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Communiqué from parents at the ZAD concerning the planned police/army attack

Monday 9 April 2018

All the versions of this article: [English] [français]

We are parents living at the ZAD. We have organized, among other things, a collective day-care center run by the parents which, like many other informal activities that knit this territory together, is about to take on a legal existence. We have chosen to live here, with our children, because the long struggle against the airport has given birth to dreams that are destined to come true in the long term. We want our children to grow up here, in an environment that is more open, healthier, and socially more densely knit than elsewhere. And also in an environment that is safer… We are neither a "lawless zone" nor or we anti-society, despite the fantasies circulating about us. Our children are legally declared, attend the schools and care centers in the surrounding towns, and trust their neighbors. And so, when delinquency sometimes takes up residence at the summit of the State, we have trouble understanding the need to “re-establish the rule of law.” The government has chosen to spend hundreds of thousands of euros in taxpayers’ money in what is essentially an advertising operation about the "return of the rule of law," in the middle of negotiations that have been credible and fairly productive up to now. Concerning the former planned airport, the preceding governments have persevered in pursuing a ridiculous project. Such disastrous decisions also have a human cost. What this deployment of 2,500 gendarmes means for us, parents, is police/army controls and daily detours in taking our children to day care or to school. It means that our children are likely to witness police/army violence. It means living with the hostile presence of thousands of police/army whose mission is unclear, and also illegal, with increased risks of arbitrary behaviour. It means going to bed in the fear of being woken up by armed men, arrested and evicted, with or without our children – since no one knows just who is targeted. The purpose of the coming police/army intervention seems to be to force a part of the ZAD into the stereotype of “bad ZAD resident,” and in the process it is destroying the serenity we provide for our children here. And yet, if the ZAD has resisted up to now, it has not been because of the actions of a few anarchists. It is the solidarity among everyone within an entire territory, in all its broad diversity – a value we want to pass on to our children – that has frustrated the intentions of the preceding governments. We can only hope, with all our hearts, that today once again this decision will come back to haunt Emmanuel Macron. Les couches-qui-luttent ("The Struggling Diapers/Nappies"). Collective of parents operating the day-care center at St Jean du Tertre, in the ZAD.