Sébastien Lecornu announces the dispatch of 70 gendarmes and 10 additional GIGN members

Reinforcement in Guadeloupe. Overseas Minister Sébastien Lecornu announced Monday, November 29 in Pointe-à-Pitre the dispatch of a squadron of 70 mobile gendarmes and 10 additional members of the GIGN, to deal with violence during the social crisis in the archipelago. “We must hold on, allow the police to regenerate” and “proceed to unblocking”, he justified.

After meeting the inter-union very quickly, the minister called, during a press conference, for a “collective awareness” about the violence that “target the police”. There are “wounded policemen”. “When we shoot and water 9 millimeters in the streets”, it is “a miracle that a child of 9 or 10 years old” not be “found under these bullets”, he insisted. “There are dams on which gas cylinders have been installed, it must be said”, he assured.

The minister criticized union officials who “began to want to seek amnesties for those who deliberately wanted to murder police or gendarmes”. According to him, they are participating in a “dangerous junction between what happens at night and during the day” during the social movement. The member of the government sees it “one of the big differences with what is happening in Martinique”, or “the situation is in no way comparable”.

In Guadeloupe, “more than 120 arrests” have been carried out since the start of the crisis, he said. And “the judicial authority recorded in one week an activity equivalent to three or four ordinary months”.

“I want to cringe at those cartoons saying ‘to a social problem you respond with RAID and GIGN’. Stop and enough of these cartoons!”

Sébastien Lecornu, Minister of Overseas Territories

in press conference

“When you rush on a scooter, stop alongside a door of a police vehicle and try to empty your magazine in the head of a police officer or a military gendarmerie, it has nothing to do with a firefighter or a caregiver who does not agree with the vaccination obligation “, he concluded.