Statement – the evictions have started, the zad is calling for mobilization

Monday, April 9th

Warded off for years by the movement, a new attempt to expell places on the zad in Notre-Dame-des-Landes [French State] has just started. At 3am, the operation started with brutality : unfinishing queues of navy blue vans, armoured vehicles, tear gas, first wounded and arrests. The military police [gendarmes] had announced that journalists were not allowed on the « zone of the plan » and they blocked access to the area. They prohibited any press image recording and media must make do with official recording.
These evictions attest to the government’s claim to restore law while actually pissing on it. The prefecture did not even give any minimal access to housing rights for the inhabitants of the zad, that is nominative and contradictory procedures for evictions. Though the majority of the inhabitants of the zad had given their names and identities several times in the last years.
The hypocrisy of the prefecture’s double dealing is now clear for everyone: they pretend to seek a « peaceful and serene » evolution for the situation while preparing 2,500 antiriot military policemen to come and destroy the habitations. A sorting is announced, according to categories that are nothing but mere fictions that the government needs for its repressive story-telling. There is no such a thing as radicals on the one hand and peasants on the other but rather a set of mixed practises for sharing this territory. Unlike what Gérard Collomb [French Interior Minister], no-one has individually registered in the last weeks, what would undermine other efforts. The movement as a whole has set up a frame for a collective agreement that would includes every project and inhabitant.
But the government could not simply admit that the airport project was useless, it had to take its vengence on those who had forced its abandonment. Earth is dying, the most brutal forms of economy shrink our lives and everywhere there are people who seek to change this matter of fact. They were 30,000 those who commit on February 10th to support the future of the zad. But the political message the government sent this morning couldn’t be clearer: no space must be given for social experimentations.
Our anger is deep today as we face the destruction of the spaces and houses we built here. We are strongly upset as the collective experience of the zad is now threatened by the police invasion. The zad though won’t disappear. We live here, we have grown roots in this bocage. We will not leave. We salute the courage of those who already joined us on the field and those who answered our calls. In 2012, the disdain and the arrogance of the State actually turned against itself. In this context of growing dissatisfaction, strikes, demonstrations, occupations all over the country, we bet the eviction of Notre-Dame-des-Landes will become a new driving energy for the ongoing and spreading revolt. Once again, this destruction operation will turn against its authors.
We call for everyone to join us here as soon as possible for the coming days. More than 80 gatherings are already planned all over France tonight, amongst them in Nantes and Rennes at 6pm. The answer against these evictions will be also found in longer terms. A demonstration is called in Nantes this Saturday and a gathering on the zad for this week-end.