Refugees Caught Up In Paris Clean-up Drive

"The police arrived at 7am and said to us 'get in the bus'," Ali, a refugee from war-torn Sudan, remembers of the morning that police raided the squat he was living in last April in northern Paris along with 500 other migrants

VitrysurSeine, (APP - UrduPoint / Pakistan Point News - 29th Mar, 2024) "The police arrived at 7am and said to us 'get in the bus'," Ali, a refugee from war-torn Sudan, remembers of the morning that police raided the squat he was living in last April in northern Paris along with 500 other migrants.

Despite having a job and refugee status, he was ordered on to the vehicle.

"We didn't have any choice," he explained.

Along with others scooped up at the disaffected office building, he was told he was being sent by bus to Toulouse -- a nearly 700-kilometre (435-mile) trip of seven or eight hours to the southwest.

"They (the police) went from room to room to tell us to get out, then they took our identity documents and said 'get in the bus'," he added in an interview with AFP. "It was impossible to get out of it. They were saying we had to hurry up."

Ali, who has a job as a cleaner at Disneyland Paris earning 1,400 Euros ($1,500) a month, had been caught up in the French government's policy of sending migrants from the capital to regional towns.

It was announced by French President Emmanuel Macron in September 2022 during a speech in which he criticised the idea of concentrating refugees and migrants in low-income and troubled neighbourhoods of Paris as "absurd".

Rather than adding strain to the stretched social services of these areas, he argued that asylum seekers and refugees could help reverse declining populations and labour shortages in other areas of the country.

Some charities welcomed the idea in principle, but worried about the implementation.

It caused immediate fury among anti-immigration politicians, and many charities now suspect Macron and his ministers of wanting to clean up Paris ahead of the Olympic Games this July and August -- which the government denies.

- 'Not our problem' -

Ali's experience demonstrates the difficulties of relocating people.

He didn't know Toulouse and, once he arrived there, he was taken to an asylum seekers' centre where he was told he couldn't stay for longer than four days.

Because he had already obtained refugee status, he was also informed that he shouldn't be there "along with 17 other refugees" who had been transported from Paris, he remembers.

"I explained that I didn't know where to go and that I didn't know anyone. They told me 'it's not our problem'," he explained from his new home, an office building in Vitry-sur-Seine in southeast Paris occupied by 400 migrants.

Soon after arriving in the southwest, he bought a return ticket to Paris and managed to save his job at Disneyland.

Abdallah Kader, a 51-year-old from Chad in northern Africa, was another person evacuated from the Ali's squat on the Ile-Saint-Denis, an area of Paris that will host the Olympic village during the Games.

Also with refugee status, he was sent to Bordeaux in southwest France, but decided to return to the capital soon after.

"I know people here. We help each other. I find work," he said in Vitry-sur-Seine where he sleeps in a small former office with another refugee.