At first sight, there is no great difference between the two camps, hurriedly built to shelter hundreds of migrants living in appalling conditions in makeshift shanty-towns on wasteland in the French Channel port of Calais and the nearby town of Grande-Synthe.
On one side is a camp built by the French authorities alongside the notorious makeshift lodgings of ‘the Jungle’ in Calais, an insalubrious site of tents and shacks which has become a sad symbol of the migrant crisis in Europe. Built in January, the fenced-in camp is made up of 125 transformed shipping containers, each destined to sleep 12 people in bunk-beds, with water, heating and electricity. There is no intimacy, and any personalization of the containers is prohibited. Cooking – even brewing tea – within them is not allowed, neither is washing. Showers and toilet facilities are situated outside the containers and there are few common meeting areas. By last week, 1,335 migrants had moved in to the site, according to official figures.
Enlargement : Illustration 1
On the other side, about 30 kilometres further east along the coast, at Grande-Synthe, near Dunkirk, is a new site designed by French NGO Médecins sans frontières (Doctors Without Borders), MSF, and built in cooperation with Grande-Synthe’s Green party mayor Damien Carême. About 900 migrants earlier this month left the mud and squalor of their nearby shanty-town to move into the 375 wooden cabins.
Conditions in both camps are from idyllic. The hurriedly-built lodgings house people exhausted after crossing thousands of kilometres in perilous situations, escaping misery or war in their home countries, and who are desperate in their hope of crossing the Channel to Britain. Caught in a trap of closed borders, making any move without people smugglers almost impossible, they have lived rough for months exposed to tough winter conditions.
As the migrants settled into the MSF camp at Grande-Synthe on March 7th, the prefect (the senior government representative) for the region, Jean-François Cordet, ordered mayor Damien Carême to secure the site, situated between a motorway and railway tracks. Two days later, on March 9th, French interior minister Bernard Cazeneuve, speaking before a parliamentary commission, said the site “posed problems” because of its lack of security controls. While paying tribute to Carême’s “humanitarian engagement”, he insisted that this must not be “outside of the rules of law and global objectives that the State pursues” in its policies towards refugees, “except for running the risk of, ultimately, an extremely degraded humanitarian situation”.
But behind the pretext that the MSF camp must meet the government’s regulatory requirements is the fear of the authorities that they will lose control over the migrants. The container camp in Calais and that of the wooden huts in Grande-Synthe reveal two very different conceptions of how to accommodate migrants.
The container camp in the Calais Jungle, officially called a Provisional Welcome Centre (centre d’accueil provisoire), or CAP, is surrounded by high-wire fencing and tight police surveillance (see more here). It is accessed through biometric security doors which scan recorded palm-prints. Migrants have complained of the use of the biometric system, who fear that those submitting their prints will, if ever they reach Britain, be sent back to France – which the French authorities deny. According to one police source, migrants are not allowed out of the camp at night, when most of the attempts to make a clandestine crossing are organised.
In this sterile environment, whose construction cost the public purse 18 million euros according to figures from the French interior ministry, the surveillance is part of an aim to redirect migrants, the camp representing the first stage in the programme to empty and close down the Jungle. The migrants are encouraged to apply for asylum in France, which entails being sent to accommodation centres situated across France, where their asylum requests are processed and without any guarantee that they will be given refugee status.
The camp has come in for fierce criticism and notably in February in the form of an open letter addressed to interior minister Bernard Cazeneuve co-signed by the heads of eight aid associations including MSF, the Secours catholique, the Secours islamique, and the social reinsertion federation, the FNARS. In their February 18th letter, one week before bulldozers began moving in to clear the southern zone of the Jungle (when evicted migrants were offered shelter in the CAP), they insisted on the need for the camp to be improved “in terms of the respect of people’s intimacy and living conditions”. A local association bringing aid to the migrants, l’Auberge des migrants, denounced the new camp’s facilities as being “below international norms”, notably the allocated number of toilets and showers per person.
The government has already come into criticism from the State Council over the enduring poor conditions in the Jungle, and the stinging rebuke from NGOs over its container camp was underscored by the generally favourable media reports on the nearby MSF camp at Grande-Synthe.
