With buzz saws and heavy equipment, workers in hard hats finished dismantling part of one of Europe’s most notorious migrant camps on Wednesday — less than a month after a judge ruled that the operation could proceed, reports The New York Times.
Day after day, police officers in riot gear kept watch in the southern half of the camp as the saws sliced through wooden shelters and mechanical diggers crunched the debris into large metal bins.
Now that the migrants in the southern part of the camp have been evicted, the question of where they will go lingers.
“Dismantling all of this is all well and good, but once it is done, what are they going to do?” said Olivier Marteau, a field coordinator for Doctors Without Borders at the camp.
“Are they going to leave a police cordon to guard the area?” he asked on a recent afternoon, before the dismantling had ended. “The people aren’t gone, and when you see all the people at the borders of Europe, there are going to be more.”
The French authorities, he added, “want to hide the problem, but that’s not going to fix it.”
On Wednesday, humanitarian groups told reporters here that 80 percent of the evicted migrants had simply moved to the northern half of the camp.
The government’s chief strategy is to bus those who are willing to 112 centers across France. It says nearly 3,000 people have already done so since October.
The French interior minister, Bernard Cazeneuve, said last week at a parliamentary hearing that most migrants in Calais qualified for asylum in France — many are Afghans, Sudanese or Iraqis — and that 80 percent of those who had been brought to centers had officially requested asylum.
Yet many of the migrants would still prefer to stay in their improvised shelters here, hoping for an opportunity to smuggle themselves into Britain through the Channel Tunnel or on ferries. The huge camp took shape in the first place because so many migrants wanted to cross the English Channel, and it grew even as the French and British authorities took measures to seal off access to the tunnel.
As spring approaches, so does the prospect of more migrants arriving with similar hopes of reaching Britain, where they see better opportunities for work and benefits.
The French government argues that conditions in the cold and muddy camp are unacceptable — which nobody disputes — and that the migrants, if they stay in Calais, should relocate to state-sanctioned facilities.
Those include an enclosed section of the camp with 125 refurbished and heated containers that can shelter 1,500, and a center providing showers and meals, where most of the women and children are housed.
Vincent Berton, the deputy prefect for the Pas-de-Calais administrative department, said the goal was to reduce the camp’s population to about 2,000 people from an estimated 4,000 at the time of the judge’s order.
“It is a midterm objective, not an immediate one,” he said.
Yet that goal would also require the dismantling of the camp’s northern half, where there are restaurants, food stalls and shops, even a hairdresser. Some common areas like schools and places of worship were placed off limits by the judge, but it is unclear how they will fare now that they stand alone.
There are no official plans to expand the demolition for now, but the prospect raises worries of renewed tensions. Clashes erupted between the police and migrants on the first day of the razing, which many did not expect to unfold so swiftly and forcibly after the ruling.
The refurbished containers in Calais are unattractive to some migrants. Each one has been fitted with six bunks, metal closets, radiators, running water and electrical outlets, but there are no showers or cooking options.
“It’s better to be outside than inside because you are free,” said Mohammed Ahmad, a 30-year old Sudanese, from a dune in front of his wooden and tarp shelter.
The nearly 1,400 migrants who live in the containers can leave and enter the site at will, but must pass through turnstiles by entering a personal code and pressing their hand into a scanning device.
Read more of this report from The New York Times.
See also: Calais and Grande-Synthe, a tale of two radically different migrant camps