Excerpt of J’y suis, j’y reste (Reflex, 2000), translated by Mogniss H. Abdallah himself.
Nowadays, the anti-racist movement in France aims at achieving an equality for all that tends to be predicated on citizenship. Consequently, the Sans-Papiers (“Without Papers,” i.e. undocumented people) movement has had to operate somewhat independently from anti-racist organizations mostly composed of French-born activists. In the 1970s–90s, however, the fight for foreigners’ rights was central to the “immigration struggle” and found one of its culminations in a historical sequence in the spring and summer of 1996. This is described in the following text by Mogniss H. Abdallah, republished for the first time in English, and containing amazing archival photographs from the Agence IM’média archive.
The Sans-Papiers of St. Bernard (March 18–August 23, 1996) ///
The Sans-Papiers lived in constant fear of police ID checks and harrasment, which increasingly dominated their everyday lives, with many of them being completely without material means. To end this insufferable situation of having no rights of any kind, a group of African men, women and children decided to emerge from the shadows.
On March 18, 1996, they occupied the St. Ambroise church in Paris, to the general amazement even of the advocacy groups specializing in immigrant issues.
The occupiers came from the African workers’ hostels in Montreuil, a Paris banlieue where immigrants have been practicing a form of self-determination for years. The initial group thus consisted of people who knew each other and gathered different sorts of statuses: parents of children with French citizenship, rejected asylum-seekers, single persons… After earlier failed attempts to reach results with the help of SOS Racisme, or through individual claims, they decided to grab the government’s attention by acting together. The group pinned their hopes on the fact that Jacques Chirac had been elected to the presidency in 1995 after making the “fracture sociale” (the social division in society) a major theme in his election campaign: perhaps he could do something for them.
On the day of the action, the Sans-Papiers were hardly inside the church when radio and television stations were already at the door. This church became a rallying point for Sans-Papiers, with their future spokespersons among them, Ababacar Diop and Madjiguène Cissé. The humanitarian organization Médicins du Monde was first on the site and informed committed groups such as Droits Devant!, a street people’s organization, which played a major role in the mobilization of prominent supporters. Léon Schwarzenberg, Albert Jacquard, Archbishop Monseigneur Gaillot, and many other public figures stood in solidarity with the Sans-Papiers, both then and now. As more and more people—French people as well as immigrants—wanted to take part in the occupation of the church, it was decided to limit the occupying group to 300 Sans-Papiers, prioritizing Black Africans from Mali, Senegal, and Mauritania. The church hierarchy under Cardinal Lustiger denounced the occupation as a political “manipulation,” and indirectly indicated their support for an eviction by the police that promptly followed. The Sans-Papiers found themselves on the street again. But the pictures of Africans wandering round Paris’ streets awakened memories of the exodus of war refugees in Africa (the Rwandan tragedy was still in everyone’s minds), and caused an outrage in the media and the general public.
Various other humanitarian organizations, the radical left, and several trade unions, as well as numerous public figures, came to support the Sans-Papiers. The Communist Party and members of the Socialist Party also joined the movement. Even more remarkable was the fact that thousands of ordinary citizens from all walks of life spontaneously offered help. This solidarity was evident too in the opinion polls, according to which 53 % of all French sympathized with the Sans-Papiers movement. This situation reminds one of—and not by chance—the popularity of the social agitation during November–December 1995, when strikes had paralyzed public transport to protest the social insurance reform. These mass actions gained widespread support, even though they seriously disturbed everyday life. The rejection of government policy found its expression then as a kind of authorization of the strikers, and the campaign of the Sans-Papiers three months later was seen as a welcome continuation of the social agitation. The Sans-Papiers evicted by the police were in turn provided with accommodation in the LCR bookshop (a Trotskyist organization), on the premises of the postal trade union Sud-PTT and those of the Droits Devants! group. They were also offered long-term accommodation in the empty rooms of the SNCF Railways in Rue Pajol in Paris’s 18th arrondissement, which had been allocated to them by railway workers in the CFDT union.
Documentation for all ///
The evolving Sans-Papiers movement accepted this support gratefully but insisted on the autonomy of its campaign. They did not want others to speak in their name or act as their spokespeople with the authorities or media. Contradictions soon became obvious, with some groups making their support dependent on certain conditions. SOS Racisme, for example, wanted only to help parents of children with French citizenship, through demanding for them the right to family life. Upon witnessing this attempt to split the movement, Madjiguène Cissé replied with her special knack for hard-hitting words: “Some people demand the right to live as families. We, on the other hand, demand the right to live. Period!” In the face of an increasingly uncontrollable and explosive situation, other support groups felt out of their depth and panicked. They ordered the Sans-Papiers, who were arriving in ever larger numbers to join the conflict, to “go home.” They claimed that there was unfavorable odds and that the demand for “documentation for all” was unrealistic, saying “You cannot win on all fronts at the same time.” Madjiguène Cissé replies to them: “Only the battles we do not begin are lost in advance.” Tensions between these groups reached their climax after arrests on March 27, when fifty-seven people from Mali were deported to Bamako by charter flights.
