Ethnic Relations : Paris No Paradise for Poor African Squatters : Police raid spotlights racial bias, housing shortage and the failure to cope with a wave of immigrants.

For more than five months, they lived a primitive existence on the edge of Paris.

Across the street from bustling boutiques and cafes, African women would balance their babies on the curb in the chilly morning air, using metal cooking pots as tubs to rinse their children’s tiny bodies.

Here, in the shadows of a chateau that was once the playground of French kings, they lived in makeshift tents--refusing to budge until city officials provided them with decent housing.

The standoff ended abruptly before dawn last Thursday when more than 700 riot policemen stormed the encampment, toppling tents made from blue plastic and metal traffic barriers. Men, women and children were loaded onto buses bound for scattered suburban destinations.

“They herded us together like goats,” said one angry squatter from among the 400 caught in the police sweep. “People had gone to work and they wouldn’t let them back in to get their things. All a lot of people have left are the clothes on their backs.”

The police raid may have ended the Africans’ sit-in, but it did not resolve the troublesome questions that the protest came to symbolize.

Most of the homeless Africans are legal French residents, and their plight underlines the Socialist government’s failure to come to grips with a wave of immigration from former French colonies. Their highly visible protest also focused attention on racial discrimination in this European Mecca--one that has always prided itself on being far more socially progressive than the United States. Finally, the tent city stood as a poignant testament to the shortage of affordable housing in a city where a no-frills studio apartment can run $650 a month.

For many of the Africans, the saga began last May when the government condemned their apartment building as unsafe and evicted them.

With nowhere else to turn, about 30 neighbors squatted in an apartment building in a nearby suburb. But the suburban mayor convinced them that the city of Paris had a legal obligation to help them relocate. He packed them onto municipal buses and deposited them in front of the Chateau de Vincennes. Most were from Mali, but there were also Senegalese, Mauritanians and Gabonese.

They included women such as Hbabaserai Touret, 30, a Malian native, who cleaned houses by day in a trendy Parisian neighborhood. Until Thursday, she shared a cramped, muddy tent with her husband, a street sweeper for the city of Paris, and their six children, ages 2 to 13.

She was forever worrying about her offspring, who were plagued by bouts of diarrhea, chronic coughs and runny noses.

After the raid, the prefecture of police said the health of the African women and children had been one of the authorities’ chief reasons for disbanding the camp.

“It’s unbelievable,” said Jean Debruille, 73, who lived near the camp and had befriended some of the residents. “It all looks good on paper. They say they are relocating these people for humanitarian reasons. But in reality, they’re dumping people in worse situations than they were already in.”

Others, however, applauded the police action.

It is unclear how many people were actually living in the tents. African organizers say there were 1,424 squatters. Government officials say there were far fewer. Whatever their numbers, the protesters had spurred an outcry in the surrounding community. Neighboring cafe owners had banned them from their restroom facilities.

The rightist National Front had begun holding weekly demonstrations against the campers that drew several hundred people chanting, “Charter flights for the Malians, lodging for the French.”

Meanwhile, a government plan to relocate about 20 Africans to a temporary barracks on property owned by the national telephone company in Ennery, a rural village community outside Paris, had further inflamed tensions. Residents complained that the move would turn their town into a ghetto.

Clearly, there are no easy solutions to the underlying problems.

In the last 15 years, the number of African immigrants in France has nearly quadrupled. Most of the 320,000 people of African origin said to live in the country are concentrated in Paris.

Whereas the typical African immigrant used to be a single man working to send money home to his family, there is now a growing number of women and children. Sometimes the immigrants are from cultures that practice polygamy, and the men are attempting to support multiple families on limited incomes.

Many have a hard time finding housing--not only because it is so expensive but also because of widespread discrimination against Africans. Even African immigrants who have the money to afford a Paris apartment have difficulty finding a landlord willing to rent to them. A June study commissioned by a government agency found that many private owners use polygamy as an excuse for excluding Africans.

“The conditions that people are forced to live in are horrible,” said Kunte Serinte, a 38-year-old carpenter who lived at the protest camp with his wife and three children. “Most of the time there is no running water, no electricity. . . .”

Serinte said he has been on a government waiting list for public housing since 1983. “It is we who clean the streets and work in the factories,” Serinte said. “We have contributed to the building of France. We’re not asking for handouts.”

According to officials at the Ministry of Housing, the greatest obstacle is an overall shortage of low-income housing.

Construction of public housing here has decreased drastically in recent years, while the demand has climbed. Many needy families must wait years before their applications are finally accepted.

For the Malians and other Africans, the situation shows few signs of improving.

“Destroying the camp isn’t going to change anything,” said Debruille, gesturing toward the guards who surrounded the park a day after the raid. “As long as they (the Africans) don’t have a decent roof over their heads, they’re just going to squat somewhere else.”

Drummond, a general assignment reporter at The Times’ Orange County edition, is in Paris on a nine-month Journalists in Europe fellowship.