By Julio Godoy
PARIS, Aug 30 2005 (IPS)

“It’s a shame to live here,” says 34-year-old West African immigrant Chantal, mother of two.

“Here” is a dirty and decrepit room in the attic of an old building in southern Paris. Chantal, her husband and her children share the room with rats and cockroaches. Showers and toilets are located outside, and shared by others in the building.

To speak of “sanitary facilities” here is an offensive euphemism. The filth accumulated in the showers and water closets makes them a repulsive place.

“I am afraid of taking a shower here, or to relieve myself, because the bathrooms are so filthy,” Chantal says. “I fear I’ll catch a disease.”

Chantal and her family share the crumbling house with some 250 other West African immigrants, mostly from the C- te d’Ivoire. Their fate is that of hundreds of thousands of immigrants, mostly from Sub-Saharan Africa, but also from the Maghreb countries, who live in inhuman conditions in Paris and other cities in France.

Over recent weeks the picture of filth became also a story of death. Three fires in such buildings over the last four months killed 40 immigrants from Africa and injured more than 100.

On Aug. 29 a fire in a building in the historic heartland of Paris killed at least seven people and wounded more than ten. Among the victims were children and pregnant women. All of them were immigrants from the Côte d’Ivoire.

Four days earlier a fire destroyed a building in the 13th district down Chantal’s street, killing 17 people, all immigrants. Fourteen of the victims were children.

A fire in a crumbling Paris hotel Apr. 15 killed 25 people, and wounded more than 60. The victims were immigrants from Tunis, Algeria, and West African countries..

According to official figures, more than 120,000 low-income families are in urgent need of housing in the Ile-de-France region, which includes Paris. Most of them are immigrants.

The living conditions of immigrants are closely associated with their legal status, and with the repression launched by governments since the mid- 1990s, says Jean Claude Amara from the group Droits devant! (Rights first!).

“If you are an illegal immigrant in France, you simply cannot get proper housing,” Amara told IPS. “In addition, although the government at all administrative levels has known of the conditions of housing for immigrants for years, authorities have neglected maintenance and security in there.”

City officials agree. Pierre Aidenbaum, mayor of the third district where the Aug. 29 fire broke out acknowledged at a press conference Tuesday that “the victims lived here under dangerous, unacceptable conditions.” Aidenbaum said a thorough renovation had been planned for September.

Paris mayor Bertrand Delanoe has admitted that “we have a major problem of insalubrities in numerous buildings in the city.”

Some officials say that when renovation is taken up, the inhabitants are not offered alternative housing. “We should stop treating people as though we still lived in the 18th century,” Yves Contassot, deputy mayor of Paris in charge of social housing told IPS.

But some of the housing difficulties could have arisen because many of the immigrants have very large families.

“Because male immigrants came mostly from rural areas in Senegal, the Côte d’Ivoire, and other West African countries where polygamy is widespread and considered a normal way of life, they were confronted with major difficulties in adapting to urban life in France,” anthropologist Jacques Barou told IPS.

Traditional polygamy in West Africa means that all spouses must be treated equally, he said. “Therefore men could not come with just one spouse but came with several. The families are very large, with all the constraints that imposes on lodging.”

Add to that the low income of these families, and the negligence of authorities in maintaining such buildings, and you have a dreadful urban lodging landscape that leads to filthy conditions and can lead to deadly fires.

But tragedy for some immigrants has meant opportunity for others.

Mohamed, a 34-year-old Tunisian immigrant lived in France for more then ten years without a residence permit. After the April fire in the run-down hotel where he lived, he got both his permit and better accommodation.

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