FRANCE: France's new Prime Minister, Mr Jean-Pierre Raffarin, said he wanted his cabinet to "get off to a running start". His number two, the Minister for the Interior and Security, Mr Nicolas Sarkozy, took Mr Raffarin at his word, attracting media attention with an overnight visit to the high-crime world of the Paris banlieues.
Mr Sarkozy started in the Seine-Saint-Denis department, whose postal code "nine three" is synonymous with delinquency. At Saint-Ouen, site of the Paris flea market, the minister visited a dilapidated police commissariat which he promised to refurbish this year.
"Your devotion is all the more remarkable when one sees the conditions you work in," Mr Sarkozy told the brigade. Two men in the unit were shot last winter.
Driving through the council housing estates of Bobigny at around 10 p.m., Mr Sarkozy's small convoy was booed and had stones thrown at it. In the Bosquets neighbourhood of Montfermeil, the patrol happened upon a burning vehicle, a nightly occurrence in the slums.
The minister asked policemen what they would change first. "Not finding the kids we arrest at night on the street the next morning, and being supported by our bosses," they replied.
In the Val-d'Oise countryside handled by the gendarmerie, Mr Sarkozy reassured gendarmes that although they would be supervised by him, they would retain the military status they had under the defence ministry. The police and gendarmerie have long been rivals, maintaining separate records and forensic laboratories.
After midnight, Mr Sarkozy watched an anti-prostitution raid on the boulevard Bèssieres, near the Paris ring-road, where young women from eastern Europe are concentrated.
Mr Sarkozy (47) is so ambitious he's often compared to a shark. He wanted to be prime minister but took Mr Raffarin's appointment philosophically, saying: "I'm 10 years younger than the others, and the others are lazy."
The left-wing Magistrates' Syndicate has expressed concern that "rights and civil liberties may be sacrificed in the interest of superficial efficiency in the field of public order, and that justice may be considered as a subordinate accessory to police action".
• In Karachi, the Defence Minister, Ms Michèle Alliot-Marie, visited survivors of the suicide bombing which killed 11 French defence industry workers and three Pakistanis on Wednesday. The wounded were met by Mr Raffarin at Orly airport yesterday.
