Solidarithe in Paris. Leo Plunkett. All rights reserved.Alberto Biella, a tall and friendly
post-doc student from Italy, has just finished overseeing a busy distribution
with Solidarithé, a grass roots collective that distributes tea and information
to newly arrived refugees in the north of Paris. It’s November and it is cold
out, though nowhere near as cold as it will be soon.

“It is not easy for people to find
somewhere to sleep. Police have been given instructions to remove people’s
tents and blankets and throw them away, and it happens very frequently,” he
tells me. “They have an instruction to remove people from this area, which they
have to follow.”

Alberto is pointing out how his work
has changed since August 18, when the makeshift encampment that had formed around
the humanitarian centre at Porte de la Chapelle was cleared. The dispersal was
followed by a two-week lockdown on almost all food and drink distributions, and
accompanied by a reinforced presence of CRS (riot police). Police have been given instructions to remove people’s
tents and blankets and throw them away.

The encampment had been unofficially
divided into national communities: Sudanese, Afghans, Eritreans, Chadians,
Somalis. Access to toilets and clean water was scarce and the camp was chaotic,
foul-smelling and insalubrious — but it was also a place of friendship,
laughter and solidarity.

“Before when people were on Boulevard
Ney, there was a kind of community. Now the community is missing here,” Alberto
tells me.

Alberto Biella, Solidarithé. Photographer, Leo Plunkett.“When you have a community, even when
it is on the street you have many advantages: people that distribute food know
exactly where to go, people are fed properly.”

“For us, it’s very difficult to
provide any information because every night you see different people,
everything is faster, you can’t spend any quality time with people: it’s very
difficult to help them now.” “It’s very difficult
to help them now.”

La Bulle

Two hundred metres to the north, on
the intersection of Boulevard Ney and Rue de la Chapelle, sits the white dome
of the tented humanitarian camp known as ‘la bulle’ (the bubble). The centre
was opened in November 2016 to much fanfare, following the destruction of the
jungle at Calais. It was framed by Paris city officials as a new kind of
refugee centre, offering short stays with a place for the weary to rest their
legs, to get clean clothes and hot showers and to receive medical attention,
before being processed and sent on to more permanent accommodation

From the outset, there were more
people arriving than the 450-person capacity centre could house and process.
This was, in part, due to logistical bottlenecks caused by an insufficient
number of CAOs (Centres d'accueil et d'orientation) to send people on to, as
well as complications caused by Dublin III: the EU edict that states that an
asylum application should be carried out in the country where a migrant is
first registered (so many who are fingerprinted in Italy, for example, face
possible deportation).

The next day, I meet Anne-Marie Bredin
for a quick lunch in a cheap and cheerful brasserie on Rue de la Chapelle, in
sight of the camp. The former businesswoman runs Solidarité migrants Wilson, a
collective that distributes daily breakfasts to homeless refugees in this area.

Like Alberto, she describes a
fractured community of newly arrived migrants, constantly engaged in a game of
“cat and mouse” with the police.

“Everyone knows the rules of the game
now,” she says: “I’m a migrant. I lie down at 3 to 6 in the morning and then I
get up at 6 and I fold my tents and I hide my blankets and I pretend I’m walking
down the street.”

Anne-Marie Bredin runs Solidarité migrants Wilson. Leo Plunkett.At the end of July this year, a newly
elected Macron announced his intentions to have “no more women and men in the
street and in the woods” by the end of 2017, along with plans to speed up the
asylum process and to expediently send failed applicants back to their country
of origin. Macron: “no more women and men in the
street and in the woods”.

They’re here

“Macron wrote that he wanted to see no
one on the street by the end of the year, and he is deploying all he can to
make sure that is true”, she told me. “People think the migrants are all gone.
They’re not gone! It makes me crazy. They’re here”

She suggests that “what’s really
happening is, by hook and by crook, [Macron] is making sure no migrants come to
Europe”.

The president in July also briefly
mooted the idea of setting up “hotspots” to process migrants in Libya before
they get to European soil, though he later rowed back on the idea, which was met
with criticism from Human Rights Watch and other NGOs.

Last week, UN human rights chief, Zeid
Ra’ad al-Hussein declared the EU policy of helping Libyan authorities
intercept people trying to cross the Mediterranean and return them to detention
centres in Libya as “inhuman”.  

