French riot
police swooped on an illegal migrant camp in northeastern Paris just after dawn
on Monday, sparking a brief standoff at a site where numbers have soared since
the closure of the Jungle camp in the northern port city of Calais.
The operation,
largely consisting of identity checks on some of an estimated 2,500 migrants
sleeping rough around a canal and urban train bridge near Paris's Stalingrad
metro station, came as pressure mounts on the government to clear and shut the
camp.
Tension has
risen in tandem with speculation that police will move in to evacuate and close
the camp definitively in the coming days, as the Paris authorities are
demanding.
A Reuters
journalist at the scene said a digger moved in to clear a small part of the
camp, a tentacular sprawl of tents, mattresses, blankets and the meager
belongings of migrants who come in large part from war-torn countries such as
Afghanistan.
Migrants
shouted at police in riot gear as the digger swept debris and rubbish away in a
small section of the camp, which was otherwise left largely intact. One
policeman sprayed a migrant with tear gas.
After a couple
of hours, police allowed migrants to move back in after a tidy-up by municipal
cleaning workers.
In a letter
sent to Interior Minister Bernard Cazeneuve, a copy of which was obtained by
Reuters, Paris Mayor Anne Hidalgo requested that the camp be shut rapidly on
humanitarian and sanitary grounds.
City Hall
officials say the numbers living and sleeping rough in the area have swollen by
about a third since the evacuation last week of the Jungle camp in Calais,
where more than 6,000 people were living, most of them in the hope of making it
across the short Channel sea crossing to Britain.
The Calais camp,
a vast shanty town on sandy scrubland where demolition workers were due to
finish their destruction job by the end of Monday, came to symbolize Europe's
fraught efforts to cope with a record influx of migrants fleeing strife and
poverty in countries from Afghanistan to Sudan.
French
President Francois Hollande urged Britain at the weekend to shoulder its part
of the responsibility for 1,500 minors who have been housed temporarily in
container boxes in Calais following the clearout. The rest of the 6,000-plus
inhabitants of the Jungle have been dispatched to lodgings across France,
pending examination of their asylum cases.
"It's up
to Britain now to fully live up to its duty, that's not finished yet,"
said Pascal Brice, the head of France's refugee agency, Ofpra.
Reuters
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