PARIS (AFP) — The Beijing Olympics flame was in Paris Monday amid high security and threats of "spectacular" protests after clashes in London where campaigners against China's crackdown in Tibet disrupted the torch relay.
A Chinese embassy advisor here said the flame's relay would be a "great festival" but media rights group Reporters Without Borders (RSF), which disrupted the lighting of the flame in Athens, has promised "symbolic, spectacular" actions.
The first reported incident came when pro-Tibetan activists shouted abuse at a man carrying a Chinese flag and tried to snatch it from him. Plain clothes police officers quickly intervened to separate the parties.
Pro-Tibetan activists began gathering for a day of protests opposite the Eiffel Tower, but not directly on the flame's route.
And Paris's Socialist mayor Bertrand Delanoe plans to unfurl a giant banner over city hall in defence of human rights.
The flame arrived in France late Sunday after a chaotic stop in the British capital, where police battled to keep pro-Tibet protesters away from the torch and made 37 arrests.
The flame was due to begin its route through the French capital at 12:30 pm (1030 GMT).
Police plan to secure a perimeter of some 200 metres (yards) around the torch as it is carried in relay by 80 runners on a 28-kilometre (18-mile) route from the Eiffel Tower to a stadium in the south of the capital.
The torchbearers will be protected by a cordon of 65 motorcycle police, 100 jogging firemen, another 100 police on roller blades and nearly 50 vehicles with more than 200 riot police.
RFS head Robert Menard has denounced the security arrangements.
"All that is missing is an appeal to Parisians to stay at home along the lines established in Beijing, where only officials welcomed the Olympic torch on a Tiananmen Square emptied of passers-by," he said in a statement.
The flame's Paris leg comes days after President Nicolas Sarkozy upped the pressure over China's crackdown in Tibet, refusing to rule out a boycott of the August 8 Olympic opening ceremony.
France's human rights minister Rama Yade appeared to set conditions for Sarkozy to attend in an interview published Saturday, demanding China start talks with the Dalai Lama and free political prisoners.
She later said she had been misquoted by Le Monde newspaper on use of the word "condition."
France's Foreign Minister Bernard Kouchner insisted Monday no conditions had been set for Sarkozy's attendance but repeated that all options were still on the table related to the Games.
"President Sarkozy has said that all options were open, all paths could be followed according to the evolution of the situation," Kouchner told LCI television news.
Beijing has faced international criticism over its crackdown on anti-Chinese protests in Tibet, which exiled Tibetan leaders say killed up to 150 people. China says Tibetan rioters have killed 18 civilians and two policemen.
The advisor in the Chinese embassy in Paris, Hu Changchun, Monday that the Olympic flame's relay here would be "a great festival for the French people and the Chinese people."
Any protests would come from a "tiny minority that was not representative of the French people," he told France Info radio.
The torch's "journey of harmony" through London was described as anything but in Monday's British newspapers, which saw it more as a victory for democratic ideals.
The mass-circulation Sun echoed other papers when it said "we are lucky to live in a country that values its citizens' right to hold lawful, peaceful public protests."
But China's state-run media voiced outrage Monday at "Tibetan separatists" who tried to disrupt the relay in London.
From Paris the flame leaves for the Americas, with stops in San Francisco on Wednesday and Buenos Aires on Friday, on the latest leg of a worldwide tour from Greece to Beijing.
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