Calais: “We will not let ourselves be taken away!”

Statement from Housing for All Calais

Since Friday 4 February, we have been occupying a building in Rue d’Ajaccio, which has been uninhabited for a year. This occupation took place within the framework of the commemoraction, an international day of mobilization initiated by the families and relatives of people who have died at the border, to denounce the murderous migration policies of the UK, France and the EU.

In Calais, about 1500 people are living on the streets in unacceptable living conditions. Displaced people occupy wastelands and have no access to basic services: housing, sanitation, water, food and medical care. The state imposes conditions of extreme precariousness and invisibility through illegal evictions every 48 hours, the theft of personal belongings by the police, the illegal dismantling of living sites without the possibility of defense in front of a judge, and recurrent police violence. The French and British governments, alongside Natacha Bouchard and all their other friends, have deliberately turned a political issue into a humanitarian crisis, keeping people who want to cross the border in a context of survival. [Read More]

Calais: Communiqué from Housing for All Calais

Housing is a right, even in Calais.

We are a group of people from different countries fighting for everyone’s right to dignified and safe housing. We are currently occupying, for over 48 hours, some of the many buildings in the city of Calais that sit empty and wasted while people sleep on the streets.

We occupy these spaces hoping to break the vicious cycle of state and police violence and dehumanisation that continues in Calais and across the world to enforce national borders. We aim to create an open space free from state violence and discrimination, where someone’s administrative status has no impact on their ability to have their basic needs met, experience solidarity, and live in dignity. [Read More]

Pertuis: trial of the ZAP, call for support

Pertuis (France) – We are mobilizing against the 86 ha extension of the commercial zone of Pertuis and the artificialization of agricultural land that it will generate.
For 3 weeks, we have been occupying houses, destined to be destroyed, to fight against this project.
We are appearing in court (what an injustice!).
Come and support us this Thursday 16 December at 2pm, in front of the court of Pertuis. [Read More]

Pertuis: The ZAP once again under attack, we will not surrender

Pertuis (France) – This morning Roger Pellenc carried out his threats at the ZAP (Zone à patates), where we are occupying several houses to fight against a project to extend a commercial zone and the capitalist world that engenders it. A shovel escorted by six municipal policemen came to destroy the gate of the common house as well as the fence and the hedge along the street and seriously damaged the reception hut that we had built in the last few days. All this under the hilarious look of the municipal police.

Some people from the ZAP witnessed these actions, a comrade tried to get between the shovel and the gate. The driver of the machine threatened him and continued his work while putting him in danger. Then the police tried to arrest him. In the morning, prolonging the pressure of the municipal police, a helicopter of the gendarmerie turned a lot around the houses. [Read More]

Pertuis: No shovels at the ZAP!

Pertuis (France) – This Wednesday 8 December, one of the houses next to the ZAP (Zone à patates) was destroyed. The company commissioned for the work was accompanied by the municipal police and the gendarmerie. This same company tried to demolish the gate of the common house. They threatened several times to come back and announced in particular that “all the other houses would be destroyed in the week”.

We wish to inform Mr. Pellenc, who does not seem to be aware of this, that the four houses still standing are occupied by four different groups of inhabitants for whom this is the only habitat, and that these occupations have already been reported. They are not evictable in their current state, and any attempt to force their eviction or demolition would therefore be perfectly illegal. [Read More]

Pertuis (France): Opening of the ZAP

[Quick translation with the help of DeepL from fr.squat.net]: The extension of the commercial activity zone of Pertuis (84) threatens the neighbouring agricultural land, as well as the local inhabitants who risk expropriation. In order to prevent this harmful project, we decided to live in one of the houses destined to be destroyed, thus launching the Pertuis ZAP (Zone à patates).
[Read More]

Montreuil: Support Le Marbré – Let’s Defend our spaces – Attack the city of the rich

Le Marbré opened its doors in september 2020, since then the marble dust and rockwool has made room for a living space and a space of radical autonomous* and self-organized political organisation. Diverse ideas carrying a discourse against market logic, against capitalism and all oppression , on the search of a rupture with the state and all existing cross and meet in this space. Some of the bigger lines around which people around Marbré organize are housing, anti-gentrification, social struggles, prison, specism, feminism and borders. The place is organised through an open general assembly and happy to welcome new people and groups.

Some words on the situation
We met a first eviction in february 2021, but successfully reopened the building the next day which gave us a lot of strength. Since september 2021 we are facing a new threat following our eviction process. The ruling received in june 2021 admitted us cumulative delays of 3 month + a 2 months grace period + the winter eviction break(1.11-1.4.). But the bailiff seems deaf on that ear: he signed a request to leave the space by september 23. [Read More]

Montreuil: vicious eviction of the Maison de l’Ermitage by the City Council?

