MACRON FORCED TO DEPLOY ARMY ON STREETS
FIRST POLICING ACTION SINCE 1947
“Maintaining order in France should be the police’s and the National Gendarmerie’s business. It is not the army’s job,” Guillaume Larrivé, MP for the centre-right Les Républicains party told Radio Classique.
Larrivé criticised the government’s “improvised” response to the Yellow Vest crisis, and expressed concern the move would “end up weakening civil peace”.
On Wednesday, Bruno Retailleau, leader of Les Républicains Senators, called on Macron to “reverse this disastrous decision”.
The move was met with similar criticism on the Left. “In what European democracy is the army called in to police a social movement?” Raphaël Glucksmann, who will lead the Socialist Party at the EU elections, asked on Twitter.
“This shows the extent of Macron’s failure to reconcile the French and to ease the tensions in our society,” Glucksmann added.
“It’s unheard of,” Benoît Hamon, Socialist Party candidate in the last presidential election, said Thursday, adding that “the government was releasing an arsenal of security and martial measures to mask the Interior Minister Christophe Castaner’s incompetence”.
The last time the State requisitioned the army for policing operations was in 1947-1948,” Élie Tenenbaum, an IFRI researcher and defence specialist, told FRANCE 24.
In the spring of 1947, the French Communist Party, excluded from the government, called a series of strikes. But the movement took an “insurrectional” turn, according to the then Interior Minister, who deployed the army to help the police.
Although the current situation is different, "it is not uninteresting to wonder what could happen if rioters attacked public buildings, as Sentinelle troops are not equipped to respond to this type of threat," Tenenbaum continued.
They are armed with lethal weapons. They have a telescopic baton and a Famas or HK 416, the army's new assault rifle, which must be loaded. "They don’t have a riot shield to protect themselves or an intermediate defence weapon," said Tenebaum. “It is therefore important to provide extremely clear guidelines as to what actions they can take."
https://www.france24.com/en/20190322-france-macron-risky-plan-army-streets-yellow-vests-protests-sentinelle