Police evict migrants from disused French office block ahead of Olympics

The Telegraph carries an article about French policemen who evicted hundreds of migrants from an abandoned building in a Paris suburb in a move aid groups described as “social cleansing” ahead of the Olympics, Caliber.Az reprints the article.

French police evicted hundreds of migrants from an abandoned building in a Paris suburb in a move aid groups described as “social cleansing” ahead of the Olympics.

Over the past three years, 450 people, including 50 women and 20 children, have moved into the empty three-storey office block, described as the largest migrant settlement in France, in Vitry-sur-Seine.

After days of warnings, 250 police officers carried out the evacuation early on Wednesday, breaking open doors and sending people to board buses to other parts of France including Pays de la Loire, Orleans and Bordeaux, far from the capital.

Images showed people boarding buses with their belongings packed into suitcases and rucksacks, mothers with prams and suitcases, and a heavy police presence of officers in full riot gear. 

Most of the migrants were men from Chad, Sudan, Eritrea, Guinea and the Ivory Coast.

Aid groups condemned the eviction, pointing out that up to 80 per cent of the building’s occupants were legal migrants who had permanent jobs but lived there because they were either having difficulty finding an apartment or were waiting for social housing.

Mohammed, an Eritrean with refugee status, works in electrical maintenance and holds a permanent contract but said he could not find housing. 

Amid a housing shortage, a property index report from Deloitte last year found that Paris was the second most expensive rental city in Europe after Dublin.

“Where am I supposed to go?” the 40-year-old asked French news site France Bleu.

Paul Alauzy, spokesman for the NGO group Médecins du Monde (Doctors of the World) also criticised the evacuation, saying it was nothing more than an attempt to make Paris more photogenic for the Olympics, which take place in 100 days.

“We have been seeing a wave of expulsions for a year, which is accelerating,” he told France Bleu. “There are people on the streets who are being removed from Paris and the Ile-de-France region, before the arrival of the cameras of the whole world, to hide poverty.”

A year ago, 500 migrants were evicted from a disused building in Seine-Saint-Denis, near the Olympic athletes’ village, and last July 150 were people kicked out of an abandoned retirement building in the department of Val-de-Marne.

The city has said unauthorised, makeshift camps must be dismantled for hygiene and security reasons.