We share here the leaflet of the “Support Committee for the Maison de l’Ermitage of Montreuil” of September 28, 2021. Return on a strange practice of eviction in the city of Montreuil, accompanied by a history of the place… Meeting on Saturday (October 2nd) 2pm at the Parole Errante to organize solidarity! The Ermitage is a place of life, of self-organization, but also the backstage of many solidarity initiatives in the city of Montreuil and in Paris! Let’s defend the Ermitage house!

Since 2018, the house at 18, rue de l’Ermitage was occupied. Property of the Montreuil City Council since 1990 and until then rented to relatives of successive mayors, it had remained vacant since the arrival in power of Patrick Bessac, but the situation of housing distress of Ms. Fahima LAIDOUDI, her son and other occupants without housing had led us to squat it. Since this summer, talks were underway with the mayor’s office and the prefecture to resolve the housing problems of its occupants and to decide on a collective future for this house, which should not be sold off to real estate developers, but used for the common good. [Read More]

Lyon: for immediate and permanent rehousing of those evicted from the Feyzin squat

Press release following the occupation of the Clémenceau gymnasium on Thursday 16 September, feedback on the course of the occupation and the negotiations with the prefecture.

On Thursday 16 September at 7:30 am, the eviction without prior notice of the Feyzin squat was allowed by a huge police force. It seems that neither the prefecture, nor the DDCS, nor the Ofii, nor the Metropolis, nor the Salvation Army, considered it necessary to warn the inhabitants of an operation which seemed to have been planned for weeks. Many people had, the day before, left the squat after the information had leaked, for fear of the police intervention. They were therefore not taken into account in the accommodation system (despite social diagnoses which normally lead to care even in the absence of the inhabitants at the time of the eviction). The figures given by the prefecture and the press are therefore largely underestimated. Out of 120 to 150 people counted in the squat, only about 50 people were taken by bus to the Chabal barracks, an accommodation center in Saint Priest known for its undignified reception conditions. If 14 people “refused” the offer of accommodation, it is because it was conditioned to an assisted voluntary return, which simply consists in accepting to be deported. Do we have to remind the prefecture once again that these people are here to stay and that neither their presence nor their right to unconditional accommodation is negotiable? At the end of this operation, and without counting the people who have been lost, at least thirty people, alone or with their families, found themselves on the street that day. [Read More]

Notre-Dame-des-Landes (France): The Mohawked Salamanders Burn Down the Salamander’s School – Why We Attacked the Zad

“I simply didn’t see where the inevitable reformism was coming from this time, discreetly but surely, from those who speak of insurrection and autonomy by the thousands of copies.”
Quote from “The movement is dead… Long live reform”, November 2017.

The Zad was our pirate ship, the mother of all Zads. It emerged in a time with no way out and it was as if the world became a little more bearable. Like a brief glimmer of light, a possibility breaking through the thick, sticky fog of our future. For those of us who lead full and busy lives, off the beaten track, it was the knowledge that there would always be a place to welcome us if we were on the run. A place where the state would never come for us. A place where we would always find allies to feed us, to clothe us, to hide us in the folds of its hedges.

And this very state, which crushes us, kills us, hunts us, was given the Zad three years ago by a handful of opportunists. Those who, only yesterday, claimed this territory as being in “secession”.

This despicable betrayal, which took place behind the backs of those who confronted the police on the barricades, cannot be forgotten. Even less so when the local Comintern has come up with a project for an École des tritons [salamanders'(1) school], to celebrate the three year anniversary of what they call victory.

Rebuilding on the Planchettes(2) then? How can we not exult in rage at this umpteenth provocation? How can we not cry vengeance for the devastated East? [Read More]

Lyon: occupation of the Clémenceau gymnasium for immediate and permanent rehousing of those evicted from the Feyzin squat

This morning, Thursday 16 September, around 7:30 am, without prior notice, more than 20 vans of the national and municipal police, CRS units, PAF (Border Police), accompanied by representatives of the prefecture, the town hall, DDETS/DDCS, Ofii and the Salvation Army, deployed a huge operation to evict the Feyzin squat, the former Georges Brassens school. Since February 2020, the place was sheltering 100 to 200 people, families and isolated people, and was under pressure, threats and lawsuits from the owner, the multinational Total.

No one, neither residents, nor supporters, nor associations, had been officially warned of the intervention. Most of the inhabitants were not able to recover all their belongings. Would it be more important for the institutions responsible for providing unconditional housing for everyone to protect Total’s image from yet another scandal than to respect the residents and their right to housing? [Read More]

Paris: Call for a rally in front of the 20th district police station after the eviction of a squat

A building located at 124 rue de Belleville, belonging to the city hall of the 20th district and empty for several years, was squatted to make it an anarcha-feminist space as well as a living space for about ten people. The place was evicted this Wednesday and 8 people are in custody.

For a long time, everything has been done so that the district of Belleville and its surroundings are reserved for the rich. Rents are constantly rising, cheap fast food is replaced by trendy bars and restaurants with ever more expensive drinks, migrant workers’ hostels have been transformed into controlled social residences, the authorities are sending more and more cops into the streets to wage war on the poor, etc. [Read More]