The ZAD is an aeroport protest site in the west of France about 15 miles north of Nantes. The aeroport project was first proposed over forty years ago and has faced constant local resistance ever since. The project is in the hands of the multinational company Vinci, who also provide us with such « services » as prisons, motorways and nuclear power stations. It is the particular pet project of Jean Marc Ayrault, the former mayor of Nantes and current Prime Minister of France. In 2009 the area hosted a climate camp, since when the empty houses, fields and forests have been gradually filling up with people disgusted enough by the idea of this project to stay and resist. The reasons for staying are as diverse as the people but the occupiers are united by an idea that fighting capitalism is not just theoretical but something to live in practice every day.
Until the second week of October you could still arrive on the ZAD and tour around over 30 diverse squats spread across the two thousand hectares of threatened land. You could visit the beautiful straw bale house bakery which provided the whole area with free price delicious organic bread twice a week, the numerous collective gardens, the home made wind turbine to provide electricity, an incredible range of cabins on the ground and in the trees made from collected materials, and you probably would have been able to go to a concert, join us on an action, and come to a few workshops to learn to climb, or knit, or maybe build a rocket stove. Still, the most important thing for us is to be able to fight against this airport project as a way to show our resistance to consumer capitalism by our day to day actions.
Right at the moment though we don’t seem to be leaving ourselves much time for knitting workshops. On Tuesday 16th the large scale evictions of the place we call home started, and they weren’t messing around. Riot vans arrived en masse from six in the morning and had already evicted seven squatted houses and burned down a large cabin by ten o’clock in the morning. Approximately 1200 police were mobilized for this so-called ‘operation Cesar’, protecting the workers who use plain white vans, hiding their company names. Since then we have seen nearly all of those houses razed to the ground, and several other houses, cabins and homes evicted and destroyed. We have also nearly all inhaled a deeply unhealthy amount of tear gas and seen enough blue vans and uniforms to last a lifetime.
Although we cannot know what to expect next week it seems the evictions and destructions will continue, and we predict it will concern three more houses which are evictable from Saturday. We’re organising defences for the houses and cabins that remain, and a big party to share time with the people to came to support us, and because we feel there is still a lot to celebrate. Even if every day we see another house destroyed, we also see mountains of food, wellies, raingear, clean dry socks, tea, gas stoves, batter10ies, clothes and materials people come to bring us. With this added to all the messages, demos and actions of solidarity from all over France and various other countries, we cannot help but feel powerful.
There is a call out for solidarity actions on our website and we hope to unite a lot of people, including you, for the reoccupation demo the 17th novembre 2012. The struggle continues for us, and we welcome the support of those as disillusioned as us with this company, the state, and the control on our every day lives. It’s far from over, this is just the beginning.
Call out for actions during the moment of eviction of the ZAD
https://zad.nadir.org/spip.php?article403
new call out for occupation
https://zad.nadir.org/spip.php?article348
action to reoccupy the zad
https://zad.nadir.org/spip.php?article175
