Excerpt
The migrant centre was in the quartier of Beaux Arts, which lies along a concrete riverbed, where a sickly stream, un pissoulet, trickles sea-wards between concrete walls covered in angry graffiti. The river has never recovered from when it was still the river Verdanson, and the tanneries along its banks threw skins and guts into the water to be carried away into the Mediterranean.
At the address of the centre, a queue of people waited in the sun with anxious eyes. They had faces and languages from all over the world. They wore the badge of the stateless; their hands clutched worn out folders. The sun beat down, and they glanced expectantly at a rolling garage door made of links of metal which should open any minute now. No one knew it then, but in 2015, this was the beginning of the migrant crisis. Listening to phrases of Arabic, Ukranian, Albanian, it was like being there in the dust when God flung out his hand and knocked down the tower of Babel.
A few metres away in the polished window of a salon de toilettage, a woman in an apron decorated with cartoons of dog varieties, swept up clouds of dog hair and glanced towards us. Outside on the pavement, a proud owner took photos of his Lassie look alike who had been tenderly shaved.
At 2pm, the metal grate slid upwards, cracking and creaking until the opening was wide enough for the crowd to elbowed its way through and I pushed alongside them.
We crammed into a waiting room which was bare apart from a few plastic chairs. Paint peeled off the walls in large blisters. On the wall above our heads, a poster read ‘il n’y a pas d’étranger sur terre’ – ‘there are no foreigners on earth’. There were too many people, and it was hot and smelt of sweat.
“I’ve come to volunteer,” I said to the woman in her late 70s who was directing the crowd. Sweat had dampened her dyed blonde hair above red, flustered cheeks.
“Go through and see Madame Dubourg in the back room,” she said without looking at me as she wrestled with a tower of folders.
The back office looked like something from a 1970s spy movie that would end badly. One lone computer with a bulky plastic body sat like a toad in a corner. Metal filing cabinets from another era lay in wait to rip at elbows and hips. An ancient photocopier looked like it would only bring trouble.
At a desk in a corner, a woman in her 70s sorted piles of papers. She was immaculately dressed in an ironed white shirt, blue cardigan, pressed trousers and polished pointed shoes. She looked like she should be somewhere else deciding important matters, either in the government or in the courts of law and indeed, I would find out that she had been a lawyer. Around her neck shone a small gold cross.
“Je suis Françoise, long-term volunteer here at the CIMADE.” She shook my hand firmly and smiled more warmly than her chic clothes made me expect.
“First, let me tell you about our organisation. It was created in 1939. At that time, young French Protestants were inspired by rebels in protestant churches in Germany who proclaimed that no fuhrer in the world would have more control than Jesus Christ.”
Francoise pointed at a piece of paper tacked onto the wall amongst the shelves.
“They were inspired by the words of Martin Niemoller, one of those rebels. He was the commander of a German sub-marine in the first world war, but then became a rebel theologian and pastor. The Fuhrer had him imprisoned in Sachsenhausen and Dacaus for 8 years. He wrote:
First, they came for the Communists
And I did not speak out
Because I was not a Communist
Then they came for the Socialists
And I did not speak out
Because I was not a Socialist
Then they came for the trade unionists
And I did not speak out
Because I was not a trade unionist
Then they came for the Jews
And I did not speak out
Because I was not a Jew
Then they came for me
And there was no one left
To speak out for me
Francoise continued, “French Protestant student groups decided to help the people who were fleeing Alsace-Lorraine, away from the Nazis. The Alsacians were seen as foreigners by the French. They were put into camps. There was one just south of here, near Perpignan, at Rivesaltes.”
Years later, I visited the camp. It was on dry and desolate plains squashed between the sea and the foot of the Pyrenees. The ground is scorched from the sun and the site is blasted by the tramontane wind as if it tries, but fails, to sweep away the past.
Francoise continued, “Over the years, the Rivesaltes camp held every type of immigrant and refugee. It held Republicans from the retirada in Spain. Then it held the Alsace-Lorraines. Then it held tziganes–gypsies.”
It was like she was reciting a strange poem.
“In the 1940s it held the juifs. In the 1960s, it first imprisoned the Algerians who fought against the French, and just after that it shut away other Algerians, harkis, who had fought with the French.
“The story of the harkis is particularly shocking. In Algeria, they were seen as traitors. France took them in to protect them, but didn’t know what to do with them. So they were put into camps. At the camp of Rivesaltes there were 22,000 of them, shut up for years in permanent exile, waiting while France figured out what to do with them.”
Video footage from the 1970s shows a strange ceremony which took place each Wednesday inside the camp. Lines of harkis wait outside an office in the dust. Some wear second-hand clothes from the Red Cross. Others have put on their French army uniforms, from when they fought alongside the French in World War Two. A great wooden door swings open, to reveal a desk, and two French fonctionnaires, guarded by a bust of semi naked Marianne. The man wears a black robe, with a white tie like a high court judge and at his side, a secretary, a woman in a plaid shirt and permed hair, waits a pen poised in her hand. The judge beckons and a harki man is shown in; he stands like a child in front of the teacher’s desk.
Like a bored actor without conviction, the judges asks “You want to keep the French nationality?” and the harki man replies quickly like he too has rote-learned the script ‘oui, monsieur le juge’. He signs a piece of paper, and is shown out, only to be asked the same thing again the following Wednesday. It is as if, each Wednesday, the French state hoped that the harkis would have a sudden change of heart and decide they would return to their homeland, so that France would no longer have the problem of knowing what to do with them. Instead, they became the first of the Chibani who stretch out their days with cups of mint tea in Plan Cabanes.
Other videos from the camp that break the heart show children, many of them who were born in the camps and grew up there thin and ragged singing in the dust of the wind off the Pyrenees: ‘Sur le pont d’Avignon, on y danse, on y danse! on y danse tous en rond.’
Françoise continued, “Here at today’s CIMADE we help the sans papiers, those without papers. Some of them are refugees. Some of them are illegal immigrants. In France there are an estimated 400,000 sans papiers. No one wants to admit it, but they help to hold up the economy of France.”
“We help people navigate the process to apply for papers. Once we get them into the system with their application, they may stay on French soil while their fate is being decided. As everything administrative is so slow in France, that gives them at least a couple of years. Eventually if they’re very, very lucky, they might get some kind of visa.”
“We transcribe their life stories. The judges look at this story and decide whether France will accept them as refugees. They need to have been subject to war, persecution of racism, sexism, homophobia. For the courts, the worse their story, the better.”