On the initiative of theater director Ariane Mnouchkine, 300 African Sans-Papiers of St. Ambroise were accommodated on the premises of the Cartoucherie theater in Vincennes outside of Paris; subsequently they moved into the empty railway building in Rue Pajol. There, the movement developed more structure. On the initiative of the women, many who made their mark with their readiness for action, they organized general assemblies of the families that became a democratic example of discussion and decision-making. They also organized meetings to determine the course of action and so formed an opposing force to any possible resurgence of the patriarchal tradition of the “village chief.”
As a sovereign entity, the general assembly selected their own delegates, who could be dismissed at any time. They then initiated discussions with the support committees recruited from various external associations and groups. There were also numerous unorganized supporters not participating in the discussions, who developed friendly relations with the Sans-Papiers and played an important but informal role in the movement. New Sans-Papiers groups emerged in a dozen cities—in Paris, the suburbs and in the rest of France. At first, they gathered to coordinate regionally, taking up negotiations in unity with the Prefecture on their cases, and they dreamed of a countrywide coordination to force the government into discussions for a general solution. They largely agreed to reject individual regulations, with all discussions revolving around general provisions for global legalization.
Under the leadership of the former French ambassador Stéphane Hessel, a committee of twenty-six mediators was established to start negotiations with the government. This body produced a list of ten criteria by which global legalization of all immigrants was to be made possible for those whose “integration into French society could be proven.” This attempt at mediation, however, proved unsuccessful. On June 26, 1996, the Minister of the Interior announced in a communiqué that he would legalize only forty-eight of the 315 Sans-Papiers cases presented to him and ordered the others to leave the country, even though they too fell under the criteria by which the forty-eight had been legalized. Evidently, this was a purely arbitrary decision. Even the more moderate mediators were outraged, as they saw this as a breach of the republican principle of equality before the law, and felt insulted by the government’s scornful attitude to the mediators themselves. The widespread coverage of the movement in the media from the beginning should not lead to false conclusions; the Sans-Papiers went through long and difficult times between April and June 1996. Exhausted and discouraged more than once, they were close to giving in.
After these negotiations, the decisive role in new mobilizations were played by women: the “Sans-Papières.”
They were ready to continue the campaign alone even if the men decided to go home, initiating a number of independent activities in the same year, such as the March of the Women on May 11 and the occupation of the (Socialist-governed) Town Hall in the 18th arrondissement in Paris on 25 June. The movement gained new impetus again and again through these initiatives.
The debate on immigration in St. Bernard Church ///
With the failed attempt to reach an agreement with the government “on a more realistic basis,” the Sans-Papiers movement achieved a new impetus when they occupied the church of St Bernard in Paris—this time with the agreement of the church’s priest, Father Henri Coindé. On July 5, ten Sans-Papiers went on hunger strike. In the middle of summer, mobilization around this action reached its climax and gained international attention. Support increased dramatically and hundreds, even thousands of people came to prevent the police from intervening. The media were present everywhere and turned the event into the main topic of debate that summer.
This public interest in the question of immigration—quite unique up to this point, except perhaps for the March for Equality in 1983—led to a dramatic leap in the quality of discussion when by the event at St Bernard was situated within a new context of globalization, the domination of the Global North over the Global South, as well as the general precarious situation of French society. Many who had until then shown little interest in the questions arising from immigration, now had a crash course in the realities of the issue. The idea of “zero immigration,” favored by former Minister of the Interior Charles Pasqua, became completely discredited.
The “Left to the left of the Left,” as sociologist Pierre Bourdieu called them, now focused on discussions about freedom of movement and the fundamental right to come and go within the framework of globalization and free circulation, which was restricted then to capital, commodities and the rich. Support groups also had the opportunity to ask hard questions about what they themselves stood for. Jean-Pierre Alaux, a member of the Groupe d’information et de soutien des immigrés (GISTI), showed his amusement about the confusion aroused by the autonomy of Sans-Papiers:
“It is quite extraordinary to observe how the associations, my own included, have been caught on the wrong foot. It’s somehow rather amusing to see how they wonder how they are to accommodate the people evicted from St Bernard. Put them up even in our own offices? ‘But then we won’t be able to work there any more!’ As if it was no job for the support groups who ostensibly clamored for the defense of the rights of foreigners, to accommodate actively struggling foreigners. All these groups said themselves that their daily legal advice had been ineffective for years. This time it could actually be useful! But to break up a pointless routine would be breaking up the support groups themselves! So I am of the opinion that this could bring about a change in their work and in their relationship with the foreigners. Foreigners now have gained power in comparison to their allies. From now on, they’ll actually have allies, whereas previously they were the allies of those who defended them.” (cited in IM’média/Reflex, La Ballade des Sans-Papiers, 1997).
The greatly feared but nevertheless inevitable eviction took place on August 23, 1996, at 7:30 am.
Axes hacked down the church door, brutal force was used against men, women, and children who wanted nothing more than documentation whereby they could live, white people and Black people were deliberately split up by the police… All this aroused the disgust of the public, who watched the eviction live on television.
