DIARY
CHARLOTTE EDWARDES Returning to my hotel with a female friend on Tuesday night, we see a man illu- minated in the doorway. He approaches us. He is slim, olive-skinned, in his late twenties and dressed in a black suit. He asks politely whether the hotel is fully booked. It occurs to me fleetingly that this is strange: it's 2.45 a.m. and he has no bags. Nonetheless, I suggest he asks reception and he follows us through the hotel's glass doors. As I walk towards reception I feel a pull on my bag, so hard that I'm dragged back into the street. The man wrestles with me until, with one violent tug, he loses his balance and hits the ground, bringing me down with him. As I fall the contents of my bag — mobile phone, camera, wallet, make-up, note-pads, address book, diary — tumble out and scat- ter across the road. My shoes have come off and still he keeps tugging, lashing at me with his free hand and pulling my hair. Jumping to his feet again, my assailant drags me along the pavement, scraping my legs and arm on concrete until my screams, I assume, frighten him into flight. He sprints off and seconds later I hear the tinny buzz of a moped engine, accelerating away.
y friend has run to reception to raise the alarm, but the night porter (burly, six foot two), is hiding in a back room. He is unmoved either by my screams, or the pleas of my friend. In the now silent street, I pick up my belongings and, shaking, hobble into reception, my legs and arms bleeding and bruised, my foot swollen, my hair dishev- elled. Unable to contain my rage, I ask why the night porter hasn't helped us: two young girls ambushed on the threshold of his hotel. `It's not my problem,' he laughs. 'What can I do? This happens all the time. It's happened here before. No, I don't want to call the police, there's no point. Go to the station in the morning.' No, I am not in Caracas. This is the Cannes Film Festival — two weeks a year in which, in theory, the provincial town is full of glamour and famous people. My hotel, the Hotel de Paris, is in a back street 300 metres from the bustle and expensive shops on the Croisette. We argue with the porter, whose name is Jung Glauser, and who now claims that he has actually called the police but that they are not interested. We force him to call again. Two policemen arrive in minutes, rebuke the doorman for his reticence and tell us he lied about calling them the first time.
ednesday morning at the police sta- tion: my report has vanished. The French policeman sits languidly behind the front desk. Flicking through the night log-book, which resembles a child's exercise book, he says, 'There is no report of this. I cannot find it.' Persevering, I name the policemen we've seen, but he turns to start a conversation, clearly of a social nature, with a friend. After 15 minutes he addresses me again: `If you want to make a report you must do the fol- lowing: get a report from the doctor, go to Nice and get a report from the British con- sul, find a legal representative and get a translation of the incident, then take these documents to be stamped at the mayor's office. Only then will I see you again.' He adds sardonically, 'I am not an English bobbee, I am a French policeman.' Waiting beside me is a French girl who says she was sexually assaulted a week earlier. 'I've been here every day and I am greeted with the same indifference. The police don't want to register these cases. I think they are trying to keep the official crime figures down so that tourists aren't scared away.'
Thursday: My report is at the police sta- tion, but comes to light only after repeated inquiries from French friends. And I am not the only statistic French bureaucracy has tried to bury. Nicky Parker, 38, president of publicity firm Denmead Marketing, had to send a friend, a Cannes resident and friend of the local commissar, to report an attack on her in her hotel room. 'I woke up to see a figure at my balcony doors,' she tells me over coffee. 'I was naked in bed and started screaming. The man, wearing a stocking over his head, entered my room and started grabbing my belongings. I tried to snatch my handbag off him but I lost my grip and he escaped. The police looked around but didn't even take prints from the large hand mark on the balcony window. Thank God `There's one born every minute!' my friend got my report filed.' Earlier that night in the same hotel, the Sun Riviera, Liz Mackewitz, 41, head of sales for the Over- seas Film Group, woke to find a man leav- ing her room with her handbag. Other vic- tims include John Battsek, who slept through the robbery but awoke to find his Carlton Hotel room cleaned out. A girl at another small hotel found two masked men ransacking her room while she lay naked on her bed. Her fear was paralysing. 'When they left an inhuman noise came out of my mouth,' she recalls. 'I was so petrified I couldn't even scream properly.'
No warnings are issued by the police, but reports of the 'crime wave' are splashed across the local and trade press. They say that gangs of young men come up from Nice and Marseille to prey on the wealthy festival visitors. 'Cannes isn't safe this year, says Nicky Parker, who lives part-time in Los Angeles. 'The police have to insist that these smaller hotels increase their security. Indeed, though prices soar during the festi- val, the profits are not spent on security. Many smaller hotels are staffed by just one man during night hours. Though a police presence is felt along the Croisette, the main objective seems to be crowd, rather than crime, control.
Unprecedented levels of street vie; fence are also reported in the press. TO Magnusson, one of several Danes to have been accosted, was smashed over the head with a bottle outside a popular bar. 'I have been coming here for 29 years, but I never thought anything like this would happen to me,' he says. Riot police were called to the All Saints party on Monday. Gatecrashers attacked guests with bottles and ten people were seriously injured. One guest says, `There was blood and broken glass every' where. Tables were upturned and people were screaming. It was like a scene from a film.'
ommentators have bemoaned the lack of glamour at this year's festival. They se Venice is the 'new Cannes'. I think the problem may be deeper. We are familiar, with the cases of British citizens murdereo in France, many of them girls, and the anger of their families at the idleness of the French authorities. I now have my own al" dence, if more trivial, of French bureau' cratic indifference to crime against tourists' There is only one hope: that the resulting slump in business hits the pockets of the Cannes establishment, and they wake up to the fact that they have been robbed by their own muggers.
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