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Rights: for Some Immigrants, City of Lights is a Deadly Hell

Posted on: Tuesday, 30 August 2005, 21:00 CDT

PARIS, Aug. 30, 2005 (IPS/GIN) -- "It's a shame to live here," says 34-year-old West African immigrant Chantal, a mother of two.

"Here" is a dirty and decrepit room in the attic of an old building in southern Paris. Chantal, her husband and her children share the room with rats and cockroaches. Showers and toilets are located outside, and shared by others in the building.

"I am afraid of taking a shower here, or to relieve myself, because the bathrooms are so filthy," Chantal says. "I fear I'll catch a disease."

Chantal and her family share the crumbling house with some 250 other West African immigrants, mostly from the Ivory Coast. Their fate is that of hundreds of thousands of immigrants, most from sub- Saharan Africa, but also from north Africa, who live in inhuman conditions in Paris and other cities in France.

Over recent weeks the picture of filth also became a story of death. Three fires in such buildings over the last four months killed 40 African immigrants and injured more than 100.

On Aug. 29 a fire in a building in the historic heartland of Paris killed at least seven people and wounded more than 10. Among the victims were children and pregnant women. All were immigrants from the Cote d'Ivoire, or Ivory Coast.

Four days earlier a fire destroyed a building in the 13th district down Chantal's street, killing 17 people, all immigrants. Fourteen of the victims were children.

A fire in a crumbling Paris hotel April 15 killed 25 people and wounded more than 60. The victims were immigrants from Tunis, Algeria and West African countries.

The living conditions of immigrants are closely associated with their legal status, and with the repression launched by governments since the mid-1990s, says Jean Claude Amara from the group Droits devant! (Rights first!)

"If you are an illegal immigrant in France, you simply cannot get proper housing," Amara told IPS. "In addition, although the government at all administrative levels has known of the conditions of housing for immigrants for years, authorities have neglected maintenance and security in there."

City officials agree. Pierre Aidenbaum, mayor of the district where the Aug. 29 fire broke out, acknowledged at a press conference that "the victims lived here under dangerous, unacceptable conditions." Aidenbaum said a thorough renovation had been planned for September.

Paris Mayor Bertrand Delanoe has admitted to major health problems in numerous buildings across the city.

Some officials say residents are not offered alternative housing when their buildings are renovated. "We should stop treating people as though we still lived in the 18th century," Yves Contassot, deputy mayor of Paris in charge of social housing, told IPS.

But some of the housing difficulties could have arisen because many of the immigrants have very large families, one expert said. "Because male immigrants came mostly from rural areas in Senegal, the Cote d'Ivoire, and other West African countries where polygamy is widespread and considered a normal way of life, they were confronted with major difficulties in adapting to urban life in France," anthropologist Jacques Barou told IPS.

Traditional polygamy in West Africa means that all spouses must be treated equally, he said. "Therefore men could not come with just one spouse but came with several. The families are very large, with all the constraints that imposes on lodging."

Add to that the poverty of these families and the negligence of authorities in maintaining such buildings, and you have a dreadful urban lodging landscape that leads to filthy conditions and sometimes deadly fires.

But tragedy for some immigrants has meant opportunity for others.

Mohamed, a 34-year-old Tunisian immigrant, lived in France for more than 10 years without a residence permit. After the April fire in the run-down hotel where he lived, he got both his permit and a better place to live.

Source: Global Information Network

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