Evictions and Destruction on the ZAD Airport Protest Site

The ZAD air­port protest site in France is still being evict­ed, a process that start­ed on the 16th Octo­ber. The zone is grad­u­al­ly being mil­i­tarised but there are HUGE num­bers of pro­test­ers and seem­ing­ly more every day. We’re still fight­ing and it is not over!

 

The ZAD is an air­port protest site in the west of France about 15 miles north of Nantes. The air­port project was first pro­posed over forty years ago and has faced con­stant local resis­tance ever since. The project is in the hands of the multi­na­tion­al com­pa­ny Vin­ci, who also pro­vide us with such « ser­vices » as pris­ons, motor­ways and nuclear pow­er sta­tions. It is the par­tic­u­lar pet project of Jean Marc Ayrault, the for­mer may­or of Nantes and cur­rent Prime Min­is­ter of France. In 2009 the area host­ed a cli­mate camp, since when the emp­ty hous­es, fields and forests have been grad­u­al­ly fill­ing up with peo­ple dis­gust­ed enough by the idea of this project to stay and resist. The rea­sons for stay­ing are as diverse as the peo­ple but the occu­piers are unit­ed by an idea that fight­ing cap­i­tal­ism is an impor­tant part of every day life.

Until the sec­ond week of Octo­ber you could still arrive on the ZAD and tour around over 30 diverse squats spread across the two thou­sand hectares of threat­ened land. The peo­ple unit­ed there to organ­ise togeth­er and fight the air­port project but life was far from unpleas­ant. You could vis­it the beau­ti­ful straw bale house bak­ery which pro­vid­ed the whole area with free price deli­cious organ­ic bread twice a week, the numer­ous col­lec­tive gar­dens, the home made wind tur­bine to pro­vide elec­tric­i­ty, an incred­i­ble range of cab­ins on the ground and in the trees made from col­lect­ed mate­ri­als, and you prob­a­bly would have been able to go to a con­cert, join us on an action, help us organ­ise and come to a few work­shops to learn to climb, or knit, or maybe build a rock­et stove.

Right at the moment though we don’t seem to be leav­ing our­selves much time for knit­ting work­shops. On Tues­day 16th Octo­ber the large scale evic­tions of the place we call home start­ed, and they weren’t mess­ing around. Riot vans arrived en masse from six in the morn­ing and had already evict­ed sev­en squat­ted hous­es and burned down a large cab­in by ten o’clock in the
morn­ing. Approx­i­mate­ly 1200 police were mobi­lized for this so-called ‘oper­a­tion Cesar’, pro­tect­ing the work­ers who use plain white vans, hid­ing their com­pa­ny names. Since then we have seen near­ly all of those hous­es razed to the ground, and most of the oth­er hous­es, cab­ins and homes evict­ed and destroyed. We have also near­ly all inhaled a deeply unhealthy amount of tear gas and seen enough blue vans and uni­forms to last a life­time.

Novem­ber 17th marked a huge change in this strug­gle. Some­where between 20,000 and 40,000 (depend­ing who you ask) peo­ple were unit­ed togeth­er on the ZAD for the huge Reoc­cu­pa­tion Demo. This involved a march from the near­by town of Notre Dame des Lan­des (where the demo stretched for near­ly eight kilo­me­tres) and a chest­nut plan­ta­tion close to the cen­tre of the ZAD where huge num­bers of peo­ple got to work build­ing new cab­ins. All day it was hard to move with­out get­ting in the way of peo­ple ham­mer­ing, saw­ing and car­ry­ing heavy things into the for­est. Wit­ness­ing this col­lec­tive ener­gy, and around ten large cab­ins fly up in the course of an after­noon is some­thing I feel sure no one who was there will for­get. More than that, I hope that every sin­gle per­son who squelched through the mud that day now feels a part of the ZAD, and that we will not lose this col­lec­tive force and feel­ing of strength.

Since then there has been vast amounts of con­struc­tion hap­pen­ing all over the ZAD. In fact it is hard to find a place on the zone where you can’t hear ham­mer­ing. Unfor­tu­nate­ly for the last few days this has been accom­pa­nied by the all-too-famil­iar sounds of con­cus­sion grenades and tear gas bombs. All of the new­ly con­struct­ed tree hous­es and the ground-lev­el cab­in in the Rohanne For­est were once again destroyed on Sat­ur­day in a con­stant cloud of tear gas. Despite being attacked and gassed all day, the huge num­ber of sup­port­ers on the ground stayed until long after dark, until the police final­ly crawled back to where they came from. The new cab­ins from the reoc­cu­pa­tion demo remain but they seem at risk of being destroyed soon. Dur­ing the week­end there were huge num­bers of injuries for the first time since the evic­tions start­ed, and also instances of police attack­ing bar­ri­cades in the mid­dle of the night. They are now mil­i­taris­ing the zone, stay­ing all night on the roads to stop us from mov­ing around, and grad­u­al­ly upping the pres­sure.

We got the mes­sage yes­ter­day that the evic­tions will stop if we stop build­ing, and I can smile as I type that I feel quite sure that will not hap­pen. We will con­tin­ue to build, and con­tin­ue to fight against this oppres­sion and this use­less sense­less project. We will not let them win so eas­i­ly. There are more of us than ever and it is impos­si­ble not to feel strong, even as they destroy our homes again and again. We have ever more peo­ple to keep rebuild­ing.

There is a call out for sol­i­dar­i­ty actions on our web­site (www.zad.nadir.org)

The strug­gle con­tin­ues for us, and we wel­come the sup­port of those as dis­il­lu­sioned as us with this com­pa­ny, the state, and the con­trol on our every day lives. It’s far from over, this is just the begin­ning.

Call out for actions dur­ing the moment of evic­tion of the ZAD
 https://zad.nadir.org/spip.php?article175

new call out for occu­pa­tion
https://zad.nadir.org/spip.php?article348