AJACCIO, France: Paris could offer Corsica "autonomy" to calm tensions between the Mediterranean island's fierce independence movement and the French state, a key minister said yesterday, but local leaders said actions must follow the promises. "We are ready to go as far as autonomy. There you go, the word has been said," Interior Minister Gerald Darmanin told regional newspaper Corse Matin as he embarked on a two-day visit following days of sometimes violent protests.

With President Emmanuel Macron seeking re-election next month, the offer from France's "top cop" will fall under especially close scrutiny from voters and rivals. "We'll have to talk about" what form a new Paris-Corsica relationship would take, Darmanin told news channel BFM, warning that "the talks will necessarily be long, necessarily be difficult". Whatever the result, Corsica's "future is fully within the French republic," he added.

Darmanin also said that "there can be no dialogue while violence is going on. A return to calm is an indispensable condition". The interior minister's visit follows repeated outbreaks of violence at demonstrations over a savage prison attack on Yvan Colonna, one of a group who assassinated Paris' top official on the island, prefect Claude Erignac, in 1998. Prosecutors said some 102 people were injured on Sunday alone, 77 of them police officers, during clashes in Corsica's second-largest city Bastia. Corsican nationalists have blamed the French state for the attack on Colonna, regarded by many as a hero of the independence cause.

But Darmanin said the convicted killer had been attacked by a jihadist fellow inmate over "blasphemy" in "a clearly terrorist" act. "This talk of a crime by the state is excessive, not to say intolerable," he told Corse Matin. Nevertheless, the government has already tried to soothe nationalist anger by removing an "especially notable prisoner" status from Colonna and two of his accomplices. That could allow for their transfer to a prison on Corsica rather than the French mainland, a key nationalist demand for all prisoners they see as "political".

'Prospects opened up'

Corsica's pro-autonomy regional council president, Gilles Simeoni, told AFP that these were "important words that open up prospects, but they ought now to be extended and firmed up". Simeoni, one of several elected officials Darmanin will meet in Corsican capital Ajaccio, added that autonomous status is "common law for many European regions and especially for all the major islands in the Mediterranean." The island would need "strong signals before believing" change was coming, regional parliament head Marie-Antoinette Maupertuis said.

Autonomist and nationalist Corsicans are frustrated that a reform of the island's status has been on ice since 2018. An Ifop poll published by Corse Matin suggested that around half of French people would back autonomy for the region, while 60 percent were opposed to full independence. But Macron's presidential rivals were quick to pounce on the proposal. Conservative candidate Valerie Pecresse said the president was "giving in to violence", while far-right leader Marine Le Pen accused him of "cynical clientelism" and rewarding the killing of Erignac.

"Corsica must remain French," she added. Darmanin will later visit a gendarmerie unit in port town Porto-Vecchio, which came under attack by demonstrators 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. But France has deployed an additional unit of 60 special riot police to the island as a precaution, the source added. - AFP