Paris graffiti.Many of the Sudanese migrants I have
met at the camp over the past months have shown me injuries they acquired in
Libya: bullet wounds, burns, scars. Stephen, a young Kenyan-educated man from Sudan
described six months of beatings endured in a detention camp in Libya, which he
escaped thanks to an encounter with a Médecins Sans Frontières volunteer. Hamad,
who I met at the camp this summer, fled Sudan after his father and two sisters
were executed by the government, leaving behind his then-pregnant wife, who he
hopes will join him later, with his infant son. He describes being made to do
manual labour in exchange for a promised passage to Europe, and instead being
driven to an empty warehouse with no light and being left for dead. 

Some seek the catharsis of telling
their story, some would prefer to speak about anything else. “Most people are a
mess [when they arrive]. You get shell-shocked, totally traumatised people who
have no brain left or they’ve got really bad psychological problems,” Anne-Marie
tells me.

Flight from death

People’s journeys to Paris vary greatly,
but some themes recur: unscrupulous smugglers, shoddy boats, hiding in the
woods, police violence.

I met Mohammad, a 24 year-old Afghan
man with excellent English, in October at a tea distribution. He had
accommodation in Limoges, but was back in Paris for the last interview of his
asylum application. He told me had studied in London in 2012, working a weekend
job at Kebabish in Southall. When he moved back to his village in Afghanistan
in 2013, he founded an English school. He was criticised by some villagers for
trying to impose ‘Western culture’ and suspected of being a Christian
missionary. After a tip-off from a local, Taliban militia targeted him. The
then 20-year-old was kidnapped, beaten and left for dead, while his older brother
was shot to death in the doorway of his home.

Due to the Dublin procedure, Mohammad,
like many others, had to wait 8 months to submit his asylum application in
France; he had been fingerprinted in Italy after crossing through Iran, Turkey,
Bulgaria, Serbia, Hungary and Austria, with the original aim of getting to the
UK.

He called me from Limoges last week to
tell me his application had been successful. “I am happy now because I have
everything. I can see my future so bright. I can do something now,” he said.
Mohammad received some practical help from a French family, whom he met by
chance. This is not uncommon, it seems: instead of reliable state
infrastructure, the asylum process runs on the generosity of volunteers, human
kindness and chance encounters, in a process that inevitably favours those with
energy, good French, good English and even good looks. “I
can do something now”.

Like all French administration, the
asylum process is complicated, confusing and paper-heavy. In addition, even the
simplest details seem to be changing constantly. Refugees and volunteers alike
exist on rumours. “The system is as complicated as it can possibly get: it’s a
Kafka situation,” Anne-Marie from Solidarité
migrants Wilson tells me.

“Nobody knows what to say anymore.
Nobody knows what the best advice is to give someone who’s just arrived. It’s a
mess,” she adds.

Indeed many of the actors on the
ground are unsure whether to advise new arrivals to try and enter ‘la bulle’ at
all. Utopia56, a grassroots charity that ran France’s first (now closed)
humanitarian camp in Grand-Synthe, was based inside the centre until last month
when they left in protest at what they considered to be unfair procedure. They
reported that some men entered believing they were starting the asylum process
and ended up being deported or sent back to the border.

 “From when the centre opened, we saw a very
marked degradation in the conditions of entry. Immigrants had absolutely no
information on what was going to happen to them, or how to get in,” coordinator
Aurélie Chaput told me. “The prefecture of Paris increasingly became the
complete master of what was happening, and it didn’t sit well with us.”

A network of civilians

The charity’s hotchpotch crew of long-
and short-term volunteers work around the clock, sorting donations,
distributing, food, clothing and blankets and generally helping out in
whichever way necessary, whether this be getting an Algerian family with a
small baby accommodation for the night or helping an unaccompanied minor with the
bureaucratic process of attending school.

The group now focuses on getting help
to the most vulnerable in the street, while building a network of civilians
ready to house those most in need.

Paris Solidarithé distribution. Leo Plunkett.“The system is completely anarchic
now: sometimes there are people admitted by queue, sometimes it’s by
appointment. People queue for days and we’re not even able to tell them whether
it’s a good idea or not. It’s very frustrating. We don’t give any information
on the centre anymore,” Chaput tells me.

Eimtiaz Safi fled his native
Afghanistan five years ago. On a cold November night, he beds down for on a
dirty woollen blanket by the entrance of ‘la bulle’, trying his luck for
admission the next day. “We just want peace,” he sings, half to his neighbours,
half to himself.

“I left Afghanistan because I didn’t
want to kill for the Taliban”, he tells me. “It was impossible. I could not do
that, but European life is very dangerous too: I never thought it would be like
this."

Eimtiaz Safi fled his native Afghanistan five years ago. Leo Plunkett.