Paris: migrants set up camp at Parc de la Villette to "make themselves visible"

Paris (AFP)

Some 120 migrants settled in the night of Thursday to Friday a camp in a Parisian tourist site, the Parc de la Villette, in order to "not remain invisible" and demand accommodation solutions, noted an AFP journalist .

Business packed into supermarket bags, strollers in hand, these migrants from all walks of life, including about fifty families, have planted their tents on the lawn located behind the Grande Halle de La Villette, a very busy and busy place during the day. summer.

All have in common that they have already been hosted by "host families", a "citizen" accommodation organized by the Utopia 56 association, which ended Thursday this solution because it "no longer wants to substitute for the state, "told Vega Levaillant, a local leader of the organization. "We want to make ourselves visible, so that the state takes its responsibilities," she added, using the light of his phone to facilitate the mounting of a tent.

"The 1,000 tents at the gates of Paris and dozens of families on the street no longer cause any indignation and are now part of the northern Paris landscape.To not remain invisible along the ring road and confined in a space of exclusion , these families have decided to settle in a real place of life in Paris, "said the association, which calls for" total, sustainable and unconditional accommodation. "

Squatting like other migrants close to the Ourcq Canal not to attract the attention of the security service, Awa Akpatcho, a 39-year-old Ivorian hopes the camp will bear fruit: "I sleep outside since 2017" and her arrival in France, sometimes in a train station or on the street, "except from time to time when Utopia finds me a family", explains this mother of two by giving the baby bottle to her 6-month-old daughter.

In July, a similar operation of the association in a neighborhood near the migrant camps of the north-east of Paris had resulted in "no solution".

This time, assures Utopia, the camp in a tourist place "has a vocation to last until a proposal" of accommodation is made.

© 2019 AFP