It was expected, ten days after a demonstration of thousands of opponents, punctuated by violent clashes with the gendarmes: the construction site of a disputed agricultural water reservoir in Sainte-Soline (Deux-Sèvres) resumed on Tuesday 8 November, noted a journalist from Agence France-Presse. It is the Coop de l’eau, a group of 400 farmers, which carries this project supported by the State, intended to build vast reserves to allow irrigation in summer thanks to the pumping of surface water tables in winter.
For the moment, nothing has come to disturb the activity of the excavators. The “basin” of Sainte-Soline, nickname given by the opponents, is the second of the sixteen reserves of several hundred thousand cubic meters which must see the light of day in this department. The first has already been put into service.
The beneficiaries of the reserves have committed in return, in a protocol signed in 2018, to adopt practices geared towards agroecology. Conversely, their detractors see it as a ” flight forward “ of the model “productivist”.
During the rally on October 29, some opponents had managed to briefly force the gates of the site, before being repelled by some of the 1,500 gendarmes deployed on the site. Demonstrators and police had deplored dozens of injuries, a handful of them having been hospitalized.
According to the Water Coop, “it was necessary to repair a hundred barriers brought down by the demonstrators”but this “will not affect the schedule”which provides for the commissioning of the reserve in the spring of 2024.
“Absolute inconsistency”
“Firmness paid off, no ZAD [« zone à défendre », l’expression popularisée par les militants opposés au projet d’aéroport à Notre-Dames-des-Landes en Loire-Atlantique] did not settle”, commented Tuesday in the entourage of the Minister of the Interior, Gérald Darmanin. Six gendarmerie squadrons, or 400 to 500 gendarmes, were maintained around the site.
After the demonstration, the opponents had built watchtowers on land located 2 kilometers from the site, but specifying that their objective was not to organize a ZAD. On the other hand, they had demanded a moratorium from the government.
Jean-Jacques Guillet, one of the spokespersons for the “Bassines, non merci” collective, told AFP that he was not “really surprised by this resumption of work”. “The State persists in wanting to force through, while this project is absolutely incoherent, it is not the right method”, he added. And promise a “a new gathering which will be of an even larger scale”.