He lived in the Paris-Charles de Gaulle terminal between 1988 and 2006. A squat that went down in history
Because of < /p>Jorge Cantillo
His real name is Mehran Karimi Nasseri, an Iranian known as Sir Alfred de Charles de Gaulle, after the airport where he lived for 18 years.
In 2004, acclaimed director Steven Spilberg joined forces with actor Tom Hanks to to bring to the big screen the unusual story of a man who was stranded in the airport terminal at John F. Kennedy International Airport in New York for a year while waging a diplomatic battle to enter the country.
In that story, Hanks’s character, Viktor Navorski, came from a fictional country called Krakozhia, which, due to a coup, had ceased to be recognized by the United States, leaving the man without effective citizenship.
Although the details of the script were constructed from fiction, the story that gave rise to the plot was far from being fictional, on the contrary, it took a very real inspiration, the case of Mehran Karimi Nasseri, better known as Sir Alfred, an Iranian refugee who, by the time of the premiere of “Terminal”, had been living at the Paris-Charles de Gaulle airport for 16 years.
Maintaining that he was British, by a supposed Scottish mother that no one ever found, Nasseri called himself “Alfred” and insisted that everyone call him “Sir”, a show of courtesy between the citizens of the United Kingdom. United that ended up adding even more mystery to this particular character.
Between 1988 and 2006, Alfred blended in with any other passenger waiting patiently for a flight on a bench in Terminal 1 of the Paris airport, with his luggage ordered next to him, a coffee and a newspaper. But unlike other passengers, that flight he was waiting for, and that he dreamed would finally take him to the United Kingdom, never happened.
Alfred’s story was the inspiration for the film The Terminal by Steven Spilberg and Tom Hanks
The story of how Mehran Karimi Nasseri became the longest-serving occupant of the French capital’s airport goes back to its mysterious origins, which have been constructed from dozens of press releases that have been written about this character. In each, Sir Alfred delivers a slightly different story, but the consensus is that his country of origin is Iran.
The Man Without a Country
The pilgrimage that took Alfred to the Paris airport began in 1972, when after the death of his father, a doctor, his family told him that he was an illegitimate son. His real mother was, in fact, Scottish, or so he maintained despite her appearance indicating otherwise.
His family rejected him and Alfred left home to study Yugoslav economics in the north of England. He returned to Iran in 1974 and was involved in demonstrations against the Shah. Arrested and tortured by the Savak, the Iranian security ministry, Alfred was stripped of his nationality and expelled from the country.
The next few years he wandered around Europe seeking political asylum,until in 1981 Belgium granted him refugee status and granted him identity documents. That, which should have been his happy ending, turned out to be just the beginning of his story.
Shortly after that, Alfred had his documents stolen, or, according to another of the versions about him, he returned them to the authorities “in a moment of madness”. The case was that he traveled from Belgium to France, where he spent the following years in and out of prison on charges of illegal immigration.
He was stranded in 1988 when he tried to traveling to the UK from France but having no papers he couldn’t leave the airport and he couldn’t be deported either.
In 1988 Alfred unsuccessfully attempted to return to the UK, but upon arrival at Paris Charles de Gaulle Airport he was unable to leave France because he had no papers. Since he couldn’t stay either because he didn’t have papers, the authorities told him to wait in the airport lounge while they solved the paradox. He did, for years and years.
Alfred settled in Terminal 1 and made it his home. From its circular confines, he and his lawyer Christian Bourget, a renowned Parisian human rights expert, fought to define his status and send him to London. For more than 10 years they waged a fierce legal battle that had several important milestones.
In 1992, a French court finally ruled that Nasseri had entered the airport legally as a refugee and could not be expelled from it. But the court was unable to force the French government to allow him to leave the airport onto national soil. In fact, Bourget said in statements to the media at the time, the French authorities refused to give Nasseri a refugee or transit visa.
“It was pure bureaucracy” , said the lawyer.
He lived in some red chairs that he adapted like his bed, his office, his headquarters.
