A number of security experts have also questioned why the forces of law and order chose to risk intervening with protesters on a site where the trees had already been removed as part of the preparatory work for the irrigation reservoir and where there was little or no property to be defended. “Was there a vital interest in defending this area?” asks one. At the same time a new witness has come forward whose account suggests that it was the gendarmes who provoked the clashes that ultimately led to Rémi Fraisse's death.
The protest against the building of the dam – since suspended - by the local Tarn council to help farmers irrigate their crops gathered more than 5,000 demonstrators on the weekend of October 25th and 26th. They included green Euro MP José Bové and hard-left Euro MP Jean-Luc Mélenchon. “We had an agreement with the prefecture that there would be no gendarmes there,” says Ben Lefetey, spokesman for the Collectif against the Sivens dam at Testet. He and other protesters had taken part in a meeting on October 21st in nearby Albi with the sub-prefect Yves Mathis, officers from the gendarmerie, the head of the local intelligence-gathering unit the Service Central du Tenseignement Territorial - whose nose had been broken by a protester on the site a few weeks earlier – and the mayor of the nearest town Lisle-sur-Tarn.
The main issue discussed at the meeting was the parking of activists' cars and buses and according to the minutes Yves Mathis promised that “to avoid provocation the gendarmes will not be placed in the middle of the demonstrators”. He also “warned the demonstrators against any acts of violence or damage” before adding: “The gendarmes will be present on the roads and elsewhere ready to intervene if they need to.”
In an interview given after the protest, the director-general of the gendarmerie Denis Favier confirmed that they had employed a “discreet presence” at the site, though he also said they had received “worrying signs” that some protesters were coming looking for a fight and to “smash a gendarme”. He told BFM TV on October 29th: “We took measures so that the demonstration scheduled for the Saturday could take place in the most peaceful circumstances possible...”
However, the agreement with the protesters was broken on the Friday evening on the pretext of a fire affecting a site office and a generator that had just been installed. “Around 3.30am the sub-prefect Yves Mathis called me to say that they were faced with 200 hooligans and he could not honour the agreement,” says Ben Lefetey. Yet all the machines that had cut down the trees on the site had already been removed at the Collectif's request. All that remained on the site was a little compound made up of the site hut and the generator behind a ditch and some wire fencing. It was protected by three security guards.
“On Friday evening as night fell we were putting up some stages [editor's note, for the speeches the next day] and we saw an unidentified group of thirty people go and set fire to [the compound],” recalls Marc, aged 56, a former civil servant. Another protester adds: “The guards were frightened and took off in their car, and the guys burned the few things that remained.”
'What were the gendarmes defending?'
The fire led to the arrival of mobile gendarme units and on Saturday morning riot police turned up to support them. Both groups were based at the other end of the valley from where the formal demonstration and speeches took place. By mid-afternoon the protesters counted between 32 and 34 vans of police and gendarmes on the building site parking area, even though the protesters themselves were around 15 minutes away by foot on a grassy area.
The demonstrators were and remain baffled by the security presence. “There was nothing to protect, there was absolutely no reason to have a police presence,” says Ben Lafetey. “There was no correlation between what needed protecting and the means deployed. However, it all absolutely served the interest of the [département] council who wanted to paint a bad image of us and distract journalists' attention from the real debate. And it put the forces of law and order in danger for nothing.”
Policing specialists contacted by Mediapart raised similar questions over the choice of tactics by the authorities. “Why did the gendarmes' military command throw its men into this battle at night on land occupied by guys who had come expressly to fight them when there was no attack on or risk to property or people?” asked one astonished official from a police trade union. “It was not an urban area with shops and public buildings to protect.” A senior officer with the CRS riot police agreed this was a fair question but noted: “These are political decisions which are the responsibility of the civil authorities, because they can have visible effects counter to the intended outcome.”
A senior civil servant at the ministry of the interior, a specialist in law and order issues, was also dubious about the tactics. “The public security code authorises gendarmes to use these means if they cannot defend an occupied position any other way, but was defending this area a vital interest? It did not involve saving a gendarme at risk of serious bodily harm.” And even in cases of legitimate defence, the use of force must be proportionate to the danger faced.
It appears that the sole officer directing operations on the site was a gendarme captain, who was in telephone contact with the prefecture. “But the gendarmes just carry out orders, they have little initiative, it's the civil authorities who decide,” says gendarme general Bertrand Cavallier, who was head of the training centre the Centre National d'Entraînement des Forces de Gendarmerie at Saint-Astier in the Dordogne, and who left active service in 2011.
Enlargement : Illustration 3
According to a source close to the case, the order for the gendarmes to use “extreme firmness” was given by the Tarn prefect, Thierry Gentilhomme, who was appointed at the start of September. The same source says these instructions might explain the use of around 400 grenades by the gendarmes on that Saturday night, during which Rémi Fraisse was killed by an 'offensive' grenade. Grenade remains were still being collected from the site a week later.
Opponents of the dam who witnessed the scenes are still at a loss to explain why the security forces became involved in such confrontations in the middle of an area surrounded by nothing but nature. Christian, 37, pointed out the marks where grenades scorched the earth on the side of a hill at the protest site. “I'd never seen anything like that and I didn’t come here for that,” he says. “But after that you have to stay.”
Christian says that during the afternoon officers had chased them into the forest where clashes took place. “They were in groups of three, one with a Flash-ball [editor's note, riot control weapon], one with a camera and the other with a shield, they were acting like it was a war,” he says. “They were aiming at us with a Flash-ball. We got out again when night began to fall and we lit some fire barricades. It calmed down. Then the battle resumed until 4am or 5am.”
'Who benefits from the public disorder?'
