LYONS, FRANCE, April 1 — Hundreds of parents of Lyons students fought the threatened deportation of 45-year-old undocumented Angolan immigrant Guilherme Hauka Azanga and forced the government to free him.
Azanga, who has lived in France for eight years, was arrested in front of his family’s four children, one of whom attends Gilbert-Dru elementary school. Shocked parents held a spontaneous demonstration on March 25 at the school. Two days later, in a show of multi-racial, international working-class unity, several hundred marched in downtown Lyons demanding his freedom.
Then, after Azanga was jailed in a detention camp, dozens of parents began occupying the school, staying in relays for ten days. On March 30, over 200 hundred people formed a chain of solidarity in front of the city’s town hall.
Azanga’s partner, an immigrant from the Congo who has residence papers, is ill and if he were to be deported, a school social worker said the children would be placed in a foster home. “Everybody in the neighborhood knows him,” declared Marc Bonny, another pupil’s father. “To deport him would be to destroy his family.”
When Azanga refused in January to board a plane to be deported, he was imprisoned for two months in Lyons’ Corbas jail, a jail he helped build previously as an undocumented worker. The cops then bound and gagged him and took him to the Bourget airport where there were 30 riot police waiting to enforce his deportation. But the pilot of the Air France plane headed to Angola refused to take him aboard. An hour later the cops made another attempt but the pilot refused to even open the plane’s doors.
Given all this and the continuing protest of the parents in Lyons, the immigration official was forced to free him, although with the warning that he was still subject to deportation.
These fascist moves by the Sarkozy government signal its hardening position on undocumented immigrants. It occurs as the strike by 6,000 undocumented workers enters its seventh month (see CHALLENGE, 4/14).
The actions by hundreds of citizens here reflect the solidarity that many feel for the fight of these immigrants to win “legalization.” It exposes the anti-working-class policies of the bosses who create these fraudulent borders which they then use to super-exploit immigrant workers and drag down the conditions for all workers.
That’s why PLP declares, “Smash all borders!”J