FRENCH POLICE EVICTS HUNDREDS OF MIGRANTS AMID COVID-19 FEARS

Wed 18 November 2020:

French authorities cleared up a large migrant camp in the north part of Paris on Tuesday. The illegal encampment was next door to the French national sports stadium, the Stade de France, in the suburb of Saint Denis.

Police said they were motivated by safety reasons, in light of the current COVID-19 pandemic. NGOs assisting the migrants at the camp said some 2,000 people were living there, including families with children.

Dozens of police were deployed to carry out the operation on Tuesday, which took place in the midst of a nationwide coronavirus lockdown.

Those who tested positive were to be placed in isolation while those who tested negative were to be taken to various shelters and sports halls around the French capital.

The figure was confirmed by French Interior Minister Gerald Darmanin, who said the inhabitants were living in “miserable conditions.”

“These camps are unacceptable,” Paris police chief Didier Lallement told reporters, adding that those migrants who were cleared to remain in France would be given accommodation but that those without bona fide asylum claims “were not destined to remain on French soil”.

The evicted migrants were predominantly asylum seekers from conflict zones, including Afghanistan, Somalia, and Sudan.

Some 70 buses were laid on to take them to 26 shelters.

‘Locked down outdoors’

The head of the Paris branch of the Medecins du Monde NGO, Louis Barda, expressed concern for migrants living in squalid camps “where respecting barrier gestures is impossible”.

“These people are being locked down outdoors,” he said.

The medical charity Medecins sans Frontieres (Doctors without borders) carried out a sample test last month on 800 migrants living in different migrant centres in the Paris region where it provides assistance.

One in two, 50.5 percent, tested positive for Covid in ten temporary shelters, the survey showed.

MSF blamed the situation on overcrowding.

French police have cleared dozens of camps in recent years around Paris. But amid a lack of housing opportunities for asylum-seekers, new makeshift settlements keep reappearing.

Critics of the French migration policy say the evictions are purely symbolic political move, to show that the state cracking down on migrants, but without actually addressing deeper issues.

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