According to Denis Favier, head of the gendarmerie, the mobile gendarme units and CRS on the site came face to face on the Saturday afternoon with around 150 individuals who wore “helmets and hoods, some with improvised shields, who attacked the forces of law and order with a violence which, according to the witness statements that have been reported to me, have never been encountered by gendarmes engaged in an operation to maintain law and order”. And Bertrand Cavallier said many of the gendarmes who had also been at the protests against a new airport at Notre-Dame-des-Landes near Nantes in west France told him that it was “tougher at Sivens”. The clashes that took place during the afternoon on the higher ground calmed down in early evening, only to flare up again on a flatter section of ground at around 11pm – after the CRS had left.
“The demonstration in the tent was passing off peacefully so I didn’t want to get involved in the clashes at the other end [of the site],” says Ben Lefetey. “That wouldn't have served any purpose, we had absolutely no influence on the people who went over there.”
In urban areas the police can count on reinforcements from elsewhere. This was not the case at the rural Sivens dam site where there was no one to come to their aid. The gendarme captain in charge on the ground decided that his officers could use so-called 'offensive' grenades which are designed to stun. The commanding officer is allowed to authorise this under service regulations if officers come under violent attack or if they cannot defend their position any other way. Talking on TF1 television, the gendarme captain justified himself by pointing to the violence used by their “assailants”. He said that his squadron of 72 gendarmes had been attacked with “distress rockets, very powerful and deafening rockets, shots from home-made mortars and incendiary bombs with acid and aluminium”.
Denis Favier said that after they had fired 200 tear gas grenades, the “pressure was such” that the gendarmes moved on to throwing offensive grenades. It was one of these that killed Rémi Fraisse, who was hit in the back at around 2am. “It should be pointed out that when the non-commissioned officer threw the grenade it was night-time, we had barely any lighting and the assailants were very mobile,” the gendarme captain told TF1. However, according to witnesses spoken to by Mediapart the gendarmes were regularly turning on and off their lights, including projector lights, lorry headlights and Maglite torches. According to their lawyer, at least five other protesters were hurt that night. Several gendarmes were also injured but it has not been possible to get precise figures.
A new witness has meanwhile come forward who casts doubt on parts of the official accounts of events on the night. Zac, 18, has told Mediapart that on Saturday evening it was the gendarmes who had provoked the new clashes after a lull in the conflict. Zac says protesters were in a line advancing towards the gendarmes but that they were not attacking anyone. “No fireworks were thrown, perhaps one or two stones but there was no attack,” he says. The gendarmes threatened to use tear gas and then suddenly violence erupted. “They threw a dozen tear gas and stun grenades, it all kicked off and went on until 4am or 5am.” The gendarmes say that they were the ones who were attacked.
Zac says he was also there when Rémi Fraisse died, at around 2am, with his account again challenging that of the authorities. He says he saw Rémi “with no hood and nothing in his hands”, when grenades were thrown. “I heard explosions. In the cloud of gas I saw Rémi fall in front of me. A mate tried to pull him by his legs. This mate was shot in the back with a LBD [editor's note, a 'lanceur de balles de défense', a weapon that fires rubber balls]. We tried to pull the friend. And then we saw police officers, the CRS, recover Rémi and pull him a hundred metres by his arms. His head was bouncing on the ground. Things went calm. All the lights went off. We couldn’t see any more.”
Zac says he did not see the grenade fall onto Rémi and admits he does not know the difference between a stun grenade and an offensive grenade, the latter being the type blamed for the student’s death. But he says he does remember that when Rémi was still on the ground the “CRS walloped him two, three times with a tonfa [editor's note, a type of police baton] before dragging him”.
On the Sunday evening, the day Rémi died, the prosecutor at nearby Albi, Claude Dérens, had claimed: “The gendarmes spotted a body on the ground, they came out to bring the person in and give them treatment.” A few days later the prefecture said that the gendarmes had “come to the aid of a young man who had a ten to eighteen centimetre wound between the shoulder blades” before realising he was dead. Later still the prefecture said the gendarmes had come to the victim's aid immediately after firing, and that they did so despite “projectiles” being thrown at them, in order to “take in the body and give him first aid”. Zac has said he is willing to make a full statement to judges investigating Remi Fraisse's death.
Experts have also pointed out that the very fact that police and gendarmes are so heavily protected nowadays means they should be able to withstand most attacks and simply wear protesters down. “Today they have the right clothing and protection to allow them to withstand serious aggression,” says a senior police officer who has been in charge of maintaining law and order in some “very tough” situations. Sociologist Fabien Jobard, director of the Centre for Sociological Research on Law and Criminal Justice Institutions (CESDIP) notes: “In maintaining law and order, time is on the side of the gendarmes and police, they just have to wait for their adversaries to exhaust themselves.”
And the senior riot control police officer asked: “Who benefits from the public disorder? It's the extremists, the 'black blocs' [editor's note, organised groups of protesters wearing black protective clothing] whose aim is to see this kind of escalation. We end up with a tragic outcome: the broad base of demonstrators become radicalised and the extremists end up winning.”
After Rémi Fraisse's death the interior minister Bernard Cazeneuve banned the use of offensive grenades, pending the outcome of an inquiry, and has also banned tear gas grenades used by police and gendarmes. The offensive grenades are officially known as OF F1 grenades and thrown by hand. They date from the 1914-1918 war and are only used by gendarmes. “I discovered them when I did my military service,” says one police officer. “In wartime you throw them into a enclosed space and this disables the people, enabling you to move in.” When contacted, the military press department the Service d'Informations et de Relations Publiques des Armées (SIRPA) referred journalists to an infantry museum and a photo of an OF F1 grenade dating from World War I.
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- The French version of this article can be found here.
English version by Michael Streeter