Tensions in Calais have become significantly heightened over recent months, fuelled by a series of dramatic incidents and a significant increase in the number of migrants arriving in the town and who are now estimated to number at least 2,300.
Last week, riot police fired tear gas grenades during clashes with groups of migrants who tried to swarm and board, en masse, trucks bound for Britain. Also last week, police again used tear gas to break up violent clashes between stick-wielding groups of Eritrean and Ethiopian migrants, who fought amid a makeshift camp housing 800 people set up on land surrounding a chemical plant. The week was also marked by the death of an Ethiopian woman who was hit by a car while crossing a motorway in an apparent attempt to board a truck in the port, the third migrant to die in a traffic accident in as many weeks.
Meanwhile, the security guard of the site of an abandoned factory in the town was recently given a six-month jail sentence for shooting, with a rifle fitted with a telescopic sight, at two migrants passing by in July. The victims, Adam Joseph Gbrel from Sudan and Jaffar Nur from Eritrea suffered back and arm wounds.
In early September, a far-right group calling itself ‘Sauvons Calais’ (Save Calais) organised a protest meeting in front of the Town Hall, where there were Nazi salutes and claims by one speaker that the migrants had come to “colonise and pillage Europe”. Another of the speakers called on locals to organize themselves into neighbourhood defence groups against the migrants, adding “don’t let yourself have your throat cut, as they’re in the habit of doing”.
On the ‘Sauvons Calais’ Facebook page dated June 9th, which can be retrieved with a search of keywords on the internet, there is a discussion thread in which contributors call for migrants to be “shot”, “killed”, and “to get the petrol out” for a “giant” barbecue.
On September 19th, after 12 complaints were lodged over the language at the meeting, local public prosecutor Jean-Pierre Valensi, based in Boulogne-sur-Mer, opened an investigation into ‘incitement of racial hatred’. That same night, four youths threw three Molotov cocktails at a small house being squatted by Egyptian migrants. The four attackers were arrested and given suspended prison sentences, ranging from six to 12 months. Two of them were identified as having taken part in the ‘Sauvons Calais’ meeting in front of the Town Hall
On the morning of October 13th, the day the four appeared in court, police officers, shopkeepers and farmers held a protest demonstration in Calais calling for reinforcements to deal with the migrant crisis, and what they said was a rise in criminality following the four-fold increase, over the space of ten months, in the number of migrants present in the port. The protest was supported by ‘Sauvons Calais’ and the far-right Front National party, although a police officers’ union official, Gilles Debove, said the support was not wanted.
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In an interview with French daily Libération, Thierry Alonso, head of public security for the Pas-de-Calais département (equivalent to a county), said migrants were cited in 7% of all complaints of crimes filed with the police in Calais in September, representing about 20 cases in all. The local press recently reported the case of a migrant who was given a four-month jail sentence after he broke into a man’s home in Calais, while drunk, and threatened him with a knife. Another reported incident involved a fight between a local man and an Albanian migrant.
On October 24th Front National leader Marine Le Pen travelled to Calais where, after a walk with supporters along the town’s main road, she gave a press conference denouncing “a scandalous negligence” of the migrant issue by government. During the afternoon, the death was announced of Mohammad Ali Douda, a migrant from Darfur. He had been admitted to hospital three days earlier after trying to jump from a bridge onto a Britain-bound truck at the port, hoping to sneak inside its canvas-covered trailer by cutting a hole in its roof. But, instead, he had fallen to the ground.
Meanwhile, little has changed in the ordinary, day-to-day conditions of the migrants since the closure in 2002 of the Red Cross-run refugee camp in nearby Sangatte. When the camp opened in 1999, (after the government approved the project under pressure from abbé Pierre, the late Catholic priest who was an ardent campaigner for the rights of the poor and the homeless, and joined by local associations), it was above all destined to care for about 150 migrants from war-torn Kosovo, and who otherwise were sleeping rough in the port’s parks. The following waves of migrants arriving in Calais were from Afghanistan, Iraq (Kurds) and Iran.
Today, most of those arriving in Calais are Eritreans and Sudanese from Darfur. In lesser numbers are Syrians, Afghans, Kurds from Iraq and Iranians. Many live in makeshift huts made of plastic and wooden pallets, set up in forest land around the port. Others have set up shelter in an abandoned and polluted factory site, in abandoned houses, while some have even found refuge in spaces between the concrete support columns of the motorway.
What is new is the arrival among the migrants in Calais of an estimated 250 women and about 15 children. About 50 women, five of whom are pregnant, and six children have been provided with pre-fabricated lodgings set up well outside the town by the local charitable association Solid'R, but the remainder are scattered around the camp sites and squatted buildings.
