The video, published on the website DailyMotion and broadcast by CNN news, shows police dragging screaming African women along the ground, including one with a baby in a sling on her back beneath her and another apparently pregnant.

The local Seine-Saint-Denis police authority rejected charges of brutality and said the eviction in La Corneuve, north of Paris, was carried out “in relatively good conditions.”

According to Michael Hoare, a spokesman for the advocacy group Right To Housing, most of the affected immigrants hail from the Ivory Coast. “Most of them have been in France for between 3 to 10 years. Some of them have papers, some of them don’t. They have submitted demands to be legalized,” Hoare told CNN. He note that no serious injuries were reported.

Further excerpts from the article France crime crackdown targets foreigners by Raphael Hermano (AFP)

GRENOBLE, France — French President Nicolas Sarkozy vowed Friday to crack down on foreign-born criminals, pushing his “war on crime” amid fear of violence between police and immigrant minorities.

Sarkozy vowed to strip foreign-born individuals of their French nationality if they attack police or public officials, in the wake of deadly shootings and other violence between police and suspects in largely immigrant districts.

His declaration coincided with evidence of violent behaviour by the authorities themselves: a video of French police violently evicting Africans from a squat in a suburb of Paris.

Michel Tubiana of the French Human Rights League said Sarkozy was “singing the old tune of the 1930s, aimed at stirring up hatred against foreigners” — a reference to fascist persecution in Europe between the World Wars.

The spokesman for the opposition Socialist Party, Benoit Hamon, told AFP that Sarkozy “is overwhelmed by insecurity, swamped by the failure of his simplistic policies” and fishing for far-right votes.

Sarkozy’s approval rating among the French is low at just 35 percent, a poll by Ipsos showed last week. He has also struggled in recent weeks with an embarrassing party funding scandal implicating his Labour Minister Eric Woerth.

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