Alwaght- French police took down tent camps of more than 2,600 refugees on Friday making them homeless after an operation to clear out shelters sprouting up around Paris.
The refugees, mostly men from Eritrea, Somalia and Afghanistan were evacuated from the vast encampment consisting of hundreds of tents located on Boulevard de la Villette.
The evacuation reportedly began early in the day with immigration authorities officials present at the scene. Some of refuges will be taken away to emergency shelters and buses. The authorities have reserved some thousand accommodation places for them, including 800 at Ile-de-France region gyms.
“It’s very hard, we don’t have blankets, showers or toilets,” PressTV cited Mahamat Moussa, a 19-year-old Chadian as saying.
Pierre Henry, head of France Terre d’Asile, a charity that helps asylum seekers, called on all French cities to provide their own refugee accommodation.
“We need (accommodation) centers in all the regional capitals, to receive the refugees and help them get their bearings, so that people are not drawn just to Paris and Calais,” he said.
Thousands of refugees are living in the “Jungle,” the name given to various encampments in the port city of Calais around the Channel Tunnel, the undersea passage into Britain.
Despite hundreds being evicted from the Calais refugee camp, a latest census said the population had surpassed 7,000, with new aerial photographs appearing to show it has grown and moved to an adjacent field.