David Lacour, head of Solid’R, says this is a “catastrophe” which his association, made up of seven staff and limited means, cannot do more to rectify. “One can’t leave a woman and children sleeping in the street,” he said. One solution has been to find a few local folk who are willing to discreetly offer shelter inside their homes on a temporary basis of a few days. One example is a retired couple who have taken in both men and women migrants, and whose names are withheld. “They see that we’re old and that it tires us,” said one of them. “They don’t stay long. The last time it was a young girl aged 17 and a woman of 40. When they left we bought them a tent.”
'It’s not true that everyone wants to go to England'
Finding food is difficult for many migrants. A local association dedicated to helping them, , called l'Auberge des migrants, distributes meals every Thursday and Friday, but is limited to providing for 600 people. The association’s president, Christian Salomé, explained that it is in debt and had not expected the rapid recent rise in migrant numbers. The meals are distributed at 4 p.m. and the first in line have often been queuing since 2.30 p.m., while the last in line often go hungry.
The occupants of a makeshift camp set up by Sudanese from Darfur close to the Channel tunnel entrance try to get by on their own. “We club together,” explained one. “We don’t eat every day, we look for water to drink, enough to wash with.” On September 29th, the seven public showers provided for the migrants by French Catholic charity Secours Catholique were firebombed. The arsonist was arrested and sentenced to six months in prison.
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French medical aid association Médecins du Monde, which describes the sanitary conditions of the migrants as “catastrophic”, regularly sends a truck equipped with showers to migrant squats, but it’s capacity is limited to 25 showers per day. Some migrants are known to wash in water sources containing the waste of the Tioxide chemical plant, one of the largest producers of titanium dioxide in Europe. “It’s dangerous,” said Mariam Guerey from the Secours Catholique. “Because of the factory’s waste, the water is luke warm here. Some [migrants] have peeling skin afterwards.”
Médecins du Monde also distributes hygiene kits for the migrants, along with sleeping bags and jerrycans of drinking water. Meanwhile, the Secours Catholique has run out of plastic sheeting it purchases for the migrants to use for their shelters.
L'Auberge des migrants president Christian Salomé said there is “no unique explanation” as to why the numbers of migrants have suddenly risen this year. He estimates that there are about 1,500 inside Calais, and another 800 in the vicinity of the port. He described this as a stable figure since the summer. “The people who pass [across the Channel] are as numerous as those who arrive,” he said. He believes that the situation in conflict-torn Libya, already hard under the Gaddafi regime when it served Europe by withholding sub-Saharan migrants from crossing the Mediterranean, has become “unliveable” for black Africans who are targeted by violence and theft, and pushed many to flee.
Another reason for the rising number of migrants is the success of the now-threatened Italian navy operation Mare Nostrum (Our Sea) whose patrol vessels on the Mediterranean Sea have over the past year saved more than 100,000 migrants from drowning. Many migrants, leaving North African shores in rickety, overcrowded vessels, head for Italy’s most southern flanks. The Italian authorities stopped recording finger prints of migrants, which made their passage to elsewhere in Europe more difficult to control, although the practice is now to be resumed after the European Commission threatened Italy with a fine. As recounted in a documentary about the Calais migrants, Qu'ils reposent en révolte (Let Them Lie in Revolt), a number of them had burned their finger tips to destroy the pattern – the print - of their skin.
“It’s not true that everyone wants to go to England,” said an Eritrean migrant who Mediapart met with last week in the makeshift encampment on the grounds of the Tioxide plant. “Most of them go elsewhere. Look at Sweden.” According to the European Commission’s statistical information department Eurostat, in 2013 Sweden recorded a weekly average of 1,000 asylum applications compared to 600 applications per week in Britain. Germany recorded the highest number, with an average 2,400 applications per week, and in France the figure was more than double that in Britain, with 1,300 asylum applications per week.
Eurostat reported that in 2013 there was a European-wide average of 860 asylum seekers for one million inhabitants. The ratio by country was 985 asylum seekers per million inhabitants in France, and 460 asylum seekers per million inhabitants in Britain. Sweden recorded 5,680 asylum seekers per million inhabitants, while in Belgium the figure was 1,885 asylum seekers per million inhabitants and in Germany 1,575 asylum seekers per million inhabitants.
However, the average chance for asylum applications to be approved shows a different picture. In France, 17% of asylum requests were approved last year on their first hearing, compared to 26% in Germany, 38% in Britain, and 53% in Sweden. Migrants landing illegally in Britain (and who are not caught and deported within days) who then request asylum are immediately given a place to live, a small money allowance and food vouchers. Their applications are decided upon in a matter of months, whereas in France the delay can often reach more than a year.
