A year on from the opening of ‘la bulle’: an invisible crisis driven underground

CURRENT AFFAIRS

Alberto Biella, a tall and friendly post-doc student from Italy, has just finished overseeing a busy distribution with Solidarithé, a grass roots collective that distributes tea and information to newly arrived refugees in the north of Paris. It’s November and it is cold out, though nowhere near as cold as it will be soon.

“It is not easy for people to find somewhere to sleep. Police have been given instructions to remove people’s tents and blankets and throw them away, and it happens very frequently,” he tells me. “They have an instruction to remove people from this area, which they have to follow.”

Alberto is pointing out how his work has changed since August 18, when the makeshift encampment that had formed around the humanitarian centre at Porte de la Chapelle was cleared. The dispersal was followed by a two-week lockdown on almost all food and drink distributions, and accompanied by a reinforced presence of CRS (riot police).

The encampment had been unofficially divided into national communities: Sudanese, Afghans, Eritreans, Chadians, Somalis. Access to toilets and clean water was scarce and the camp was chaotic, foul-smelling and insalubrious — but it was also a place of friendship, laughter and solidarity.

“Before when people were on Boulevard Ney, there was a kind of community. Now the community is missing here,” Alberto tells me.

“When you have a community, even when it is on the street you have many advantages: people that distribute food know exactly where to go, people are fed properly.”

“For us, it’s very difficult to provide any information because every night you see different people, everything is faster, you can’t spend any quality time with people: it’s very difficult to help them now.”

La Bulle

Two hundred metres to the north, on the intersection of Boulevard Ney and Rue de la Chapelle, sits the white dome of the tented humanitarian camp known as ‘la bulle’ (the bubble). The centre was opened in November 2016 to much fanfare, following the destruction of the jungle at Calais. It was framed by Paris city officials as a new kind of refugee centre, offering short stays with a place for the weary to rest their legs, to get clean clothes and hot showers and to receive medical attention, before being processed and sent on to more permanent accommodation

From the outset, there were more people arriving than the 450-person capacity centre could house and process. This was, in part, due to logistical bottlenecks caused by an insufficient number of CAOs (Centres d'accueil et d'orientation) to send people on to, as well as complications caused by Dublin III: the EU edict that states that an asylum application should be carried out in the country where a migrant is first registered (so many who are fingerprinted in Italy, for example, face possible deportation).

The next day, I meet Anne-Marie Bredin for a quick lunch in a cheap and cheerful brasserie on Rue de la Chapelle, in sight of the camp. The former businesswoman runs Solidarité migrants Wilson, a collective that distributes daily breakfasts to homeless refugees in this area.

Like Alberto, she describes a fractured community of newly arrived migrants, constantly engaged in a game of “cat and mouse” with the police.

“Everyone knows the rules of the game now,” she says: “I’m a migrant. I lie down at 3 to 6 in the morning and then I get up at 6 and I fold my tents and I hide my blankets and I pretend I’m walking down the street.”

At the end of July this year, a newly elected Macron announced his intentions to have “no more women and men in the street and in the woods” by the end of 2017, along with plans to speed up the asylum process and to expediently send failed applicants back to their country of origin. Lowering his voice to a conspiratorial stage whisper, he tells me: “We live in a hyper-consumerist society, a society centered around the ‘click’. I had to invent a product people are prepared to wait for. It was my idea to teach people patience and generosity. I had to find something where people were confronted by a wait, and moreover, through that, they received a message of what generosity can be.”

They’re here

“Macron wrote that he wanted to see no one on the street by the end of the year, and he is deploying all he can to make sure that is true”, she told me. “People think the migrants are all gone. They’re not gone! It makes me crazy. They’re here”

She suggests that “what’s really happening is, by hook and by crook, [Macron] is making sure no migrants come to Europe”.

The president in July also briefly mooted the idea of setting up “hotspots” to process migrants in Libya before they get to European soil, though he later rowed back on the idea, which was met with criticism from Human Rights Watch and other NGOs.

Last week, UN human rights chief, Zeid Ra’ad al-Hussein declared the EU policy of helping Libyan authorities intercept people trying to cross the Mediterranean and return them to detention centres in Libya as “inhuman”.  

—-

Read the original article on OpenDemocracy.