French government evacuates homeless Africans SINCE May 21, 1992, more than 300 African families have been camping on the Esplanade de Vincennes, just outside Paris' inner city, demanding decent housing They stayed there for more than five months in very difficult material conditions and at the outset, under a strict police blockade aimed at preventing any improvement in sanitary conditions.
Over the past three years the Paris Region has seen an increasing number of such occupations, a reflection of the French capital's mounting housing crisis. Rents have been rising sharply since 1981, there have been big cutbacks in the construction of public housing while property speculation has flourished. In the Paris Region alone more than 300,000 people are homeless or without decent accomodation, while there are more than 300,000 recorded empty properties. A 1945 law allowing the requisitioning of empty properties remains a dead letter.
In September 1992 an "agreement" was signed concerning the Vincennes conflict which the families rejected since it gave no guarantees for the majority of cases, and required that the camp be immediately abandoned. Since then the authorities have broken off all negotiations.
The neo-fascist National Front (FN) has been agitating for the camp to be broken up and its appeal seems to have caught the ear of the authorities. On October 29, the police brutally evacuated the camp giving spurious "humanitarian" reasons, and pretending that the families would be temporarily rehoused. In fact hundreds of those from the camp have not been rehoused and are wandering the streets of Paris each evening looking for somewhere to sleep.
The offers made to the families are often indecent — for example a filthy abandoned hospital with 75 beds was offered as a home to 205 people who have preferred to camp outside. Hostels supposedly booked by the authorities are often not ready to receive the arrivals. A united committee has been organizing support for this struggle. Alongside housing campaigns it is continuing to demand the urgent rehousing of the hundreds who remain in the street, and a definitive solution to the housing problems of all those involved in the Vincennes camp.
The police raid on the camp has been met with indignation in the press and 07 among public opinion - Cecilia Garmendia. *
USA From Kuwait to Los Angeles THE most significant result of the American presidential election is not the victory of Bill Clinton - even if he is being promoted as the new Kennedy for the 1990s (and the legend of Kennedy was largely a posthumous creation). It is the shattering defeat of George Bush, who just a year ago, was riding high in the polls.
After his victory in the Gulf War the outgoing president basked in imperial grandeur. The Battle of Kuwait was his Austerlitz, but a year later he met his Waterloo - in Los
The Reagan years saw a record-breaking military build-up, which had several consequences. The United States fitted itself out with a highly sophisticated array of means of destruction. Its superiority in military technology reached levels never seen before as its great power rival began to falter.
This was itself to some extent one of the consequences of Reaganite militarism: the debacle that Gorbachev presided over in the USSR was hastened by the exhaustion of the bureaucratic economy in the arms race imposed on it. The pursuit by the USSR of military parity with the US meant a much higher burden relative to its own national product than that borne by its rival.
From this point of view Clinton was not wholly right when he compared the triumphalism of the Republican administration over the collap- administration over the collapse of the Soviet Union to the pretensions of a cock who daybreak to be the result of its Reaganite militarism, supported have sent any other economy to the bottom. The US is the ultimate example of the great debtor without recoverable property who the creditors cannot declare bankrupt because that would be the end of them as well.
Spendthrift on weaponry, but penny pinching cuts on social spending in the name of primitive social Darwinism. "Get rich", *, cried Reagan to an America already characterized by big inequalities. The result was that the gulf between the two Americas, that of the rich and that of the poor became vaster and more dizzying than ever. Enrichment at the top was less the result of economic growth than of redistribution at the expense of the most disadvantaged and of a policy of easy money for the privileged.
The Reagan legacy
This was the America that Bush inherited and which he was to perpetuate. On the foreign policy front it was easy to flourish the super-sophisticated arsenal built up by Reagan in the face of an increasingly decrepit Soviet Union. Firstly on a small scale, with the invasion of Panama in December 1989 and then on the grand scale against Iraq in JanuaryFebruary 1991 — the biggest US military intervention since Indochina. That year was rounded off by the collapse of the Soviet Union.
Paradoxically, the fall of the USSR deprived Reagan's successor of his main argument. A world without the Evil Empire no longer needed "hawks" at the controls in Washington. Furthermore, the Gulf operation disappointed those who had believed in the mystification about the crusade against a new Hitler. Saddam
Hussein is now able to draw consolation - albeit a very meagre one for the suffering Iraqi people — from having survived to see his conqueror's downfall. In the United States, economic and social issues were again the centre of attention. This time Bush's luck was out. Starting in 1990, recession succeeded the largely artificial growth of the Reagan years. In this context, the consequences of the latter's anti-social policies have become immediately explosive. And so the victor of Kuwait lost the battle of Los Angeles last April, before losing office in November.