Thousands of high school students in Paris and other parts of France rose up on Thursday in anger at the deportation of foreign pupils, after the high-profile eviction of a 15-year-old Roma girl.
Leonarda Dibrani was detained during a school trip earlier this month and deported to Kosovo with her parents and five siblings, in a case that has raised questions over France’s immigration policies, shattered the unity of the ruling Socialist party and landed France’s popular interior minister Manuel Valls in hot water.
Critics have lashed out at the “inhumane” way the French-speaking teenager – whose family had lived illegally in the country for four years – was treated, pointing to the fact she was forced to get off a bus full of classmates in the midst of a school outing.
On Thursday, students marched through streets of the French capital, blocking the entrance to several schools and disrupting the smooth-running of other establishments.
All in all, some 20 schools in Paris were “disrupted”, the local education authority said, as students protested the eviction of both Dibrani and Khatchik Kachatryan, a 19-year-old Paris student who was deported on Saturday to Armenia.
“Bring back Khatchik and Leonarda, they belong here,” the marching pupils chanted, holding up signs calling for Valls to resign or urging solidarity.
The protest movement also spread to other parts of the country. In the southern town of Mende, around 100 students demonstrated under the slogan “Leonarda isn’t going to class, nor are we.”
Valls has launched an investigation into the deportation of Dibrani on October 9 in the eastern town of Levier, which only came to light Wednesday when an NGO highlighted the incident.
The exact circumstances in which the girl was taken off the school bus remain unclear but both the interior ministry’s version and the account of a teacher agree that her arrest did not take place in view of other pupils.
Some opposition lawmakers have backed authorities who carried out the deportation, warning that reversing the eviction – as is demanded by students and some politicians – would send out a damaging message that illegal immigrants are welcome in France.
But members of the ruling Socialist party have lashed out at the government – and Valls in particular – for what they see as right-wing immigration policies that do not sit well with those on the left.
President Francois Hollande, whose own dismal popularity ratings sharply contrast with those of his popular interior minister, has so far not commented on the controversy.
