BAttle Story

The battlefield is the hearts of the people

By Pierre Chopinaud

The Askola association which helps parents who live in slums and squats in the 93 to enroll their children in school was facing insurmountable blockages from the mayors of the municipalities. Laws, morality, the rector, associations, nothing helps. Because it is not a question of rights but a situation of oppression, that is to say a relationship of power.

In France, in 2025, there are slums, and there are people who have the misfortune of living in them. A widely shared prejudice among activists and social workers is that the people who live there are resigned, apathetic, incapable of defending their dignity.

The Askola organization practices school mediation in Seine-Saint-Denis. Mirela, Lucile, Emmanuelle, Alisa and the others go to the slums to help parents enroll their children in school and help them feel good there.

What father, what mother has not been heartbroken by the suffering of their child whom they have just abandoned for the first time, at the start of the school year, in the middle of twenty-five little strangers and adults of whom they know nothing? So imagine that in the morning you woke him up in a wooden cabin, without water, after spending the night protecting him from rats, that you don’t know the language or any of the common customs and that in the evening it’s the police that you find with him at home who order you to go far away?  

“The path to school, for parents and children who live in a slum, is arduous and perilous.”

The path to school, for parents and children who live in a slum, is arduous and perilous. This is why Mirela, Lucile, Emmanuelle, Alisa and the others are there: they are a bit like the sherpas who help these parents and their children to climb the mountain that is their way to school.

But what if there was only the mountain to climb? The world would still be too beautiful! This is without counting on the powerful people who drop rocks on you from the summit to make the effort even more difficult. And among these people, up on the mountain, is the mayor of the city.

Many mayors of Seine-Saint-Denis prevent children from squats and slums from accessing their city’s schools. For what ? Because they want these slums to disappear; and welcoming these children into schools, into the school community, as the law and the principles of the republic oblige them, is to recognize that they exist, that they have dignity, rights, like all the others. Once you know the children who live there, it is more difficult to destroy their house. You know that you are not only destroying wood and cardboard but also the lives inside. Despite all possible cynicism, it can hurt the heart and the conscience. Especially when you are a socialist, a communist, a rebel, a Catholic, a Muslim, an “anti-racist”… It can be shameful.

“Refusing the child to school is to make him and his family invisible, it is to throw them in the garbage bag of lives that do not count, of deaths that we do not mourn.”  

Refusing the child to school is to make him and his family invisible, it is to throw them in the garbage bag of lives that do not count, of deaths that we do not mourn. It is to put oneself, as an elected official, at the service of the builder who wants to make money by building a large building in place of people’s small cabins, an Amazon warehouse, a cement factory, it is above all to place oneself in the most cynical way at the service of the intense racism of those who have a little more than nothing, whose parents or grandparents who arrived from Brittany, Algeria, Portugal, Mali, lived in their time in these same slums, in order to to flatter their baser feelings, and win the elections.

And believe me, there are no small profits in politics: whatever the color of the skin or the shirt, when the goal is to keep one’s position of power: all means are good: even racism. And when power is at stake, principles, values, laws generally remain on the sidelines.  

“the feeling of helplessness and indignation had swallowed up their rage and their anger.”

Mirela, Emmanuelle, Lucile, Alisa and the others were at the end of their rope : the feeling of helplessness and indignation had swallowed up their rage and anger: how can we live in such an immoral world? Nothing helped: the letters, the arrests, the appeals to the administration… Are we not in the country of human rights? How can a mayor who has the reputation of being an anti-racist activist so despise the lives of these children? This world is without faith or law…

One of the fundamental precepts of radical political organizing is as old as the dawn of time. He says: there is no justice without power. Jesus Christ would not have made any Caesar tremble if he had not come with the “sword” of God.

When the Askola team spoke to us about the situation of injustice which overwhelmed the parents and the children they accompanied on the way to school, we said: drop morality, drop administrative rules: together we will try to forge “the sword”, that is to say the strength and power that we need to restore dignity to these children…

(Continued in the next episode….)