PARIS: After a rash of fires struck immigrant housing buildings around Paris, killing at least 63 people, most of them Africans and about half of them children, the squatters at 10 rue de Tanger took turns staying up late, keeping an eye out for anyone who might try to torch the dilapidated building they call home.
“You have to think that if a fire starts at the bottom of the stairwell, no one’s going to get out,” said Mohammed Fofana, an unemployed 29-year-old from Ivory Coast who lives with his wife and two small children in a back room on the fifth floor.
“We had people staying up until 3 or 4am keeping watch.”
Paris police said they were unsure whether any of the four blazes since last April were meant to target immigrants. But Fofana and about 50 other African residents of this run-down building in northwest Paris, abandoned by its owners and commandeered by squatters more than eight years ago, aren’t taking any chances.
In late August, 24 immigrants were killed in two fires that consumed buildings remarkably similar to this one, with dozens of legal and illegal immigrants packed into sweltering, rancid rooms with jury-rigged electric systems and inadequate water and sewer services. Arson is suspected in at least one blaze, a police spokesman said.
The fires moved the government to action, though occasionally in seemingly opposite directions. Interior Minister Nicolas Sarkozy announced he would immediately seek to evict all squatters, who according to private estimates number up to 5,000 in Paris and its suburbs. It remained unclear where the people would go; the city has no alternative housing for them.
Two days later, Prime Minister Dominique de Villepin promised to build 5,000 government-subsidized apartments in the city in the next two years.
Some social workers and immigrants call the capital’s housing crisis a symptom of a much larger problem: the alienation of immigrants, especially blacks from France’s former West African colonies, who live apart from French society after years in the country.
Patrick Doutreligne, director of the Abbe Pierre Foundation for the Housing of the Underprivileged, said Sarkozy’s eviction programme was ‘scapegoating the victims and trying to lay the responsibility on them, even though they are the least responsible’.
He criticized the government for not giving immigrants ‘the keys to life in a city, the keys to French life’. French authorities too often build small apartments that are unsuitable for immigrants, who typically have larger families, he said.
“Their only choice is to live in unsafe housing.”
Marilou Jampolsky, an official with SOS Racism, a private group that fights discrimination in France, said, “There is discrimination against foreign people, against large families, against black people.”
Sarkozy, a presidential hopeful, defended his eviction policy in a recent interview on French TV. “I don’t regret it,” he said. “Facing the proliferation of fires, what was there to do?”
“It’s not the government that is discriminating against these people,” said Patrick Weil, an immigration specialist at the National Centre for Scientific Research and the Sorbonne in Paris who occasionally advises Sarkozy.
“It’s the housing market that’s terrible to black people. Apartment owners discriminate against them.” —Dawn/ The Washington Post News Service
