Students March in Paris to Mourn Colleague; Call for General Strike Fails

Tens of thousands of French students, holding back any elation over forcing Premier Jacques Chirac to give in to their demands, marched through the streets of Paris on Wednesday behind a black, wordless banner that signaled the mourning in their triumph.

Although hailed for humbling Chirac by forcing him to withdraw his university reform bill Monday, the students decided to stage the previously scheduled march anyway--not as a celebration of victory but as a protest against what they insist was police repression.

Some demonstrators carried an oversized replica of a French national identity card with a picture of Malik Oussekine and the legend, “Murdered by the Police.”

The death of Oussekine, a 22-year-old student, after a post-midnight beating by police last week embittered the students, radicalized their movement and shook the Chirac government. After two more days of stubborn insistence that the country needed some university reform, if only a little, Chirac finally capitulated to the students.

Strike Call Unheeded

But a student call for a general strike to accompany their march went largely unheeded. Most union members obviously saw little point in a strike after the main battle was over and won. Union leaders and prominent Socialist and Communist politicians, however, did join the march.

Most political analysts were convinced that the student victory had been turned into a considerable political victory for Socialist President Francois Mitterrand, who told a nationwide radio audience Tuesday night that he had asked Chirac several times to withdraw the bill. Mitterrand sounded condescending as he complimented Chirac for finally doing the right thing “in time, a little late, but in time.”

The student demonstration began in the Place Denfert-Rochereau on the left bank of the Seine River, not far from the hospital where Oussekine died, and continued for three miles to the Place de la Nation on the right bank.

Families of the Wounded

Marching at the head of the demonstration were families of students wounded in the previous week. Many family members and other marchers wore buttons with the slogan, “Never Again.”

“We have gotten what we wanted,” said David Assouline, the spokesman of the student leaders, “but Malik is dead, and we cannot forget that. We are going to show en masse that we will never accept anything like that again.”

To prevent any outbreaks of violence similar to that of the last week, which the students, President Mitterrand, and many journalists have blamed on outsiders, the paraders had their own private guard made up of students and members of the Communist-run General Confederation of Labor. A special unit of white-helmeted lawyers, doctors and other professionals also joined the parade to be ready in case of violence.

The students had objected to the Chirac government’s university reform bill because they were afraid it would allow the country’s universities, all state-run, to develop separate, elite curriculums that might make it more difficult for them to graduate.

Faced with the unexpected, swelling and powerful mood of student discontent, Chirac also decided to slow down government consideration of the rest of his legislative program, including a controversial nationality bill that would have made it more difficult for children of immigrants, even when born on French soil, to obtain French citizenship.

Chirac’s political position was further undercut Wednesday when former Premier Raymond Barre, one of the most popular conservatives in the country and a probable conservative rival of Chirac in the 1988 presidential election, said that Chirac had been trying to move too fast in social change.