Paris - The French call it the "Isle of Beauty," but the Mediterranean island of Corsica has been a painful thorn in side of the French for more than 30 years, since its separatist movement grew violent. Over the past three decades, relations between the island of some 280,000 people, which is one of France's 95 departments, or administrative regions, and the central government in Paris have grown increasingly tense, and now practically not a day passes without an act of violence committed in Corsica in the name of independence.
On January 21, for example, two homemade bombs damaged branches of the French banks Credit Lyonnais and Credit Agricole in the south of the island, bringing the number of banks attacked on Corsica in less than a week to four.
On the same day, police announced the arrest of three youths, including one minor, suspected of having set a fire in the Regional Parliament building in Ajaccio on January 12.
On that day, two days ahead of a visit by Prime Minister Francois Fillon, dozens of nationalists occupied the building to demand the grouping together in one prison of all incarcerated nationalists and an end to what they called "police repression."
When he arrived on the island, Fillon said, "What happened here, at the Regional Parliament, is unspeakable and incomprehensible. We are in a democracy."
The Corsican nationalist movement grew out of the severe economic problems the island experienced in the 1950s, a period marked by a drastic increase in the number of people leaving Corsica for greener pastures, mostly on the mainland.
The early nationalist groups demanded more money from the state, to help them out of their economic impasse, and greater respect for local culture, such as the teaching of the local language and history in local schools.
There was also growing resistance to the sale of Corsican property to financial interests from the French mainland, and the use of mainland materials and labour for island tourist sites.
An early nationalist leader, Edmond Simeoni, expressed the frustration of many Corsicans when he said, "The loveliest areas of Corsica were handed over to the real estate speculators and industrial tourist agents, who are now destroying the local hotel business, commandeering the beaches and mutilating the countryside without producing any real profit for the inhabitants."
Friction increased with the arrival of French settlers from Algeria who installed themselves on the island for wine and fruit cultivation.
On August 21, 1975, a group of about 20 separatists, led by Simeoni, occupied the wine cellars near the city of Aleria owned by one such inhabitant.
Interior Minister Michel Piniatowski ordered 2,000 riot police officers and gendarmes, aided by a number of armoured vehicles, to attack. Two gendarmes were killed in the shootout, Simeoni was imprisoned and several nights of violence followed in which a policeman was killed and many were injured.
This incident marked the radicalization of the separatist movement and led to the founding, in May 1976, of the hardcore Corsican National Liberation Front (FLNC).
A series of terrorist attacks on government buildings on the island and the mainland followed, and they have not ceased since, with hundreds registered every year, many of them also targeting holiday villas owned by non-Corsicans.
But, despite the many attacks, there were very few fatalities. However, on February 6, 1998, the French government's highest representative on the island, Claude Erignac, was shot in the back of the head and killed on the way to a classical concert.
Erignac's murder was the first time a prefect had been killed in cold blood since the legendary French Resistance hero Jean Moulin was tortured to death by the Nazis in 1943. It put the Corsican problem at the top of the French government's concerns and marked a peak in the campaign of separatist violence.
In 2003, in an effort to defuse the separatist violence, the French government held a referendum on giving Corsicans more say in their own affairs.
The referendum proposed the creation of a single regional assembly with thepower to levy taxes and take greater control over public services.
The French government campaigned hard for approval of the proposal, but the plan was narrowly rejected.
This failure prompted Nicolas Sarkozy, who was then Interior Minister, to say: "The status quo will remain. It has now been shown again how difficult the path of reform is in Corsica."
