THOUGH still in good form, Dr Regis Barnavin decided to call it a day when he turned eighty early last month and went on retirement. His clinic, in an apartment that he owns, was situated on the ground floor of a building in Asnières, a picturesque suburb across the River Seine, north of Paris.

A truck was hired to shift the furniture and medical equipments donated to a public hospital. The doctor engaged an African immigrant to help the driver move the stuff.

The truck gone, the good doctor turned towards his worker: “Here are a hundred euros for you. I have to go home now. When you are done with vacuum cleaning, please lock the door and drop the key into the letterbox.”

Dr Barnavin placed an ad on the internet for the sale of the apartment and took a long weekend off to the countryside. On return three days later he found a number of responses and fixed an appointment for the next morning.

He met the prospective buyer at the entrance of the building and escorted him in. The key was there in the letterbox but when he tried to insert it into the door-lock it wouldn’t go in. After several attempts he took a careful look and found out that the lock had been changed.

Upon hearing movement inside, he knocked on the door and discovered that his former clinic was now occupied by a large family — two men, two women and eight children.

He called the police. The squatters in their turn called the rights association that had provided them the tip. Finally, it was Dr Barnavin who was the loser.

“You already have a roof over your head but these immigrants are houseless,” he was told by the association’s representative.

“But who’ll pay the property tax and electricity, water and gas bills?” asked a baffled Dr Barnavin.

“You will! You’re the owner.”

“But if I am the owner why can’t I get into my own…”

Any discussion was pointless. The police informed the doctor it had no power to throw the squatters out but he could go to the court and await a verdict that could take a few months … or a few years.

Such cases have become frequent in France but the biggest story that caught the media’s attention last week concerns Maryvonne Thamin, an eighty-three-year-old lady who owns a house in the north-western city of Rennes.

Madame Thamin had to leave Rennes to be close to a near-and-dear relative who was dying and stayed with him until his last breath. When she returned, she was unable to get into her house. It had been occupied during her absence.

It took the lady eighteen months, plus the lawyer’s fees, to obtain a court injunction ordering the squatters to leave the place. But now they also have a lawyer … provided by the rights association, you guessed it!

This story remains incomplete if we do not talk about the strike on May 22 by the staff of the world’s biggest tourist attraction. Yes, the Eiffel Tower was closed to the public on that day as people who work there were protesting against, guess who, the pickpockets!

An Eiffel Tower employee told a reporter: “Everyone, including the police, knows who these pickpockets are and where they live, but nobody dares to raise a finger against them as they’re protected by rights associations.”

According to media reports these gangs are gypsies from Romania who operate freely at the Eiffel Tower and other sites crowded by tourists. Each pickpocket makes something like four thousand euros a day!

Thanks to the strike, the police made several arrests last weekend. The question on everyone’s lips currently is: how long will these criminals remain in prison before the associations succeed in getting them out?

The writer is a journalist based in Paris.

ZafMasud@gmail.com

Published in Dawn, June 7th, 2015

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