This time the French police arrived at 11 in the morning. But it ended worse than the previous time, on the evening of April 24: CRS agents – the anti-riot police – forcibly evicted the pro-Palestine students who had occupied the Sciences Po university in Paris since the day before. The other evening, 120 of them entered the prestigious university building on Rue Saint-Guillaume. Yesterday at noon the Paris police station announced that 91 students had been forcibly evacuated “without incident”, while the Minister of Higher Education Sylvie Retailleau asked the university presidents to guarantee the “maintenance of order” using “the maximum extension of the powers” at their disposal.
THE NEW EMPLOYMENT of the students had begun following the meeting on Thursday 2 May between the university administration and the student body: the convening of this meeting had been one of the students’ requests during the first days of occupation, accepted by the administration in that which the students had seen as a partial victory and a sign of openness to dialogue.
«Unfortunately the assembly was a farce» says Pierre (not his real name), a Sciences Po student who has been participating in the mobilizations of the Palestine Solidarity Committee for months, «it was supposed to be an opportunity for the administration and the community of Sciences Po to discuss together our requests and Sciences Po’s response to the situation in Palestine, instead the administration’s posture was that of a total unavailability to listen to us or open a further dialogue”. Among the main requests of the Palestine Solidarity Committee, an investigative committee on the partnerships between Sciences Po and Israeli universities: an issue on which the interim director Jean Bassères reiterated there would be no openness.
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At the assembly, the students also presented an open letter signed by over 1,700 students and former students of Sciences Po to complain about the university’s response to the situation in Gaza and the repression of student demonstrations of solidarity towards Palestine.
“WE WERE extremely disappointed with the situation and we have decided to occupy the university again to relaunch our demands.» Over a hundred students therefore spent the night in the historic headquarters of the university. «There were many more of us than last week» says Pierre, «we woke up with the news that the police had begun to arrive outside the university: the administration gave us an ultimatum, if within twenty minutes we had not agreed to leave demobilize and renounce any form of mobilization for the rest of the year, they would have let the police in.”
Around 11 in the morning, therefore, for the second time in just over a week, the police raided Sciences Po. «Some of us decided to go out in a group before the police entered, another of us sat in the hall, continuing the protest in a peaceful manner, crossing our arms and waiting for the police” says Pierre. The administration then closed access to the campus. Sciences Po in Lyon was also forcibly evicted and closed. Mobilizations also in Lille and Saint-Etienne.
IN THE LATEST weeks, student protests against the massacre in Gaza have become increasingly numerous and increasingly participatory, both in the United States and in Europe. In France, over the past week, many universities have been the scene of protests and occupations, in addition to Sciences Po, also the Sorbonne in Paris: most of these mobilizations were promptly cleared out by the police. «It is an unprecedented situation: after a few hours in which the students do not give in to all the university’s demands, the police arrive», says Pierre, «this thing has never happened at Sciences Po, but since he started talking about Palestine, it happened twice in two weeks.” In the afternoon, demonstration at Place du Panthéon, following the appeal of several student unions.
