There have been hands ripped off, faces broken, joints deformed in a devastating toll that is moving from dozens into hundreds. After nine uninterrupted weeks of the so-called ‘yellow vest’ (gilet jaune) movement, the immoderate use by police of weapons that wreak serious injuries (guns that fire rubber rounds such as Flash-Balls and the so-called ‘defence ball launchers’, or LBDs, and explosive stun grenades) have left many demonstrators and others caught in the mayhem with shocking wounds, sometimes life-changing.
Over the past decade, there has never been such an intensive use of crowd-control ammunition in France over such a short period, nor so many victims of the weapons, who countless images show lying on the ground, bloodied and maimed.
During the ninth major day of street protest action by the yellow vests on January 12th, a voluntary fireman Olivier Beziade, a father of three, was among the marchers in the city of Bordeaux, south-west France. He was hit in the head from behind by a rubber projectile – in effect a large rectangular rubber bullet – fired by a police gun of the Flash-Ball category (there exist similar weapons in the police arsenal, commercialised under a different name, such as the LBD 40), resulting in him receiving emergency surgery and placed in an artificial coma. In the southern city of Marseille on December 1st, when the movement had entered its third week, 80-year-old Zineb Redouane, who was closing the shutters of her apartment, was the victim of the explosion of a teargas grenade fired by police at her window. She died the following day during surgery.
How many more victims must be counted before the authorities review police crowd-control tactics and the use of such dangerous weapons, which France is one of the very few countries in Europe to deploy during demonstrations?
Enlargement : Illustration 1
In face of a movement of unrest which continued again this weekend, unconvinced by the few concessions so far granted by the government, the authorities have chosen to adopt a strategy of repression, fuelling more violence among yellow vest militants. A change in policing tactics was clearly introduced as of December 8th 2018 when, rather than avoiding confrontation as has been the approach in such situations over recent years, the police was ordered into frontal contact with protestors. On top of the massive numbers of arrests in the hours preceding demonstrations, there are so-called “preventive” attacks on protestors in an attempt to disperse them with the zealous use of weapons like the Flash-Ball or LBD 40, a more powerful gun which fires 40mm rubber bullets, as witnessed and reported by Mediapart’s Karl Laske, who has covered the majority of the demonstrations in Paris.
In an escalation of the conflict, French Prime Minister Édouard Philippe announced at the beginning of January that the government was studying proposed legislation that would profoundly affect the freedom to demonstrate, including measures to punish the organisers of demonstrations that had not been submitted beforehand for approval to local authorities, making it an offence to wear balaclavas, authorising the “preventive” arrests of demonstrators identified as engaged in civil disorder, and the extension of financial liability against those responsible for causing material damage.
This anti-democratic and counter-productive strategy of escalating the already volatile tensions was the worst of choices. Because beyond the fact that it would fuel exasperation and unruliness among yellow vest demonstrators, the unrestrained use of weapons that are supposedly non-lethal undermines the police’s mission of protecting citizens. When a state goes about mutilating members of the population it should be recognised as a mark of regression, if not a necrosis, of our current democracy.
On Thursday, Jacques Toubon, the head of France’s civil rights’ watchdog, “le Défenseur des droits”, called for a “suspension” of the use by police during demonstrations of weapons in the category of Flash-Ball guns (which includes the more recent and more powerful variant, the Swiss-made LBD 40, whose rubber ammunition can reach a target at up to 50 metres away). Already, in a report commissioned by the president (speaker) of the National Assembly, parliament’s lower house, and dated December 2017 (available in French here), Toubon had recommended a halt to the use of such weapons. “The introduction of crowd-control methods that are more protective of freedom [rights] is indeed the condition for a more composed management [of crowd control situations],” wrote Toubon. “Public order is a component of democracy, it should allow for the reinforcement of fundamental freedoms, and cannot be an adversary of this.”
At that recent time, Paris police chief Michel Delpuech was also convinced of the argument, announcing that he had “taken the decision to ban the use of the LBD 40 in crowd-control operations, given its dangerousness and its inappropriate nature in such contexts”. But apparently the authorities have changed their opinion on the subject, and the issue has this winter never been higher on the agenda. It is also just as urgent to widen the debate to consider a ban on all potentially mutilating weapons, notably crowd dispersal stun grenades and the like, given the devastating physical harm such weapons have caused over recent weeks.
It is time to listen to NGOs and victims’ associations who, for some ten years now, have called for the prohibition of these arms. Last Wednesday, in the latest programme of our regular live-streamed debates, Mediapart invited some of those wounded in the yellow vest protests, highlighting the dramatic effects of such violence for which the authorities are responsible. Guests included Antoine Boudinet, a 26-year-old whose right hand was blown off by a crowd dispersal grenade, and Lola Villabriga, 19, who was wounded in the face by a projectile from a Flash-Ball gun or similar.
Listening to their accounts, it is simply intolerable that the government remains in denial of the reality of the violence employed. In a visit to the town of Carcassonne, south-west France, last Tuesday, interior minister Christophe Castaner stonily declared that “no police officer, no gendarme” had “attacked the yellow vests”, adding: "I have never seen a policeman or gendarme attacking a protester."
A ban on the use of weapons like the LBD and GLI-F4 "instant" stun and teargas grenades – which contain TNT to produce a deafening and blinding thunder-flash effect – is a necessity because the conditions for using these weapons are incompatible with those of demonstrations. Yet they have been massively employed since the yellow vest protests began last November.
The situation is the result of the government’s choice of militarising law and order strategy, with the appearance of arms hitherto never used in the context of street demonstrations. As Mediapart has revealed, the director of the CRS crowd-control police units gave his authorisation, as of January 12th, for the arming of officers with G36 assault rifles, battle weapons made by German firm Heckler & Koch.
