Purgatory In Paris

At 8:30 a.m. on October 12, 2018, a queue was beginning to form in front of the big sturdy door of 82 Avenue Denfert-Rochereau, where the reception center is located. The line quickly comprised about 250 men. Sihame Amar, the chief services officer, decides who are the most eligible ones to enter and determines how many migrants can be hosted per day. The policy is first come first serve. Many are not accepted because of limited space.

There were approximately 300,000 refugees in France in 2016 according to the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees. Around one fifth of those were asylum seekers. Agence France Presse recorded a total of 97,300 people who were granted asylum in 2016, 35.1 percent more than the previous year. The acceptance rate is 28.8 percent, with 93.8 percent acceptance for Syrians and 80.6 percent acceptance for Afghans, according to the Office Français de Protection des Réfugiés et Apatrides. The Paris agglomeration is the biggest concentration point for migrants in France.

From Monday to Friday, a usual day for migrants at the Grands Voisins cultural center begins with a shower, then collecting their clothes to be washed by the laundry staff, playing ping pong and having lunch on the house. The purpose of the place is to provide basic daily needs for them, as well as medical care and information concerning their rights.

Les Grands Voisins, an initiative run by the charitable association Aurore, began on the premises of about 20,000 square meters of buildings and 15,000 square meters of open-air space in the 14th district of Paris. Between 2015 and 2017, they consistently hosted at least 600 migrants a night. Between 2018 and 2020, about less than half of the space is available; only about 100 people are hosted a night.

Les Grands Voisins began due to a mayoral decision to remove asbestos from the walls of the Saint- Vincent-de-Paul hospital, after scientists discovered that inhaling its fibers over a long period of time produces scarring (fibrosis) of the lung. Simon Laisney, the founder of Les Grands Voisins helped finance the project by having several events a month, a bar open seven days a week, monthly flea markets, along with government subsidies. In March of 2018, a nuns’ residence building next to the complex was also made available after they were vacated and the town hall took the decision to allow Aurore to take over the premises for humanitarian services.

They decided to make it a day reception center. Since the opening, more than 7,800 migrants, mainly from Afghanistan and Sudan, have been taken care of. The Dublin Regulation has been problematic for them. This European Union (EU) law determines which EU Member State is responsible for examining an asylum seeker’s application for international protection. According to it, asylum seekers may be transferred to another country for their application to be processed.

In the Grands Voisins courtyard, I started by introducing myself to Mahmud. Notunderstanding me, he called over his English-speaking friend SaydAllah, along with a few others. They were from different parts of Afghanistan. Mahmud and his closest friend are from Nangarhar, a province situated east of the capital. The others are from Parwan and Logar, also provinces surrounding Kabul, where Mahmud is from. They left because they felt unsafe. In 2015, according to Amnesty International, civilian casualties were at their highest level in Afghanistan, and European governments were “forcing increasing numbers of asylum-seekers back to the dangers from which they fled, in brazen violation of international law.”

One of the men standing in the circle, Shinwarai, a friend of SaydAllah’s had “witnessed more than a

dozen deaths back in his province back in Afghanistan. He left in 2015,” his friend SaydAllah told me.

He left his hometown after working as a truck driver for NATO in one of their refineries for nearly 10 years and raising a family. What made him shudder was the murder of his uncle by members of the Taliban. His uncle was sleeping in a truck near a parking lot before being spotted bythe terrorist group, moments before they attacked him. After his uncle’s death, his maternal uncle could not bear seeing him in danger and repeatedly advised him to leave the country.

There was also a lot of tension from corruption. Shinwarai feared becoming the subject of abuse by the police or by armed groups. He said it was dangerous to take sides and that powerful groups such as the Taliban, corrupt police officers or other militias would do harm just to show ruthlessness.

The UN Assistance Mission in Afghanistan (UNAMA) recorded 1,592 civilians killed and 3,329 injured in the first six months of 2015, while 70 percent of civilian casualties were attributed to the Taliban and other armed insurgent groups, and 16 percent to pro-Afghan government forces. According to Amnesty International in 2016, the Taliban increasingly attacked soft and civilian targets.

In April 2015, Shinwarai decided to flee the country and go to Europe without a particular destination in mind. He gave a few thousand dollars to a “coyote,” someone who takes migrants from one country to another illegally, who was supposed to take them past Western Europe. They took five months to get there in a group of dozens of men, walking through forests and deserts, taking a bus here and there. He had a swollen foot. His food supply came to an end while he was trying to get through monitored areas in Turkey and he was forced to eat the barely-edibletree leaves that were around him. He was desperate to find a country where he could live without torment.

He traveled through Iran, Turkey and Bulgaria, ending up in Serbia, where he was asked for his identification in a train station. He did not have anything to show. The border guards did not take him into custody and did not try to ask him any further questions, “They just put me in a train without giving me anything!” What followed was a 32-hour train ride, which was easy compared to what he had been through. He was willing to stay in any country if it would give him asylum.

