On Thurs., Aug.17, dozens of French police sealed of access to a former university residential building in Chachan, a Paris suburb. The building was being used by over 1,000 people as makeshift housing. One cop was seen carrying a ram to break down doors, according to representatives of non-governmental organizations who witnessed the evacuation.
Some occupants of the building staged a sit-in, barricaded themselves in the building, and threw possessions out the
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Immigrant rights groups denounced the eviction: “It is again an act of racism by the French Minister of Interior Nicolas Sarkozy,” said Ousmane Diarra, president of the Association of Malian Deportees. Sarkozy infamously referred to Arab and African youth as “scum” when they rebelled against institutional racism, police brutality and high unemployment beginning in October 2005.
The university dwelling raided on Aug. 17 was initially occupied in 2001 by workers and unemployed people—many of them immigrants—who have been unable to obtain subsidized housing. The residents and their supporters resisted eviction since a local court first ordered it in 2004. Because of this resistance, the local police were hesitant to carry out the eviction order.
The order was issued on Aug. 17, ostensibly because negotiations broke down with the occupants. In reality, the evictions are part of a larger assault taking place on working class people in France, a war in which immigrants are the most visible targets. The racist Sarkozy has led an all-out assault on the immigrant population in France to silence the increasingly militant voice of this exploited sector of the French working class.
On Aug. 20, a fire raged through a hostel inhabited by the same neglected population, killing five people, including a young girl. This is the third fire in Paris hotels that house immigrants awaiting asylum and affordable housing. The two other fires claimed 37 lives. (Deutsche Presse-Agentur, Aug. 20)
There is a housing crisis in France; immigrants are among the most severely affected. According to the Paris city government, in 2005, there were 102,478 applications for the French subsidized housing program, which had only 12,000 apartments available. A third of the applicants came from immigrant families, who wait about twice as long as others to receive this benefit, if they get it at all.
One year ago, the International Herald Tribune quoted a 31-year-old African immigrant named Korotoum—who lived in an abandoned workspace northeast of Paris—as saying, “From the outside, France is the country of human rights, but the inside is less pretty. The rights are not for everyone.” This remains true today.
