Racist Attacks Cast Shadow Over French Liberation Celebrations

Paris partied to celebrate the 60th anniversary of liberation from Nazi occupation yesterday, but its mayor warned that, faced with a recent surge in racist and anti-semitic attacks, the city needed to recover the courage it had shown in the summer of 1944.

"If, 60 years ago, our elders were able, at a cost for some of sacrificing their lives, to rid themselves of barbarians, we must be capable today of not giving in to indifference, of defeating those who continue to insist that a person is different because of their race or religion," Bertrand Delanoe said on French radio.

"Those who, at immense risk to themselves, stood up and fought the racist ideology of the deportations, of the Shoah, were heroes," the Socialist mayor added. "We need their spirit today, at the start of the 21st century. It's an insult to their name to see swastikas still being daubed on walls in the city of Paris."

Mr Delanoe was speaking three days after arsonists set fire to a Jewish community centre in central Paris and scrawled anti-semitic graffiti on walls and furniture.

Visiting the gutted centre yesterday, the Israeli foreign minister, Silvan Shalom, said it "cannot be" that 60 years after Paris was liberated, "Jews will live under threat here".

France's interior ministry said 160 attacks against Jews or Jewish property had been recorded in the first six months of 2004, compared with 75 in the same period last year. "Surely if the lessons of the past are being celebrated so vigorously, it is in an effort to contain the further spread of contemporary woes," the left-leaning Liberation said in an editorial.

Kicking off yesterday's events, tanks and troops lined up on the Place de la Concorde for a military ceremony at which the president, Jacques Chirac, decorated three veterans of the 2nd Armoured Division, the first allied force to reach the city.

There was also an emotional re-enactment of the raising of the tricolore on the top of the Eiffel Tower, and a festive procession by two military columns which retraced the paths through central Paris taken by French and US forces to finally seize control of the city.

Mr Chirac presided over further ceremonies, one at the Paris police headquarters, where he unveiled a plaque commemorating the surrender of German forces by their commander, General von Choltitz; and another at the city hall, where schoolchildren read essays written by the pupils of 60 years ago and an actor read the farewell letters of resistance fighters who had been sentenced to death. More than 1,400 Parisians, including 582 civilians, were killed in the battle for their city, and 3,200 Nazis died.

Two huge popular balls, in the Luxembourg gardens and on the Place de la Bastille, rounded off the celebrations last night, with city authorities inviting Parisians to dance the night away to swing and bebop bands - dressed, if possible, in their 1940s finest.