Police Attack 20,000 French Citizens Protesting Against Airport Notre-Dame-Des-Landes

The event attend­ed by ten’s of thou­sands of French cit­i­zens against the air­port Notre-Dame-des-Lan­des esca­lat­ed Sat­ur­day after­noon in the city cen­ter of Nantes when Police Block­ad­ed the pro­gres­sion of the march and attacked with charges to the peo­ple protest­ing. Many cit­i­zens were wound­ed by tear gas and rub­ber bul­lets. Par­tic­i­pants respond­ed with fired pro­jec­tiles – bot­tles, cans, steel balls, flares – towards the police who charged repeat­ed­ly.

“This is tens of thou­sands,” assured Julien Durand, spokesman for the ACIPA, the main oppo­si­tion group to the air­port project, while refus­ing to give a pre­cise fig­ure.

Accord­ing to him, the par­tic­i­pa­tion is equiv­a­lent to the pre­vi­ous ral­lies, such as in Novem­ber 2012 which accord­ing to the orga­niz­ers had expect­ed 40,000 peo­ple (13,000 accord­ing to police).

In the late after­noon, the city cen­ter of Nantes showed scenes of dev­as­ta­tion. Peo­ple took out frus­tra­tion from being ignored for years and beat­en down when they speak out by ran­sack­ing a police sta­tion, an agency of Vin­ci (deal­er air­port project) group, but also broke sev­er­al store­fronts, any agency of Nantes trans­port or agency Nou­velles Fron­tières. At least two con­struc­tion equip­ment vehi­cles and a bar­ri­cade were also burned.

Objects were thrown at the SNCF cate­nary to block the move­ment of trains one source said. As for police, they made use of a large amount of tear gas, stun grenades and water can­nons.

Pro­test­ers moved away blind­ed by tear gas while sev­er­al hun­dred oth­ers con­tin­ued to face the police, refer­ring new pro­jec­tiles bot­tles, or even own grenades forces.

“No mat­ter what tell the pre­fec­ture, for all of you it is a great suc­cess,” pro­vid­ed at the end of the event Julien Durand.

“An unnec­es­sary and expen­sive project”
The demon­stra­tion had start­ed in a friend­ly atmos­phere. “No thank you Ayrault­port”, “No to Ayrault pork”, “Ayrault also emerges Vin­ci”, “Ni or air­port metrop­o­lis, the city is ours” we heard in the pro­ces­sion.

“The mobi­liza­tion is great here. We are here to show our deter­mi­na­tion to aban­don this use­less and expen­sive at this time of short­age project,” said AFP Eva Joly MEP EELV.

Giv­en the anti-cap­i­tal­ist com­po­nent of the event and clash­es that have marked pre­vi­ous events, the pre­fec­ture on Fri­day adopt­ed a mod­i­fi­ca­tion of the route so that it avoids the down­town core.

The event is orga­nized two months after the pub­li­ca­tion of pre­fec­tur­al ordi­nances autho­riz­ing the start of pre-con­struc­tion of the air­port. Appeals were filed against these orders but do not have sus­pen­sive effect. How­ev­er, work has still not start­ed.

The inau­gu­ra­tion of the future Grand Ouest Air­port, orig­i­nal­ly sched­uled for 2017, is now con­sid­ered only “2019 or 2020″ by sup­port­ers of the trans­fer. Accord­ing to an Ifop poll pub­lished Sat­ur­day, a major­i­ty of French (56%) are opposed to the future air­port, 24% being pos­i­tive and 20% were unde­cid­ed.

This sur­vey was con­duct­ed on behalf of Act­ing for the envi­ron­ment, Attac and ACIPA, the lead­ing asso­ci­a­tion of oppo­nents to the project. The project of pub­lic util­i­ty in 2008, is jus­ti­fied by its sup­port­ers, PS as the UMP, includ­ing the risk of sat­u­ra­tion of the cur­rent air­port Nantes Atlan­tique.

 

 

Sources
http://t.co/RS8wSS9yRB” target=“_blank”>FranceTVinfo
Lemonde
7sur7