Paris could offer Corsica “autonomy” to ease tensions between the Mediterranean island’s fierce independence movement and the French state that erupted this month, Interior Minister Gérald Darmanin has said. of a visit on Wednesday.
“We are ready to go as far as autonomy. That’s it, the word is said,” Darmanin told the regional newspaper Corse Matin.
But he added that “there cannot be dialogue while the violence goes away on. A return to calm is an essential condition.”
As France heads for a presidential election next months, violent protests erupted out in Corsica in pursuit of a savage prison attack on Yvan Colonna, one of a group who high parisian assassinated official on the island in 1998.
Prosecutors said some 102 people have been hurt on Sunday alone, 77 of them police officers, during clashes in Corsica second-most grand city Bastia.
Corsican nationalists blamed the French state for the attack on Colonna, considered by many a hero of independence cause. But Darmanin said the convicted killer was attacked by a fellow inmate over “blasphemy” in a “clearly terrorist” act.
“This talk of a crime by the state is excessive, not to say intolerable,” he told Corse Matin.
Nevertheless, the government at already attempted to assuage nationalist anger by removing a “particularly notable prisoner” Colonna statute and two of his accomplices.
It could allow for their transfer to a prison on Corsica rather than metropolitan France, a key nationalist demand for all the prisoners they consider “political”.
Darmanin is set meet elected civil servants in The Corsican capital Ajaccio on Wednesday, including the pro-autonomy president of the regional council, Gilles Simeoni, who expressed hopes for “a real political solution”.
Autonomist and nationalist Corsicans are frustrated that a reform of the status of the island has been on ice cream since 2018.
“The government mismanagement of the Corsican question has created an extremely tense situation in where we meet,” said Marie-Antoinette Maupertuis, the nationalist president of the regional parliament.
Darmanin will later visit a gendarmerie unit in port city of Porto-Vecchio, which came under attack by protesters on Friday.
During the minister’s visit, “on imagine it will come alive, but on does not have clear another idea” one a police source told Agence France-Presse (AFP).
Until there just one a demonstration is planned for outside a local police station.
But France has deployed an additional unit of 60 special riot police on the island as a precaution, source added.
