The decree provides for a ban for one month, between October 10 and November 10, in a “delimited” sector of the 10th and 19th arrondissements. Some associations helping the most deprived, which plan to attack this decision, see it as a desire to clean up the capital before the 2024 Paris Olympics.
“That helps out well. Whenever I go there, there is always an association that distributes something: soup, or rice and chicken. So now I don’t know how it’s going to work out.”. The years on the street can be read on Lala*’s face. HAS 46 years old, the Parisian knows the hot meals of the Jaurès and Stalingrad district well. But this Tuesday evening, October 10, Lala will not be entitled to her dinner.
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Suddenly signed by the Paris police chief, Laurent Nuñez, an order prohibits associations from distributing meals to the poorest. The measure should last one month, until November 10, in certain arteries of the 10th and 19th arrondissements of Paris, around the Stalingrad and Jaurès metro stations. According to the authorities, these distributions would encourage the concentration of migrant and homeless camps in the area. Installed near the Porte d’Aubervilliers, Lala is therefore begging. She knows too well the importance of having something to eat.
“It’s an ‘incitement to crime’”
“The first brain is the stomach. As long as you have not eaten, as long as you do not have a home, you cannot do anything”, testifies Lala. The forty-year-old cannot come to terms with this decision by the authorities, which is incomprehensible to her. “Removing food from the poor is paradoxical: it is an ‘incitement to crime’, between quotation marksbecause when you’re hungry, it makes you aggressive”she testifies.
Lately, Lala has been spending her nights in a social hotel in the area. A regular visitor to the area, she contradicts the idea that these meal distributions encourage new camps, or create trouble: “people, they eat and they disperse”. An opinion shared by another resident of the Stalingrad district. “There was no concern at all, in my opinion, in relation to these distributions.”
“What are they offering these people?”
In these neighborhoods in the north of Paris, poverty is certainly heavy, visible on every street corner. But local residents are worried about the situation of migrants get worse. “What do they offer these people in a more sustainable way?”asks Mickaëla, a resident of the north of the capital for 15 years. “Is it a solution to exclude people from these neighborhoods? Where do they go afterward?”
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HAS this question, Utopia 56 to his response. The association helping foreigners in an irregular situation and refugees denounces a desire to do “clean place”to hide the poor of the capital, in view of the next Olympic Games. “These are people who are going to be left to their own devices for a month! We don’t even know why a month!”
Hundreds of people deprived of meals
In a disaster, Abdenour Dadouche had to change the location of the meals his association distributes to the poor in the neighborhood. “A chorba for all” was set up two kilometers away and inevitably, this change of address disturbs the beneficiaries, fewer of whom knock on its door. “This evening, we distributed 150 meals while usually, it’s up to 500 per day!“
“This decree is like an injustice because many of these people returned without eating.”Abdenour is indignant. Also revolted, the Utopia 56 association filed an appeal to challenge the police headquarters’ order in court.
*The first name has been changed
“Many returned without eating” after the suspension of food distributions in certain working-class neighborhoods of Paris