A prison assault last week that left prominent Corsican nationalist Yvan Colonna in a coma has triggered days of angry protests and whipped up resentment against the French state on an island with a history of separatist violence.
Yvan Colonna, once France’s most wanted man, remained in a coma on Friday at a hospital in Marseille after he was brutally attacked on March 2 by a fellow detainee serving time for terror offences. The assault has stoked anger in Corsica, where some still see Colonna as an icon of the island’s resistance against the French state.
The 61-year-old is serving a life sentence for the 1998 assassination of Corsica’s prefect Claude Érignac, the French state’s top official on the island. He was arrested after an almost five-year manhunt that took French investigators across the globe – only to find him living as a shepherd in the Corsican scrubland long romanticised as a hideout for patriots and bandits.
The Mediterranean island has been swept by angry protests since news of Colonna’s hospitalisation first broke a week ago, with a number of media outlets mistakenly reporting his death. Several protests have degenerated into clashes with security forces, fanning fears of a return to the violence and bloodshed that scarred the “île de Beauté” (Island of Beauty) from the 1970s to the turn of the century.
‘Martyr’ for the nationalist cause
Those decades of violence culminated with Érignac’s assassination near a concert hall in Ajaccio, the regional capital, in February 1998. The shocking murder marked the first time a French prefect was killed since the post was created two centuries before by the most famous of Corsicans, Napoleon Bonaparte.
“The assassination of the state’s representative in Corsica is a barbaric act, of extreme gravity and without precedent in our history,” said Jacques Chirac, French president at the time.
Source : france24