Public outrage had reached its peak, and spontaneous demonstrations were held the same day all over the country. 25,000 people gathered in Paris at the St Bernard church and marched to the detention center in Vincennes right outside Paris, chanting “Let the Sans-Papiers go free!” The wave of indignation was even echoed in Africa, where protest demonstrations were also held across the continent. At the Dakar airport, the ground personnel refused to attend to a military Airbus full of deportees from France who had been forced to board the plane.
In the course of the following days, the arrested Sans-Papiers were freed: a consequence of completely chaotic administrative tribunal proceedings, where most of the arrests for deportation were declared illegal. However, thirteen Sans-Papiers from St Bernard were ordered to leave France. In response, the trade unions CGT and GFDT of the air transport branch organized a demonstration against “the charter of shame” at Paris’s Charles de Gaulle Airport. The freed Sans-Papiers, on the other hand, moved into the Cartoucherie at Vincennes before being put up in the premises of the employees’ council of the Banque Nationale de Paris in the Rue du Faubourg-Poisonnière in Paris. Despite the authorities trying to force them back into illegality, they chose to continue and widen the campaign and prepare for a longstanding battle.
The Sans-Papiers and the illegal labor market ///
On August 31, 1996, the National Coordination Group of the Sans-Papiers Collective, founded on 20 July, called for a broadening of the campaign. The appeal was aimed at Sans-Papiers, but also at trade unionists, workers and teachers as well as other levels of immigrants and “sans” (the homeless, unemployed, and illegally employed).
Other immigrants joined the movement: the Chinese, absent from immigrant agitation up till then, turned up at meetings on St Bernard. They formed, together with Turks, North Africans and various other cultural groups (twenty-seven altogether) the “Third Collective.”
There are immigrant groups that have long been in existence and active in the background, at the side of Sans-Papiers and organizations like Cedetim and the Ligue des Droits de l’Homme. Among the founding members of the Third Collective were public figures such as Saïd Bouziri, former president of the Mouvement des Travailleurs Arabes (MTA) and a 1972 hunger striker, and university anthropologist Emmanuel Terray. The Third Collective made itself known by stressing the role of the Sans-Papiers in the economy, thereby publicizing their importance as workers. It attempted to establish contact with trade unions in the sectors where Sans-Papiers and illicit work are generally to be found: the construction, hotel, and restaurant trades, the textile industry and farming. Police repression hurt the undocumented labor force more than it affected the employers hiring them. There were 12,000 deportations in France during 1996, whereas only a few dozen employers (most of them, also foreigners) were prosecuted. Those prosecuted were seldomly the actual persons responsible, with those in charge of mass exploitation hiding behind a system of cascading sub-contractors and sham companies who managed to cover their tracks. Theoretically, they could be sentenced to two years’ imprisonment and a fine of 200,000 francs (about 45,000 euros today), be barred from conducting business, and have their goods confiscated. But in practice, according to a police official cited in Le Monde (October 1996): “The sanctions are so mild that it’s worth it.” And correctly so, as illicit work has strategic significance in some sectors of the economy. The above official alleged: “You can say without exaggeration that practically all the Made in France clothing for women comes from hundreds of workshops which employ illegals [sic]. Moreover, this sector can only compete on that basis.” Here, we can understand that the exploitation of Sans-Papiers is not merely a marginal phenomenon happening within archaic sectors opposing “modernization”, but is a result of this “modernization” itself.
“From the crisis management of the second half of the 1970s up to the restructuring in the 1980s, the employment of foreign workers was always the decisive moment whereby a reaction took place to the new demands for flexibility and the smooth flow of the global labor supply. The massive reduction in the pay rates of foreign labor in industry, their increasing invasion of the tertiary sector, their relative stability of employment in small businesses, and the renewal of the forms of illegal work, have in this way accompanied, promoted and even anticipated the productive and employment systems and the renewal of working relationships.” (Claude-Valentin Marie, Plein Droit, No. 31, April 1996).
The word “flexibility,” uttered above, requires“precariousness”; a logic that conquers the whole labor market and affects social life. Suddenly, many French people are also accepting “dirty jobs” they had previously rejected. During the late 1990s, various surveys showed that the proportion of Sans-Papiers involved in illicit work was on the decline, and constituted under 10% of people on offense registries. The struggle for legalization of the Sans-Papiers led, in this way, to questions of illicit work in general.
However, it would be mistaken to believe that the legalization of residency would place the illegalization of employment into question. To counter demands by legal wage-earners, employers often resorted to taking on other workers such as illegal workers: whether it’s French people, immigrants with residence status or new Sans-Papiers. This situation explains why many Sans-Papiers preferred to remain undercover. They wanted above all to keep their jobs, no matter how illegal or badly paid they were. It was a matter, then, of a global struggle against capitalist exploitation in ever newer forms.
The authorities were unhappy to discuss these realities and reacted violently when the Sans-Papiers became active in this area. The attempt to occupy the construction site of the giant Stade de France in St. Denis was thus choked at the outset, and one of the initiators, Hadj Momar Diop, was imprisoned on the spot. With this action, the movement wanted to indicate that the Stadium of France, built for the 1998 World Cup, would have never been completed in time without the labor of Sans-Papiers workers. ■