In the shadow of the Summer Games, protests highlight the struggle to provide housing for France’s migrant community.
As a pink sun sets over the Place de la Bastille in central Paris, a group of protesters play 1960s Malian music and dance in a circle, while some slowly set up small red tents for the night. Next to the Olympic rings installed by the city for the 2024 Summer Games, the group hoists a large yellow banner from the trees on the sidewalk. It reads: “Stop repression, stop speculation, right to housing!”
The past weeks, international news channels have reported on what organizers have been warning about for years; in preparation for the Games, the government of President Emmanuel Macron has gradually forced thousands of homeless migrants to board busesand moved them to smaller towns in France to clear the streets for the Olympic venues and to accommodate the athletes and tourists. Unfortunately, this practice of mass expulsions and the eviction of marginalized and homeless people ahead of the Olympic Games follows the all too familiar approach taken over by previous host cities such as Beijing, RioAnd Tokyo.
Given the displacement, it is important to also tell the story of those fighting to stay, like the Bastille campers.
The group consists of migrants without a permanent residence. Many are on a waiting list for social housing years—some for more than a decade—and in the meantime they live among friends’ benches, hotels, the street, or abandoned buildings. As they roll a cigarette, one of the older members of the group tells me, “Our goal is to occupy a public space and remind both the city and passersby that we are here to stay, that we need housing, and that we are prepared to go to the end.” I point to the rings and ask what he thinks of the Olympics. He says, “I have no illusions. It’s for their pockets at our expense.”
The other sides of the coina collective of 90 organizations that focus on defending the interests of Paris’ most vulnerable during the Olympic Games, the city estimates that about 12,545 people (of which 3,434 children) from squats in abandoned buildings, tent camps and other historical alternative tier-ranks—third spaces and informal settlements. The government claims the evictions have nothing to do with the games, but this wave of evictions is a 38 percent increase from the previous year.
And that’s just the official count. Organizers on the ground claim the figure doesn’t reach into the thousands additional illegal or “self-deportations”, Where hotels terminated contracts so they could renovate before the influx of Olympic tourists or landlords would serve illegal eviction notices on their tenants so they could turn their homes into Airbnbs. “The evictions are defiant,” said Passynia Mondo, a spokesperson for the housing organization Right to housing“For families, it happens overnight. People are asked to leave the community where they have a job, where their children go to school. They are not given a choice.”
In France, individuals have a legal right to “rapid rehousing” shelter or social housing by the state when they are evicted or identified as homeless. Despite this rightA majority of migrants find themselves without housing or in detention centers upon arrival, with the likelihood of deportation as a result. The cities they have moved to lack the resources or political will to facilitate access to education or employment. In February, conservative mayor Serge Grouard of Orléans, a city in central France, condemned Macron’s government for sending more than 500 migrants to his city without warning or resources. “It is not the calling of Orléans to The Paris Crack Hill” he said, in a racist reference to the migrant enclave Porte de la Chapelle in ParisOn the left, Philippe Salmon, the ecological mayor of Bruz, a small town in Brittany, condemned the attempts by the state to set up a shelter on a polluted and dangerous locationwhich he called “unworthy conditions” for the migrants.
But you can’t just make people disappear!” says Orane Lamas, an organizer of CNDH RomeEuropea collective focused on informal settlements. “They won’t just leave the country. They’ll find another solution, but with more uncertainty, more of their personal belongings destroyed, further from their support networks and with more risk of violence.”
The campers at Place de la Bastille have been there for more than six weeks. Catching his breath between dances, a protester, Eric, tells me: “I work as a security guard for the mayor’s office and I’ve been on the streets since October 2022. I sleep in the metro station at Tuileries, but they closed everything for the Olympics. I was lucky to find the camp at Bastille. It’s not always easy, but I like Paris. My family is here, my work is here. I have to stay.”
On April 6thJust over a mile north of Bastille, after a series of camp evacuations in the weeks before, a group of about 170 unaccompanied, homeless minors, mainly from Ivory Coast and New Guinea, occupied The House of Metalsa 19th century cultural community center that organizes exhibitions and eventsThey established the squat to demand housing and to let the city and its inhabitants know that there were a large number of public buildings that could be used as shelters, including the buildings of the Olympic Village of Saint-Denis itself (where approximately one in three inhabitants are migrants). After several successful deportation defenses and building a support movement among constituencies and community groups, the minors agreed to leave on July 3 after the city committed to their demands: shelter for the entire duration of the Games in Paris and not to be separated from each other.
On the national holiday, when the major media published massive videos of the military parade and the Olympic flame being passed to hordes of tourists in Paris, minors organized an internationalist march through the city. Dressed in traditional clothing, and carrying instruments and flags from West Africa to Lebanon, they situated their housing struggle within the broader struggle of anti-colonialism. They called for an end to evictions and an end to the oppression of migrant social protections, among other demands. The collective made clear what their struggle represents in a recent statement: “We have shown that we are the solution, that we belong here… and that dignified housing in the heart of Paris is possible.”
Images via SOPA Images/Getty
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