From: Rusty�Bullethole, [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Times 23.8.00
Hunters open fire on French Green summit
FROM ADAM SAGE IN LARNAS, ARDECHE
AS A horn sounded, Simon Senouillet charged forward
to storm the Green Party Congress in Larnas in the Ardeche
region of southern France yesterday.
A volley of firecrackers sailed towards riot police
sealing off the site. A metal barrier followed. Several
hundred angry hunters hurled themselves into the first row
of police officers sheltering behind shields and fingering
riot control guns loaded with rubber bullets.
The violence flared as hunters from the Ardeche and
other rural regions reacted furiously to the start of the
Greens' meeting in the heart of a countryside that remains
attached to ancient traditions. The presence of people
they contemptuously describe as interfering townies was a
red rag to a bull.
M Senouillet thrust his immense frame up against an
equally powerful gendarme. Fighting broke out as the
sub-prefect, Jean-Claude Bernard, appealed for calm. The
police lines held firm and the hunters were forced to retreat.
"There are too many of them for us," said a
disappointed M Senouillet, 38, who spends his weekends
hunting wild boar. "We will never get to those ecologists
in there."
A few hundred yards away, inside the Imbours Holiday
Centre that is hosting the Green Party Congress, Jean-Pierre
Fouquet was eating a pizza royale. Articulate, opinionated,
middle class and a Green Party militant, he is the symbol
of an urban France that the hunters detest. "These huntsmen
are violent and vindictive and that is why we need
protection," M Fouquet said, signalling towards the 260
armed officers forming a ring around the tents and caravans.
M Fouquet is an environmental activist who works as an
engineer building roads for the local council. To him,
hunting "is just one problem among many, and not the most
important at that".
French dependence on nuclear power, agricultural
pollution and the Green Party's delicate relationship
with its socialist ally in the governing coalition are
far more significant, he said.
To rural France, however, there is no question that
burns more fiercely than restrictions on the right to hunt.
The left-wing Government Bill, passed in July,
shortening the hunting season by about a month, turned
much of the French countryside into a political tinderbox.
The spark that lit the explosion yesterday was the arrival
of Dominique Voynet, the Green Party leader and Environment
Minister. She has done little more since coming to office
than implement European Union directives to protect
wildlife. Under pressure from Lionel Jospin, the Prime
Minister, to appease a hunting lobby that won 7 per cent
of the vote in the European elections last year, she has
long since abandoned ecological extremism.
To M Senouillet, her mere presence in the Government
is a provocation. For him the politicians in Paris and the
bureaucrats in Brussels form a single hated mass.The Green
Party activists debated their participation in the
Government. "We are deeply divided over this issue," M
Fouquet said. "We recognise that we have not been able to
influence M Jospin anything like as much as we would like."
As he spoke, a hunting horn echoed through the trees,
stepping up the pressure on an ecological movement trapped
between pragmatism and ideology.
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