Bourget and Alfred then focused on Belgium, where they hoped to recover Nasseri’s original refugee documents. But Belgian refugee officials refused to mail them to France, arguing that Alfred had to appear in person to be sure he was the same man who had been granted political asylum years before.
At that time, the Belgian government put another hurdle: refusing to allow Alfred entry, because under Belgian law, someone who has been granted refugee status and who voluntarily left the country cannot return.
In 1995 Alfred got another chance for a ‘happy ending’, as the Belgian government changed its stance and said it would return his refugee documents on the condition that he return to live in Belgium, and be supervised by a social worker.
It could have been the exit, by then I had been living in the airport for almost a decade. But Alfred was intent on entering the UK, and he wasn’t about to leave the homeland he had built for himself in Terminal 1 for anything less.
And there it remained, year after year.
Sir Alfred’s dignity
Alfred is from Iran, the country that expelled for opposing the Shah’s regime, after wandering through several European countries he ended up at the Paris airport.
At first glance, Alfred never looked like a refugee sleeping on an airport bench because he has nowhere to go. His clothes always clean, his mustache neatly trimmed, his only jacket covered in plastic wrap, kept hanging from an airport trolley, and his belongings kept neatly packed in a suitcase and a stack of Lufthansa boxes.
During his early years at the airport, her basic needs were met by sympathetic passers-by and airport workers who were aware of her Kafkaesque situation.
People bought her food, gave her money, and listened sympathetically to her story. As his story began to hit the press, Alfred became something of a surreal celebrity, not just among airport workers, but among tourists who included a visit to his small independent homeland in Terminal 1. as an initial or final part of your trip to Paris.
Alfred made Terminal 1 of the Airport of Paris Charles de Gaulle his home for almost two decades.
It was thanks to the press that he got another form of subsistence. Well, since he aroused so much curiosity, he used to charge a small tip to the journalists and film directors who desperately wanted to tell his story, and among other things, to be the ones who convinced him to stop inhabiting the airport, seeing him like a prisoner who had come to love his chains.
But Alfred never saw himself like that, he was always comfortable with his life, and he even felt that by appropriating his piece of the airport, he had managed to reclaim the freedom and homeland that circumstance had taken from him.
“From the moment I sat down next to him I felt the strength of his, there is no better word, dignity. Alfred seemed totally pleased with himself. He did not intend to please or play with your sympathy. He wasn’t the subway bum who sang for a drink. Everything in Alfred’s life took place on his own terms. In a sense, he was a freer man than most ”, director Paul Berczeller wrote in a 2004 note for The Guardian.
Alfred showing a newspaper article written about him.
Berczeller spent a year with Sir Alfred and documenting his life at the airport for a film he called “Here to Where” which was released in 2001.
“Alfred’s red bench was the only anchor in his life. It was his bed, his living room, and his corporate headquarters. It was actually two benches side by side, about eight feet long in total and gently curving, wide enough to sleep on if he kept his hands tucked under the pillow. But he never slept during the day, though his eyes often drooped from boredom; you could always find Alfred sitting in the middle of his bench, in front of a rickety white Formica table, which he used as a desk”, narrated Berczeller.
The director described Alfred as someone who despite outward appearances lived a life “of complete self-sufficiency and order”.
“I always had a MacDonald’s bacon and egg croissant for breakfast and a McDonald’s fish sandwich for dinner. She always left a tip. Alfred was not, to put it bluntly, a tramp”, Berczeller stated.
But neither he nor anyone else managed to convince Alfred from leaving the airport, even after the French government finally granted him a temporary visa in 1999 that allowed him not only to leave the airport but to go wherever he wanted.
Sir Alfred’s story inspired books, films and documentaries.
He insisted on staying, by then his health and mental state had begun to deteriorate.
In 2006, after 18 years of living at the airport, his health deteriorated. For that alone, he had to be removed from Terminal 1 to receive medical attention.
After spending some time in hospital, Alfred went to live in a hotel, but on March 6, 2007 moved to the Emmaus reception center, in the 20th district of Paris.
Since that date, reported in an article by Europa Press, his whereabouts are unknown of the man without a country, Sir Alfred by Charles de Gaulle.