DEPORTING illegal immigrants is turning out to be an expensive and violent business for the French government. Twenty two gendarmes spent the weekend in hospital in Marseille and Paris after being rescued by their interior ministry from Bamako airport in Mali western Africa.
All were injured when rioting broke out on the arrival of charter flight SF 480, carrying 77 Malians who had just been deported from Paris.
The Malians were enraged by Thursday's vote in the French parliament oh a strict new immigration law, as well as by their own expulsion. They got their revenge against the French authorities by so badly damaging the Boeing 727 aircraft belonging to a subsidiary of Air France that a second aircraft had to be sent to retrieve 47 gendarmes including the 22 wounded who had taken the outbound flight.
"The plane is dead," one of the crew members said. The return rescue flight was forced to stop in Marseille so that the two most severely wounded gendarmes could be taken to hospital there. One suffered an eye injury from a metal bar, the other a dislocated shoulder.
Since he took office in May 1995, the French Interior Minister, Mr Jean Louis Debre has sent 36 charter flights of expelled immigrants to Africa. The policy has been denounced by police unions, who say it is dangerous for them, and airline workers who object to the treatment inflicted on the deportees.
Immigrants are sometimes expelled on commercial flights. Last summer, a pilot refused to take off after interior ministry guards chained a Zairean to his seat. The African was hidden from other passengers by a curtain, but they could hear him screaming. The guards taped his mouth shut, but he continued thrashing about.
In other instances, deportees have been drugged to prevent disturbances. Two days before the riot, the CFDT Air France union wrote to the head of the airline demanding the right to refuse "to transport human beings in such conditions".
About 30 of the 77 deported Malians on the most recent flight tried to break cabin windows, knock down the door to the cockpit and tear out eats as soon as the plane touched ground at Bamako. When gendarmes began pushing the rioters out on to the tarmac, they grabbed tools, rocks or metal posts and charged back into the plane. Some attacked the outside of the aircraft, damaging an engine, denting the fuselage and breaking the cockpit window.
Malian police were dispatched to the scene, but were quickly overwhelmed by the rioters. Inside the aircraft, deportees seized the gendarmes nightsticks and beat their warders. The violence lasted for more than an hour.
The rioters were finally subdued and placed under arrest in Bamako. Four of the wounded gendarmes will require long term medical care, the interior ministry said, while the others will receive, psychological help. However with his new immigration law just nine days short of confirmation by the Senate, Mr Debre is unlikely to show much clemency in the future.
