NOT to be confounded with the jihadists who are often born and brought up in Europe but are willingly go to Syria, Iraq and Egypt and lay down their lives for their cause, the Zadists are quite a different phenomenon though their devotion to their mission is just as radical.
The history of the origin of the word is interesting. When the French authorities decided to build an international airport at Notre-Dame des Landes in the Brittany region, a sign was put up defining the area as Zone d’Aménagement Différé, or ‘zone marked for future construction.’
Ecologists, who do not agree with the idea of transforming the French countryside into industrial areas, changed the sign to Zone à Défendre, or ‘zone to be defended’. The expression caught on rapidly and developed into two new words — Zad and Zadist.
The Zadists say they are not convinced by the arguments of economic prosperity, more jobs and foreign investments. “What we can immediately see is that the airport, the highways that will be built to connect it with the cities and the new buildings that will surround it will swallow up kilometres and kilometres of our green countryside, an immeasurable expanse of our blue sky and our entire spectacular seascape.”
Though the project of converting the small Nantes landing strip north-west of France into a huge and busy international airport is nearly half a century old, work was actually to begin early 2013. But everything was brought to a halt as a good part of the area was taken over by the Zadists who planted their camps and started living there. They also brought in their chickens, cows and sheep to continue life in the old-fashioned way and in conformity with nature, as they say.
This movement is far from being a local phenomenon confined to Brittany only. Given today’s communications and transport facilities, the Zadists have spread their message of resistance all over the country and are equally forcefully opposing the construction of the Sivens barrage in southwestern France, the project of a high-speed train track from the city of Lyon, of a modern farm in the village of Drucat where thousands of cows are to be fed and milked by automats and many, many other modernisation projects in various parts of the country that they claim will end up destroying the environment. The Zadist movement gained further country-wide media coverage, and sympathy, as a young protester named Rémi Fraisse was killed in police action during a demonstration last October at Sivens.
Elena Bachelet, a sociologist, says the Zadists, like all pro-ecology groups, are fighting to save the future generations from heavy industrialisation and consumerist rule; but they are very different from other nature lovers as they have no jobs, no social and economic attachments and can quickly move with their families and animals from one end of the country to the other and settle down in a mode of perpetual, lifetime protest.
It is however wrong to assume, she insists, that all of them are nonconformist protesters out to create trouble. Of some 850,000 active Zadists in the country, many are traditional farmers whose generations old lifestyles are directly threatened by modernisation projects.
The latest twist to the campaign came on February 21 when 17 protesters were arrested in the city of Toulouse during a demonstration against the barrage project and local authorities lodged a legal complaint to have the Zadist settlers out of the site. The court decision is expected on March 6, but experts doubt if any action will be taken to evacuate the determined nature lovers at the risk of further bloodshed. The worst that can happen, they say, will be the confiscation of their cows and sheep. To which the Zadists reply: “We may lose our cattle, but they can never make us lose our battle.”
— The writer is a journalist based in Paris.
Published in Dawn, March 1st, 2015
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