He arrived in Stockholm alone, separated from his group. The first thing he did was to go find a migrant reception center and learn about the procedure to ask for asylum. His patience was put to the test. He only had a mattress to sleep on and some food. He got a job painting walls for little money for some Afghan immigrants who ran a business and wanted some extra money. He started thinking maybe this could be it, maybe he could have his life there, acquire citizenship, work in a legitimate business and send money back home to his wife and kids. But things moved slowly.

Two-and-a-half years passed without him hearing back from the center where he had applied for asylum. He went to ask them again, but they did not give him a useful answer and took his fingerprints by force. It was a major setback for him. He had suddenly lost hope. Shinwarai’s cousin suggested that he should not take the risk to be sent back home and come to France instead, the country he deliberately fled to in 2016. His cousin was granted asylum and got a job selling vegetables in the outskirts of Paris.

Shinwarai has been in Paris for two-and-a-half months now and iscurrently in the process of applying for asylum. He feels thankful to have the services France is providing to him.

Later in the day, I saw a man on the opposite side of the room speaking in Arabic to a pal of his. I could understand the dialect he was speaking. He said his name was Mohamed Al Nour. He was born in Chad in 1988, in the Borkou-Ennedi-Tibesti region, below the Aouzou strip, which is the Chadian side of the border with Libya. After Gaddafi failed to annex the strip throughout sporadic clashes that lasted nine years prior to his birth, he returned to Northern Libya with his parents, to his hometown Az-Zawiyah, situated on the West of the Libyan coast, close to Tripoli.

He told me that he had arrived in France in January 2018, after taking a train from Rome to Marseille and a bus from Marseille to Paris. Nonetheless, this was not the hard part of his journey. He took the central Mediterranean Sea route to make it to Lampedusa. According to the International Organization for Migration, in 2017, one out of 49 migrants who took this route did not make it alive. “I was in a boat with about thirty people from all over,” said Nour in Arabic. It was the most dangerous month to travel, because waves are at their highest level in that period, and it did not help to be in a small boat. “It was a very diverse group: about ten kids, of which only two were accompanied; the rest were men and women in their 20s and 30s from countries like Mali, Niger, Nigeria, Guinea and Libya,” he specified. They took off from Libya with the help of a “self-proclaimed experienced” captain.

They spent about 6,000 dollars for this dicey deal. The journey was about 400 kilometers long. He spent a dozen bumpy hours in the boat, eventually arriving at the famous destinationfor migrants. He was offered to stay in a welcome center, as illegal immigration is decriminalized in all of Europe. He told the hosts he wanted to go to Rome to then leave the country by train. After being taken on another bouncy ride headed to the capital, he was getting closer.

Having served in the army back in Libya he was quite the hefty young chap. He later worked as a painter for a big furnishing company. With some energy left in him, he hopped on the first train to Marseille. “I didn’t have much money after I bought that ticket,” he said, laughing. Things were moving. He knew that he would find an Arab community there and find his way to Paris, but it was not as easy as he thought. After wandering around in the different neighborhoods, sleeping in the least cold metro he could find for a few nights, he was put in contact with a slumlord who took his remaining money to take him to the Paris. In due course, he was part of a team of eight Arab men who knew no more than 10 words of French. They wanted to get there with the least chances of getting caught so they decided to walk, as they generally ask for identification in the trains and buses.

They travelled to Paris mostly on foot, through some national parks drenched with snow, through small cities like Vichy or Nevers, where they would fill up their backpacks with provisions. Over the long haul, he got to the capital where he found a bed through a Libyan connection in the eighteenth district. He applied for asylum in the end of January and is still waiting for an answer. He is hoping for the best and staying positive, talking regularly to his family on his smartphone.

Shinwarai and Mohamed Al Nour are planning on staying in France and waiting as long as needed. Shinwarai is strugglingwith depression as has been not been granted asylum in Europe for nearly three years, but Al Nour has been here for several months and is an optimist by nature. They have no information on how long it will take for the state to answer back to them. It is now just a waiting game for them.

The stories of these two men shed light on the struggles of hundreds of thousands of asylum-seekers and migrants. There are many difficulties for them to be granted asylum in Europe, as countries are exceeding their decided quotas and are not adjusting economically to accommodate more migrants. Countries like France are postponing asylum grants and hiding the realities of this issue from the public eye. There are limited information campaigns to help new migrants and the state is not providing enough shelters for them to sleep at night. As total migrant stock in Europe will increase over the years, perhaps governments will be forced to adjust to the consequences, but it would be best for them and for the migrants to allocate more resources to social insertion and care before the situation gets out of control.

BY SHADI AYOUBI

ILLUSTRATIONS BY SOPHIA FOERSTER