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FRANCE – “And we are all eco-terrorists”, sing in chorus the participants of the Water Convoy, arriving this Saturday, August 26 in Paris. They thus take up the expression used by the Minister of the Interior Gérald Darmanin to describe the actions of the demonstrators in Sainte-Soline.
Having left Deux-Sèvres on August 18, nearly a thousand people gathered on the Champ-de-Mars in a good-natured atmosphere and to the sound of songs castigating the basins, these controversial reserves of agricultural irrigation.
“Grid by grid, tarp by tarp, we will destroy all the basins”sang the demonstrators who arrived in the early afternoon from Orléans, where they had been established since Thursday in front of the headquarters of the Loire-Brittany Water Agency.
A delegation had been received the day before, for more than five hours, by Sophie Brocas, the prefect of the Center-Val de Loire region and basin coordinator, to unsuccessfully demand a moratorium on current basin projects.
The dialogue notably failed on the site of Priaires (Deux-Sèvres), where grids were installed, signaling, according to the delegation, the imminent start of the work.
New actions planned
“We are very upset because we did not get the moratorium we had come for. We are going to have to continue the actions to dismantle the construction sites”declared this Saturday to applause the spokesperson for the Uprisings of the Earth movement, Benoît Feuillu.
He did not give dates for these actions but specified that “the next meeting would take place in Niort on September 8, for the trial of nine representatives” environmental and trade union movements “accused of organizing prohibited demonstrations”.
“I would be Darmanin, I would be seriously worried because the next strategies that we are going to put in place, they will find them very, very destabilizing”warned for his part Julien Le Guet, the leader of “Bassin non merci”. “A large rally of support will be organized there. And we won’t be far from Priaires.”he added.
“We will soon go to the Water Agency. We will go to Priaires, we will remove the barriers and we will make them miserable “sang, accompanied by an orchestra facing the Eiffel Tower, the members of the procession, including a good hundred cyclists.
Good-natured atmosphere
The procession then set off with the aim of reaching Montreuil to the east of Paris for a “ celebratory evening » as part of an environmental festival. But the police blocked the bridges and walkers and cyclists in large numbers began to walk along the sunny quays of the capital to the joyous sound of trombones and saxophones under the astonished gaze and questions of tourists.
Police vans channeled the flow of demonstrators while car traffic ended up being severely disrupted. Demonstrators unfurled a banner on a tourist bus, surprised but amused by the scene. Their vehicle quietly turned around.
The mega-basins aim to store water in the open air drawn from the surface aquifers in winter, in order to irrigate crops in summer when rainfall is scarce.
Its supporters make it a condition for the survival of farms in the face of the threat of recurring droughts. The opponents denounce, them, a “grabbing” water by “agribusiness” in times of climate change.
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2023-08-26 15:40:12
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