“The State can’t stand being overtaken,” commented anthropologist Michel Agier, a research director with the School for Higher Social Sciences Studies (EHESS). He underlined that the Jungle was an authorized site before the recent decision to begin dismantling its southern zone. The destruction of the site began after it had developed a certain structure, with places of prayer, shops and even makeshift schools. “Seeing that the shanty-town was out of their control, the government had containers built, a camp within a camp,” he said. “The CAP is a place of ultra-security.”
Vast differences in cost and approach
Built against the will of the authorities, the camp in Grande-Synthe is of a different nature. Local mayor Damien Carême, who was reelected to a third term of office in 2014, began making plans for such a site last summer after the steep rise in numbers of migrants arriving in the nearby shanty-town in Basroche, whose population jumped from around 80 people to almost 3,000. With living conditions there deteriorating, he proposed to MSF last November that the international humanitarian organization design a new camp using its know-how in managing refugee camps. The result was the construction of the new camp’s 375 cabins, capable of housing 1,500 people. It was built in two months, compared to five months for the building of the container camp in Calais.
Enlargement : Illustration 2
The MSF camp was built at a cost of just more than 3 million euros, of which 2.6 million euros were funded by MSF and 500,000 euros by the local town hall. Carême, who estimates the camp’s yearly running costs will total 2.5 million euros, wants the French state to refund the construction costs. Beyond technical differences between it and the camp in Calais, the ways the camps function also diverges. “Our aim is to ensure that people feel at home,” said MSF programmes director Mathilde Berthelot. “They have lived through countless difficulties on the way, and they need a refuge where they can drop their belongings. During the first hours following their installation, the families began making awnings and pergolas. They set up plastic sheeting to make verandas. Children began running between the houses. Each one personalised their space. We saw a poster of Justin Beiber appear, [and] a Kurdish flag. Clothes were immediately hung from wires like in any village.”
“In Calais, all of that is impossible, the site doesn’t allow for it” Berthelet added. “The regulations are so strict that you could not hang curtains over the windows. The containers are an alignment of boxes with beds to sleep in, whereas our chalets are living places that can be appropriated by the migrants.”
Architect and engineer Cyrille Hanappe has studied the two sites with his students from the higher education institute l’École nationale supérieure Paris-Belleville, and contributed to the conception of the MSF camp. “Empowerment is the key word at Grande-Synthe,” he said. “We don’t yet know what will come of it, but the idea is to go about things so that people take their lives into hand. The cabins are transformable, they can be made bigger or divided up, according to need. In Calais, people can do nothing. Everything is prohibited, nothing is movable. The migrants are numerised, like the containers. They are denied their individual identity, and treated as objects.”
Hanappe is a co-founder of an architects’ practice, AIR Architectures, and denounces the “totally opaque” tender process for the construction of the container camp in Calais, which he said was a “waste of public money”. The company which was given the contract, Brittany-based Logistic Solutions, counts the French army among its major clients. Its founder, Norbert Janvier, was himself a logistical expert in the army, now specialized in converting maritime cargo containers.
If conviviality does not appear to have been on the agenda for the camp in Calais, it was at Grande-Synthe. “Close to the camp entrance, we transformed a vast hangar where people can meet up, chat, drink tea and recharge their mobile phones,” explained Samuel Hanryon, from MSF, who added that there is also a laundry room with ten washing machines and clothes-driers. The camp also has a clinic and tents set up for association staff who help in the management of the site. That is another crucial difference with Calais, where the only association allowed inside the container camp is La vie active, mandated by the authorities. The numerous NGOs and volunteers who have been active in the Jungle for years are left to camp in the muddy ground outside.
It is too early to predict how the Grande-Synthe camp will develop, but what is sure is that the relationship between the different associations will be determining for its success. Even if a yurt has already sprouted among the huts, even if the creation of a school is planned, a number of association workers complain of being marginalized. “There are faults, it’s not a five-star camp, but we are trying to make it an open place,” said Hanryon.
One important question is that of whether the people smugglers, whose omnipresence in the nearby shanty-town in Basroche included making migrants pay for space and showers, will settle at the camp. “We can’t do very much about this issue, other than to inform the police about criminal behaviour, like the carrying of weapons,” said Mathilde Berthelot of MSF. She pointed out that there are police patrols which circle the camp.
“At Basroche, it was easy to hide in the forest,” said her colleague Samuel Hanryon. “In the new camp, where entrance is filtered, everything is in full view and knowledge of all.”
-------------------------
- The French version of this article can be found here.
English version by Graham Tearse