Paris may offer autonomy to ease Corsica tensions: minister

Paris might offer Corsica "autonomy" to ease tensions between the Mediterranean island's fervent independence movement and the French state, Interior Minister Gerald Darmanin claimed ahead of a visit on Wednesday.

"We are ready to go as far as autonomy. There you go, the word has been said," Darmanin told the regional newspaper Corse Matin.

But he stressed that "there can be no dialogue while violence is going on. A return to calm is an indispensable condition."

As France prepares for a presidential election next month, violent protests have erupted in Corsica in response to a jail attack on Yvan Colonna, a member of a group that convicted of assassinating Paris' top official on the island in 1998.

Prosecutors said 102 persons were hurt in conflicts in Corsica's second-largest city, Bastia, on Sunday alone, 77 of whom were police officers.

Corsican nationalists have blamed the French authorities for the attack on Colonna, whom many see as a hero of the independence struggle.

Darmanin, on the other hand, claimed that the convicted murderer was attacked by a fellow inmate over "blasphemy" in an "obviously terrorist" act.

"This talk of a crime by the state is excessive, not to say intolerable," he told Corse Matin.

Nonetheless, the administration has already attempted to appease nationalists by removing Colonna and two of his comrades from the list of "particularly famous prisoners."

That could allow for their transfer to prison on Corsica rather than the French mainland, a key nationalist demand for all prisoners they deem "political".

Darmanin is set to meet elected officials in Corsican capital Ajaccio Wednesday, including the pro-autonomy President of the Regional Council, Gilles Simeoni, who expressed hopes for "a real political solution."

Corsicans are dissatisfied that a reform of the island's status has been stalled since 2018.

"The government's poor management of the Corsican question has created the extremely tense situation in which we find ourselves," said Marie-Antoinette Maupertuis, the Nationalist President of the Regional Parliament.

Darmanin will later pay a visit to a gendarmes unit in Porto-Vecchio, which was attacked by demonstrators on Friday.

During the Minister's visit, "We imagine that things will get lively, but we don't have a clear idea yet," one police source told AFP.

So far, just one demonstration has been planned for outside a local police station. However, France has deployed an additional unit of 60 special riot police to the island as a "precaution", the source added.