Refugees have been promised shelter, food and support, and help with asylum applications by the French authorities

French authorities have cleared nearly 4,000 people from Paris’s biggest makeshift migrant camp, insisting those moved would be given shelter, food and support, and helped with asylum applications.

In a pre-dawn operation, police sealed off the sprawling ad-hoc shanty town of tents and cardboard shelters that stretches for almost 1,000 metres (3,300ft) from under the arches of the Stalingrad Métro bridge. A fleet of 80 buses took men, women, children and groups of unaccompanied minors out of the area.

The operation was organised jointly by the state and Paris city authorities. Officials said families and those considered vulnerable would be housed in and around the capital, while lone male migrants would be taken to reception centres around the country.



Facebook Twitter Pinterest A Red Cross volunteer counts people as they arrive to be sheltered in a former retirement home in Sarcelles, north of Paris. Photograph: Francois Guillot/AFP/Getty Images

Humanitarian organisations said people were not being told where they were going and that they feared for those not eligible for asylum in France. However, those who jostled to board buses seemed relieved – even happy – to be going.



“It would be good to know where we are being taken, but it will be better than sleeping here,” said one woman, who did not wish to be named.



The loudest protests came from French campaigners, who shouted insults at police and City Hall chiefs, but the evacuation passed off without violence. Earlier in the week, fights had broken out as tensions rose.



Facebook Twitter Pinterest A police line restrains people during the evacuation near Stalingrad metro station in Paris. Photograph: Lionel Bonaventure/AFP/Getty Images

Hundreds of CRS riot police carrying shields and batons had arrived at the ad hoc camp at about 6am.



They found the camp’s occupants waiting for them. Word had already gone around that the camp would be broken up in an early-morning operation, and many of those living on the street, among them Afghans, Eritreans, Sudanese and Ethiopians, had packed their few belongings into battered suitcases and plastic bags. Some even folded up their tents and stood waiting, duvets draped around their shoulders to keep out the morning chill.



The scene was already bleak; then it began to rain. Locals and humanitarian organisations handed out baguettes and biscuits to women and toddlers, who were given priority on the buses.



Marine, 28, an actor living nearby, said she had been visiting the Stalingrad camp for six months. “It wasn’t possible to just sit at home while there was all this misery around me. I felt I had to do something. Many of the migrants were people my own age and we formed a strong bond. Today, I’m afraid for them.”



Facebook Twitter Pinterest The mayor of Paris, Anne Hidalgo (centre), arrives during clearance of the camp in Paris. Photograph: Philippe Lopez/AFP/Getty Images

The mayor of Paris, Anne Hidalgo, turned up to support the clearance and spoke to a group of Eritrean teenagers, standing out of the rain in a bus shelter waiting to be evacuated.



“Do you have houses for us?” one 16-year-old asked in broken English. The mayor reassured them they would be given a roof over their heads.



How on earth can refugees or migrants think about their futures if they've had no sleep and nothing to eat? Anne Hidalgo, mayor of Paris

Hidalgo said breaking up the squalid open-air camp was essential. Finding accommodation for the thousands camped at Stalingrad would enable the authorities to start with a clean slate and control the flow of new refugees in the French capital – estimated at 80 a day – in a “humane manner”, she added. A new reception centre will open in the north of Paris next week.



“Paris attracts people, but the problem is one that the whole of France needs to deal with. We cannot have camps of this nature in the city. We cannot have people living in such dirty, undignified circumstances,” Hidalgo told the Guardian.



Facebook Twitter Pinterest Tents on the Avenue de Flandre in Paris, one of several camps that have sprouted up around the French capital. Photograph: Lionel Bonaventure/AFP/Getty Images

“These people need a proper place to sleep. How on earth can refugees or migrants think about their futures if they’ve had no sleep, or been sleeping on the street, and have had nothing to eat. Once they have a roof over their heads, they can reflect on what they will do.”



She also praised local residents for their “patience and solidarity”.



Alain Guillo, who lives in the 18th arrondissement, said residents and refugees had existed in “deplorable health conditions” in recent months.



The number of migrants living rough increased to a record number after the closure of the Calais camp last week. Despite about 30 attempts to move people on and clear the area in the last 18 months, they have always returned.



“In the end, it grew so large that it was no longer a refugee camp in a district, it was a district inside a refugee camp. What we wanted was dignity for all: residents and refugees,” Guillo said.