This radicalisation was already apparent with the deployment of armoured vehicles on the streets of Paris, and the engagement of “mobile” police and gendarmerie brigades, which are in principle dedicated to carrying out arrests but which in reality were used to disperse crowds with the weaponry of LBD 40 guns and stun grenades. As first revealed by French investigative and satirical weekly Le Canard enchaîné, and on the blog of French journalist Jean-Marc Manach, the French interior ministry put out a tender just before Christmas for the supply of a further 1,730 LBD-type guns, including 450 rapid-fire versions.
This militarisation has mechanically led to a massive use of munitions. According to figures provided by the interior ministry, on Saturday December 1st, during a national day of action by the yellow vest protestors, a total of 1,193 rubber projectiles were fired by police, along with 1,040 crowd dispersal grenades and 339 GLI-F4 stun grenades. Since that day the interior ministry has put a halt to releasing such statistics in public.
'A disproportionate dangerousness with regard to maintaining order'
The human consequences have been disastrous. French journalist David Dufresne, author of a 2013 book, Maintien de l’ordre, about the use and abuse of crowd control methods in France, has researched and recorded more than 300 cases of unwarranted police violence since the beginning of the yellow vest movement. Dufresne duly reported the cases to the French interior ministry, which is therefore aware of them.
The French website Désarmons-les (meaning “Disarm them”), run by an association called the Collectif contre les violences d’État (the “collective association against state violence”), has recorded 97 cases of individuals who have been seriously wounded by police, which includes 17 people who have lost the use of an eye, and four others who have had their hands blown off. In a separate count, French daily Libération found a similar toll. The toll of serious wounds caused by rubber projectiles the past six weeks is already more than the total caused by Flash-Ball ammunition during the past ten years in France. The director-general of France’s national police force, Éric Morvan, has publicly admitted that the police’s internal investigation service, the IGPN, which investigates alleged wrongdoing by police officers, has received 200 complaints by the public of incidents during the recent demonstrations, and 78 cases have been referred to it by the public prosecution services.
In an attempt to justify the use of this arsenal of offensive weapons, interior minister Christophe Castaner has underlined what he called the “extreme violence” of demonstrators. “We’ve got people who come to provoke, assault, even to kill,” he said. “When they [law enforcement officers] are cornered, they use the means [at their disposal],” he added, while assuring that the police use only proportionate force.
But a confidential circular sent out by police director-general Éric Morvan to police units nationwide on January 15th, and which was revealed by public broadcaster France 3, appeared to contradict Castaner’s claims. In the missive, Morvan called on officers on crowd control duties at the demonstrations to “rigorously ensure a respect for the operational conditions” for use of the LBD 40 rubber bullet launcher. “The length of distances […] must be respected,” he wrote, referring to the distance between an officer and his target, and underlined that an officer using an LBD 40 “must exclusively target the torso and superior or inferior limbs”. In other words, officers must not target a person’s head.
In reality, the regulatory requirements on officers using the LBD or Flash-Ball guns are virtually impossible to apply. They demand that before using the weapon, the officer must ensure that “a third party who may be present cannot be hit, in order to limit the risks of collateral damage”, and that the officer also takes into account that the “effectiveness of the [weapon] is relative to a certain number of elements (the firing distance, the mobility of the person, thickness of clothes, etc)”.
But during a demonstration, those individuals targeted are by definition mostly among groups of people and mobile, and as a consequence it is more probable that the true target is missed. “In the situation of a gathering on a public street,” warned Jacques Toubon, head of France’s civil rights’ watchdog in his December 2017 report on the subject, “the defence ball launcher [LBD] does not allow for an appreciation of the distance of the shot, nor to take into account the collateral damages.”
Toubon’s report underlined that even if the regulations were respected, the rubber projectiles can cause serious injuries such as the loss of an eye “which lends the weapon a disproportionate degree of dangerousness with regard to the objective of maintaining order”.
The dangerousness of these weapons is known to everyone, including the police forces. The user manual for the LBD 40 makes clear that “the risks of wounding [are] greater at less than ten metres” between the officer and the person he is shooting at, and the gun’s Swiss manufacturer Brügger & Thomet states that a person’s head should never be aimed at. The difference between this weapon and the Flash-Ball gun, which the LBD 40 is now progressively replacing, is that the LBD 40 is classified as a “first category” weapon, which means a weapon of war, a distinction that Flash-Ball manufacturer Verney-Carron is keen to underline.
In his circular sent this month, national police director-general Éric Morvan also set out the procedures to follow after use of the weapon. “As soon as the operational environment allows, the state of health of the person [shot] must be ascertained and they must be given medical assistance if their state of health justifies it,” he wrote. In fact, numerous first-hand accounts of such incidents demonstrate that such precautions are not the priority of those using the weapons.
There is no inevitability about the use of the LBD 40 gun or the GLI-F4 stun grenades. Alternative solutions exist, such as in Germany where such dangerous weapons are not employed and where, like most European countries, rubber bullets are excluded from crowd control operations. To disperse radical elements in demonstrations, the German police rely mostly on the use of water cannons in place of tear gas, and the deployment of massive police numbers, as well as ‘preventive’ (and liberticidal) detention measures against some individuals. But the principal tactic in crowd control situations is that of the de-escalation of tensions, of defusing conflict situations as quickly as possible.
The French authorities have chosen an opposite approach to that of using force only as an ultimate deterrent, placing in peril not only the physical safety of demonstrators, but also the exercise of the right to demonstrate.
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- The original French version of this op-ed article can be found here.