PARIS: With hundreds of migrants and asylum seekers packed in tents alongside a Paris canal and under a nearby bridge, charities are warning of the risk from drowning and violence if the authorities do not act to tackle makeshift camps.

Two young men — one Afghan and one probably Sudanese — drowned in the canal this month from the camps housing more than 2,400 people by the Canal St Martin, a trendy area known for hipsters having picnics along its banks on sunny days.

“If this situation continues, there will be other dramas, there will inevitably be deaths. And therefore I call on the public authorities to act, and give shelter to the people who are there,” said Pierre Henry, the director of the France Terre d’Asile charity.

Some bathe in the canal’s unsanitary waters, while the mobile phones and subsidies handed out by authorities to some of the asylum seekers are the target of attacks, with knives used as weapons to obtain them, said charity volunteer Pauline Doyen.

“There is too much crazy people. I see, look, this is my face. I fought yesterday here,” a 24-year-old Pakistani man, who gave his name as Suleiman, said in broken English.

The Paris municipality and government disagree on how to tackle the situation and blame each other for it, drawing criticism from charities.

Published in Dawn, May 17th, 2018