[Marxism] Paris fires expose another city of glamour

[Brian Shannon <Brian_Shannon@xxxxxxxxxxx>]

Living in squalor by the Eiffel Tower

By Caroline Wyatt
BBC Paris correspondent

(Up to 60 mainly African immigrants, many of them children, have died
in recent house fires in Paris. It has highlighted a long-standing
housing crisis and raised serious questions over the treatment of
immigrants in France. Caroline Wyatt met one of the families affected
by the crisis.)

Paris is the city of dreams.

Who on a grey and rainy day in London has not dreamed of owning a
little flat in the French capital, overlooking a cityscape of slate
rooftops, where you can stand at the window and watch the setting sun
turn the clouds a vivid pink over the Eiffel Tower?

When Fofanna Satou and her husband came here from Ivory Coast, they
held in their hearts a similar dream, albeit a more modest one.
. . .

Slum conditions

I have seen poverty across the former Soviet Union, in Afghanistan and
southern Iraq. Yet the state of this slum in the middle of one of
Europe's richest cities comes as a physical shock.

The front door opens into the living room, which is where this family
of five lives, cooks, eats and washes. Just space for one sofa, two
chairs and a gas oven in the corner, powered by a canister, near where
the washing hangs out to dry.

All immaculately clean, or as clean as you can keep somewhere when you
have no kitchen and no bath; where you wash up in a tiny sink next to
the lavatory, making sure that you watch the floor so you do not get
bitten by the rats. But at least they scare off the cockroaches.
. . .

The shock of so many fires in just four months has at least prompted a
government promise to close down these dangerous buildings, as they
become an increasingly lethal refuge for the dispossessed.

But what then? Where do families like Fofanna's go?

Some have ended up in a tent city in the suburb of Aubervilliers,
living with their children in a makeshift refugee camp on the streets.
And they are still there as winter approaches.

The fires opened Parisians' eyes to a secret world of poverty in their
midst, long hidden behind the shutters and the grand facades.

But after the public outrage and the demonstrations, will anything
really change? Fofanna and her neighbours doubt it

FULL AT
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/programmes/from_our_own_correspondent/
4208612.stm

from Brian Shannon


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