Hollande leads mourning for 130 victims of Paris attacks
Print Edition
FRANCE mourned the 130 people killed in the November 13 Paris attacks yesterday, with President Francois Hollande leading a solemn ceremony in honor of the victims.
Families of the dead from the country’s worst terror attack were joining some of the hundreds of injured at the Invalides, the gilded 17th-century complex in Paris that houses a military hospital and Napoleon’s tomb.
Hollande called on the French to display the red, white and blue French flag in their homes and they were selling fast in Paris ahead of the ceremony.
But some of the victims’ families are boycotting the ceremony, saying the government failed to take sufficient measures to protect the nation in the wake of the jihadist shootings in January.
“Thanks Mr President, politicians, but we don’t want your handshake or your tribute, and we hold you partly responsible for what has happened,” Emmanuelle Prevost, whose brother was one of the 90 killed at the Bataclan concert hall on November 13, wrote on Facebook.
The attacks on bars, restaurants, a concert hall and the national stadium were claimed by the Islamic State (IS) group.
Liberation and Le Parisien dailies yesterday listed all the victims on their front pages.
Hollande has spent the week in a whirlwind diplomatic bid to build a broad military coalition to defeat IS, although his efforts have met with limited success.
The marathon has taken him from Paris to Washington to Moscow in just a few days.
On Thursday, Hollande said he and President Vladimir Putin had agreed to coordinate airstrikes against IS.
“The strikes against Daesh (another name for IS) will be intensified and be the object of coordination,” Hollande said, adding that military action would focus on oil transport.
The future role of Syrian President Bashar Assad, however, remains a deeply divisive issue following the Kremlin talks, as Putin said the Syrian army was a “natural partner in the fight against terrorism.”
Hollande, however, argued that Assad “has no place in the future of Syria.”
Yesterday, French Foreign Minister Laurent Fabius said he could envisage Syrian regime troops taking part in the anti-IS fight. In order to fight IS, “there must be two measures: bombings... and ground troops who cannot be ours, but who should be of the (opposition) Free Syrian Army, Sunni Arab forces, and why not regime forces too,” Fabius told RTL radio.
He later said he meant that Syrian government troops could take part in the fight against IS only if the regime changed.
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