The Kangoo is slowly making its way along the Quai des Celestins in Paris. On board, the head of the health surveillance project and a volunteer doctor from Médecins du Monde, wearing a load-bearing vest with the colours of the humanitarian organisation on his back, are exploring the covered gallery next to the Cité Internationale des Arts. “This is where young asylum seekers seek refuge. But they have already been evicted…”“This is a cold morning in mid-September,” says Milou Borsotti, an employee of the association. On the lower platforms, there is no trace of these people who, the rest of the year, crouch under the Pont Marie.
The marauders resume their journey in search of those exiled to the streets. Since the end of the Paralympic Games, Doctors of the World has started a new cycle of tours to reconnect with the foreign population sent during the events of Paris 2024.
Direction La Chapelle, where homeless people usually take shelter every night under the Skytrain. There, two men He sat down on a chair. Opposite, by the entrance to the square, a group of young Sudanese were warming themselves in the sun. The whole group was expelled early in the morning and a van with the logo of “Propreté de Paris” collected the boxes that would protect them during the night.
The two associations, with large medical bags on their backs, approach and ask if the two men need treatment. Hamed Taïeb shows his sore ear. The doctor diagnoses a ruptured eardrum. They give the man drops and antibiotics, who explains that he is waiting for his refugee card to be renewed and has lost his universal health insurance.
“They broke our tents”
The doctor is busy while the director of the association gives information about the offices of Doctors of the World, when a young Afghan woman arrives, wearing an impeccable white shirt and a neat hairstyle. Ahmadzai Koudouz, an asylum seeker who arrived in Paris two years ago after being “doubled” in Austria (according to the European Dublin regulation, which establishes a return procedure in the first country of entry into the Schengen area), recounts his night cut short by a police intervention in Stalingrad. “They arrived at 6am, it was dark, there were five of us with friends who had just arrived. They shouted at us to get out and destroyed our tents. They just let us take our sleeping bags and asked us to leave.”The 21-year-old recounts, looking defeated.
Stalingrad is one of the places on line 2 of the Paris metro where migrants congregate. The Olympic Games (OG) changed the situation: the authorities used significant means of intervention to prevent any regrouping and the establishment of camps. In recent months, police operations have become more frequent. Associations denounced a “social cleansing” who did not give his name, before the sporting event. The return to normality, a week after the end of Paris 2024, does not seem to change practices, according to the NGO: “Today, there is no place in Paris where these immigrants can set up shop”protests the director of Doctors of the World.
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