/ 21 November 2007

Saboteurs hit French rail lines during strike

Coordinated acts of sabotage struck France’s high-speed trains on Wednesday, causing further delays to services already widely disrupted by strikes, as talks were to coax unions into ending their walkout.

The national SNCF rail authority stopped short of blaming strikers for the overnight vandalism, which it said included the burning of electric cables and damage to signalling systems. Labour unions quickly denied any connection.

Nevertheless, the attacks added a new note of ill will before the talks on Wednesday between unions and the companies worst hit by the strike — the Paris transit authority and the SNCF.

President Nicolas Sarkozy called the attacks unacceptable and ordered his justice minister to pursue those responsible.

The SNCF described the vandalism as a ”coordinated sabotage campaign”. The boss of the powerful CGT union, Bernard Thibault, condemned the attacks but also suggested they may have been designed to discredit the strike movement.

Train drivers and Paris transit employees have been staying off the job to protest against Sarkozy’s plan to trim their retirement benefits.

Sarkozy appears to have the upper hand in the test of strength with powerful transport unions — opinion polls say the public strongly supports the president and strikers have been trickling back to work on subway and long-distance trains.

Vandalism

Just more than half of the 700 normally scheduled fast trains were planned to run on Wednesday, the SNCF said. It said the acts of vandalism were causing delays of one to three hours for some high-speed trains.

The attacks appeared to be aimed at further crippling the fast-train network: vandals targeted lines connecting Paris to the western Atlantic coast, the east, the north and the south-east of the country.

SNCF official Mireille Faugere said electric cables running beneath tracks had been set alight and then reburied, making it harder to find and fix trouble spots. Vandals also stuck burning rags into railway signal boxes, Faugere said.

Interior Minister Michele Alliot-Marie said police were working to identify those responsible.

Talks between labour unions and Paris’ public transit authority kicked off early on Wednesday with a government representative present. Following the meeting, union leaders declined to call for an end to the strike, saying workers would vote on whether to resume work.

”We’re not going to play the role of firefighters for this pyromaniac government and it’s the workers themselves who are going to decide the next step,” said Gerard Leboeuf of the CGT-RAPT union.

The next round of talks with the RATP is scheduled for next Monday. Negotiations with the SNCF were slated for later on Wednesday.

The government hopes the opening of negotiations will prompt a full return to work.

Ranks

The SNCF said strikers’ ranks continued to dwindle on Wednesday, with about one in five of its workers still out. That was dramatically down from the first full day of the walkout, when the SNCF said 61% of its workers took part.

Striking rail workers in the Mediterranean port city of Marseille did not wait until the end of the first round of talks and voted on Wednesday to extend the strike at least until Thursday, an official from the CGT-Cheminot union said.

But workers in several smaller cities could vote later on Wednesday to resume work, union officials said.

After about a week of uncharacteristic silence, Sarkozy spoke out against the strikes on Tuesday, which he said were holding transport users ”hostage”. He pressed strikers to return to work and insisted that he would not back down on the retirement reforms — an opening salvo in his broader programme of economic, political and social change for France.

Sarkozy also faces resistance from students, whose protest movement against a recent university reform law has been slowly but steadily gaining in strength. About 35 universities were shuttered, blockaded or otherwise disrupted by protesters on Wednesday, a student union leader said.

The head of France’s main employers’ association, Laurence Parisot, described the transit strike as ”a real catastrophe for our economy”. The government estimates that the walkout is costing the country at least €300-million a day. — Sapa-AP