Between 400 and 450 migrant people had to leave the building where they lived in the south-east of the city, after an operation that activists believe was linked to the Olympics
In Vitry-sur-Seine, south-east of Paris, the largest squat in the country was evacuated, a squat where between 400 and 450 migrant people lived, most of them asylum seekers or refugees. Local civil rights organizations accused the French authorities of carrying out the eviction to make a good impression on foreign tourists and media ahead of the Olympics, which will begin on July 26.
The building in question was the old abandoned headquarters of a bus company, is located a few kilometers from Paris Orly airport and had been occupied since 2021. The clearing operations began shortly before 8am on Wednesday morning and ended around 2pm without particular opposition. Le Parisien he writes that 100-150 people had already left before the arrival of the police, while another 300 were escorted out by the approximately 250 police officers who intervened, according to data from the prefecture.
The operation had been authorized by the department of the Marne Valley, the competent one, on the basis of future plans for the construction of a bus line. However, the main French left-wing parties, including La France Insoumise, the Nouveau Parti anticapitaliste, Europe Ecologie-Les Verts and Génération.s, noted in a joint statement that to date “no permit to demolish or build » in the area of the building and therefore «there was no reason to expel the inhabitants».
As he had remembered only a few days ago Liberation, the people living in the squat had been fearing the expulsion and subsequent demolition of the building for some time. They lived with improvised beds and mattresses placed on the floors, including in corridors and under the stairs, among dangling electrical cables and with cold water showers, with the assistance of the humanitarian organization United Migrants. They were mostly single young men from countries such as Sudan, Ethiopia and Eritrea, but there were also around fifty women and twenty children, at least half of whom went to school nearby.
Paul Alauzy, who works for the NGO Médecins du Monde, said that 80 percent of them were asylum seekers or migrants who had obtained refugee status, and who lived and worked regularly in France but had not found another place to live. Since last year, he has always been writing Liberationthe people living in the building had also doubled following the eviction of another disused building in Île-Saint-Denis, north of Paris, near the Olympic Village: in the building, which had been evicted about a year ago , about 500 migrants lived there.
«They are people with permanent contracts but to whom we don’t want to rent apartments. The only solution remains illegal occupation”, commented Alauzy.
The eviction of the occupied building in Île-Saint-Denis, on April 26, 2023 (REUTERS/ Layli Foroudi)
Now the evicted people have been offered temporary accommodation in other areas. In the square in front of the building on Wednesday there were some buses waiting to take them to Orléans or Bordeaux, hundreds of kilometers away from Paris, where many had jobs. Around fifty will be hosted in temporary reception centres, while the most vulnerable ones, around a hundred, have been moved to accommodation in closer departments.
Jhila Prentis, a United Migrants volunteer who was offering legal advice to the squat’s inhabitants, said evictions of this type had “increased” in recent months. In July, for example, another 150 people who had occupied an abandoned retirement home in Thiais, a few kilometers from Vitry-sur-Seine, were evicted. Since the building evacuated in Île-Saint-Denis is still empty and there are no concrete plans for the one evacuated on Wednesday, «the only conclusion that can be drawn is that they are trying to clean up the area for the arrival of the tourists and international media for the Olympics,” Prentis said.
“Not having a place to sleep is a problem that already existed before the Olympics, and it is a crisis that affects many European countries,” he noted, adding, however, that people who have refugee status and work regularly “should have access to adequate housing”. According to Médecins du Monde, the evictions «https://twitter.com/MdM_France/status/1780606531509043542 the health and social precariousness of people”.
– Read also: The bookshops along the Seine in Paris will remain there even during the Olympics
Continue on the Post
Tags: largest French squat evicted Paris Post
