Friday 10 a.m. in front of the free expression panel on boulevard Tessé in Toulon. The associative world which fights for the defense of human rights in the Port of Levant has once again met here to show the meaning of its fight, alert the population and give them an appointment Thursday at 6:30 p.m. at the Helix for a new counter of ideas. Once again, it is a question of undermining the received ideas which surround those who are called migrants by giving them a voice. It being understood that the immense outpouring of European solidarity with regard to Ukrainian victims of the war must not hide the fate of all the other refugees who are also fleeing death, torture or misery to find refuge on our continent.
« It’s our hope, our expectation and our fight “, specifies Henri for the Cimade by denouncing ” a very tough policy towards migrants for many years regardless of their situation “. With, he continues, people who come to the border of Europe to ask for asylum, a right defined by the Geneva Convention and who are not even given the opportunity to present this request.
A respect for the law which does not mean that everyone will sweep over Europe, he hastens to clarify to cut short the fantasies conveyed by the far right. With a reality, it is that ” there are people who are in the war elsewhere than in Europe ».
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Against the speeches
of demonization
The human rights activist castigates the stigmatization that is made of those who arrive from Africa, for example, by considering them on this sole criterion as economic or climate migrants, which for him is far from obvious. . He recalls: There are nevertheless in the western part of Africa, which France knows well because that is where we find its former colonies, real dictatorships where people are threatened, arrested, injured or killed. There, I am thinking of a young man who comes from Guinea, his brothers were killed at the time of the coup and he fled as best he could. »
Thursday evening it is around the testimony of Mahmoud, a young Malian who fled when he was still a minor to escape the exactions of the Islamist militias, that the debate will open. ” Mahmoud was taken care of by the Var children’s social aid, which is not always the case insists Henri, recalling that “ the ASE in each department has the power to determine whether they are real or fake miners with assessments that are quite problematic ».
Mahmoud, he was able to benefit from a CAP horticulturist training, worked as a landscaper and would be in carpentry today. ” What is interesting with him is that he tells us about how and why he left, what he is looking for in France and how he sees our country and Europe “, Continues the Cimade activist. Not like a paradise, he warns, but rather an opportunity to get trained and work.
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“We have to do it again
people ”
« It is important to give voice to these people, they have a lot to say. And too often we talk about them only in relation to the problems they are supposed to pose. We have to make people again “, argues Henri, also questioning France condemned on several occasions by the European Court. Then, raising his arm, he continues: The building there behind, the prefecture of Var, is completely closed today to any request that would come from a person who arrives in France. Everything must go through the Internet. »
For the associative activist, it is urgent to be in a human-to-human relationship at the risk if not of not measuring the consequences of what is happening. And warn: How many years have we spent trying to reposition ourselves in relation to the various genocides ? I’m not talking about the genocide of migrants, but I’m saying that we act as if these people didn’t exist and that there was no other solution than to turn them back in the conditions we know. »
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