Internet and Xenophobia
An Interview with Marc Chemillier
Webmaster of the Sans Papiers Movement

At Hybrid Workspace, Documenta X, Kassel
July 3, 1997

Geert Lovink: When did you start the website of the Sans Papiers movement?

Marc Chemillier: The movement started on march 18th 1996 and the website
was up in july, so a few months later. I had this idea because I felt we
were lacking information about their actions, meetings and demonstrations.
In the summer of 96 the media began talking about Sans Papiers.
I wanted to give the full information. Before, faxes were used
intensively, mainly for the national coordination, to communicate with
other Sans Papiers groups in other parts of France. But only after the
eviction of the Saint Bernard church they themselves began producing
some newspapers.

GL: One would not associate a movement of 'illegal' immigrants with the
use of computers. How do you see the relation between the Sans Papiers
and the Internet?

MC: Computers seem very far away from the situation and the cultures of 
immigrants. But they understand very well how the computer can help
them and they agreed completely with what I proposed at the time. One
of their representatives, Babacar Diob, is himself a computer developer.
When I began, I hoped that we would receive some messages from Africa but
it did not work out.  Those African people who are connected to the
Internet do not feel any solidarity with the Sans Papiers, who were
seeking refuge in a church in Paris. One of the answers we got was: "I
don't care about French people. They don't want us to go to their country,
and I am working in Canada or America, so I don't care." The people who
have Net-access in Africa have money and visa. The problems of the Sans
Papiers do not concern them.

The website now has two parts: the webpages and a mailinglist. The
list is managed by a person from the newspaper 'Le Monde Diplomatique'.
The website is private and runs from a server in San Francisco. The
mailinglist has 300 subscribers and the site has about 1000 pages. In
the beginning it was mainly information from the Sans Papiers, press
releases and also material from the "College des Mediateur", a group of
well known people who wanted to help the Sans Papiers. Then people on
the Internet contacted me and offered to help me.
The website is built in circles: in the middle are the 300 people in the 
church, then the College des Mediateurs and the next one are all the
persons involved in this issue, like the government. The fourth circles
contains articles about the politics of immigration (in France). The fifth
one deals with immigration in other countries.

GL: Why aren't the people themselves making use of computers?

MC: It's not so easy. It is a technological instrument and the Sans
Papiers from Saint Bernard church have got nothing, very little money.
Babacar Diob wrote a book about Sans Papiers and from the revenues he
bought a computer and now got onto the Internet. He is the only person
doing the communication between the virtual world and the world of the
Sans Papiers. The other members got printed parts from the Web. We put a
print-out of all the messages that were sent to the website on a wall of
the place where the immigrants are living.
The web is important to provide people with basic information, like about
the laws. If you ask people a question about immigration, they will say:
"There are too many immigrants." But they cannot tell you any figures. The
fact is that only a few people in France are (yet) using the Internet.
But together with video, papers and pampflets, it might work.
The movement itself is multi-lingual. France do not want immigrants, but
they are using the French language as an intermediate. There are many
African languages spoken by the Sans Papiers. On the website we try to
make a maximum number of translations available. Some of the pages are
translated in more than ten languages. People are contacting us through
the Internet and offer us to translate documents into Italian, Polish
or Svahili.

GL: Many people in Europe, especially older intellectuals, seem to be
sceptical about the use of the Internet. Do you encounter this also in
your work?

MC: Recently, I read some of the texts you are refering to, and I
became confused about the Internet. I am wondering to what extend the
Internet is contributing to the current xenophobia. When I am working
on the website, I am alone with my computer. It is certainly something
we have to have a closer look at. I am not sure what we can take from
the Net, from a general tactical position. It's really open for me.
Jacques Derrida recently wrote about the tension in the contemporary
world. On the one hand, people can communicate so fast and so easily.
The xenophobia in France or in Germany, on the other hand, seems to be
a reaction against the speed of the television, the airplane and the
Internet. But he is not very pessimistic about it. This reaction to
this open world is temporary and local and not so important.

e-mail: marc@info.unicaen.fr
The Sans Papiers movement:    http://www.bok.net/pajol

(edited by Patrice Riemens)