The slum constituted an anomaly at the time of national confinement. More than 700 migrants, who lived in an insanitary camp in the Paris suburbs, whose hygiene and promiscuity were controversial against a background of coronavirus, were sheltered Tuesday morning.
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Agglutinated in single file close to the vacant lot of Aubervilliers (Seine-Saint-Denis) where they had set up their tents, 732 exiles, mostly men from sub-Saharan Africa, some draped in blankets and their belongings gathered in plastic bags, boarded buses that took them to gyms and hotels, an AFP reporter said.
Health protection
The operation, carried out as part of the fight against the spread of the virus, started before dawn. Under the orders of the prefect of Seine-Saint-Denis, Georges-François Leclerc, the police and gendarmes emptied of its occupants this site which remained Tuesday late in the morning littered with garbage, mattresses and makeshift huts.
"In the particular health context of the country, the operation was limited to sheltering these people, without examining their administrative situation with regard to the right to stay" and was carried out to "ensure the health protection of the most precarious populations (...) in particular by avoiding large groupings ", welcomed Tuesday evening the Minister of the Interior Christophe Castaner in a press release.
"We will ensure that the barrier measures are respected" during the sheltering, had explained to AFP Anne-Claire Mialot, prefect delegate for equal opportunities, during the operation, stressing that Upon their arrival in the gymnasiums or hotels in Ile-de-France, the migrants would be examined by the NGO Médecins sans frontières (MSF), to detect any symptoms of Covid-19.
Impossible “barrier gestures”
"It is crazy, in time of confinement, to have left people for so long in these conditions of unworthiness", was sorry on the spot Pierre Henry, director general of France Terre d'Asile, association operating the State. "Obviously, they must be sheltered", but for a long time, he lashes out, "of course people are surely infected and now they are evacuated in the worst conditions which are in terms of public health" .
By finding oneself in this situation "we pay months of inaction", abounds Louis Barda, head of Médecins du Monde (MdM) who has marauded several times in recent days on the camp. He mentions "some suspicions" of coronavirus among the people who were "confined in this camp by the police without anything, no water, no toilets".
"It is a very difficult operation," warned the prefect of 93 before the operation, calling on the police to "respect barrier gestures".
But quickly, AFP noted, this proved impossible: after a crowd movement, the exiles were ordered to huddle together, in contact with police and gendarmes without masks who let them pass to the account -drops to buses.
On arrival in the gymnasiums, "we will have to be careful not to go from one promiscuity to the next," warned Christian Reboul, Migration referent at MdM, recalling that such migrant camps still exist in the North, in Calais or Grande-Synthe.
In the early afternoon, MSF also tweeted that "sheltering in gymnasiums does not make it possible to correctly apply the health instructions of the Covid-19". “No screening capacity provided by the Ile-de-France ARS, great proximity and difficulty in maintaining isolation. These places must not become places of propagation ”, denounced the NGO.
Joining this observation, several organizations, including the Federation of Solidarity Actors, asked that "accommodation in the gymnasium be as short as possible", to favor "unconditional" solutions such as the hotel or the mobilization of vacant premises.
Other organizations, including MdM, Amnesty International and Secours Catholique, for their part called in an open letter to the Minister of the Interior to take into account the "health context" when applying the extension of the winter break also to these people.
"It would seem to us contrary to the general instructions relating to the management of this epidemic", they write, "to weaken migrant populations".