Meanwhile, there are cases of migrants who have been deported from Britain but who return to Calais to attempt to cross back over the Channel to pick up their clandestine existence and where they have moonlighting work to return to.
In Calais, there are currently about 150 migrants who have filed asylum requests and who are sleeping in the street. In a makeshift camp of Sudanese, Mediapart found the example of three men who live side-by-side, one who plans to smuggle himself across the Channel to Britain, another who has requested asylum in France and another who has been granted asylum in France. “How can you be credible? How can you expect all the others not to want to go to Great Britain?” asked lawyer Norbert Clément who has represented 15 migrants in their requests for asylum and one seeking refugee status. Nearly all of them have now been granted, along with their requests for lodgings, which were obtained after a separate court procedure.
'Winter is coming, and it will be harder still'
Just how many migrants succeed in clandestinely crossing the Channel is unclear. Vincent De Coninck, director of the Secours Catholique operations in the Nord-Pas-de-Calais region, estimates their number to be “20 to 50 per week”, while Christian Salomé, president of the association l'Auberge des migrants believes on some days as many as “30 to 40” get across. Both agree that, whatever the exact figure, the clandestine passage continues.
While the numbers of Eritreans and Sudanese arriving in Calais have risen significantly since the start of the summer, people smugglers, who find migrants a passage across the Channel for a cash sum, mount guard over the port’s car parks, leaving cash-strapped new arrivals the only solution of attempting to enter a truck on the cuff. Close to the Tioxide chemical plant where Eritreans and Sudanese have established makeshift camps, a right-hand turn in the road to the port forces trucks to slow down almost to a halt, when some migrants attempt to jump into the trailer.
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The spot, which the Eriteans have knick-named ‘Laffa’, was already used by penniless Afghans and Kurds before the Sangatte refugee camp closed in 2002. One of their methods was to send two men to cross the road in front of the trucks, one of them pretending to limp, forcing the vehicle to stop as it manoeuvred the turn.
Speaking to daily Libération, Thierry Alonso, head of public security for the Pas-de-Calais département, described such attempts to mount trucks as being “completely irrational” acts. “They are detected straight away at the control points,” he said, referring to the entry zone to the port itself. “The probability of passing across by this method is quite weak.”
In 2001, a similar method was used by Afghans and Kurds at the entrance to the Channel Tunnel. Groups of several hundred would force trains entering the tunnel towards Britain to brake, when they would storm it. After security services intervened to remove them, the necessary speed of the operation left the possibility that a few of the migrants, well-hidden, would be overlooked and would make their way across the Channel. But the process was fraught with danger. Four migrants died in such attempts in February and March 2001, in separate incidents of colliding with trains and electrocution, while another was seriously injured.
Despite all the scanners, British-handled sniffer dogs and CO2 detectors inside the port, there are still opportunities for migrants to pass undetected, notably when traffic is jammed. “Rather than risk their lives on the most dangerous routes, they have chosen to use their [large] numbers to get past people smugglers and to confuse the police and port security,” wrote Philippe Wannesson, who worked for a local association assisting the migrants and who now runs a blog dedicated to the migrant issue in Calais, called Passeurs d'hospitalités.
There are some cases of migrants who have been living rough in Calais for five, and even seven, months. Christian Salomé explained that the toll of living rough so long, hunger, damaged feet, depression at seeing friends succeed in crossing and the effects of alcohol can end up in violence. “Five years ago I never saw people drunk,” commented Vincent De Coninck of the Secours Catholique.
Earlier this year, Britain accepted to give 15 million euros towards efforts to tighten security at the port, and French interior minister Bernard Cazeneuve last week said reinforcements of 100 police and gendarmerie officers would be sent to the town. Cazeneuve made the announcement in an interview with French regional newspaper La Voix du Nord adding that 70 of the extra officers would be stationed “24 hours a day to secure the port, and 30 others to secure the town centre”. He said that there were already 350 police and gendarmes stationed in Calais, including two anti-riot squads sent there when tensions began climbing. A total of 450 police and gendarmes was, he said, “exceptional” for a town of 75,000 inhabitants “but totally justifiable given the situation”.
Vincent De Coninck said the move would serve no constructive purpose. “It will reinforce the people smugglers,” he said, arguing that clamping down on the migrants would automatically mean they would depend more upon the organised clandestine networks of the smugglers. The fees they demand can reach between 5,000 euros and 6,000 euros for a so-called guaranteed crossing with the complicity of the truck driver, who faces a fine of 2,583 euros (£2,000) per illegal immigrant found travelling in his truck on arrival in Britain.
Christian Salomé said he hoped the reinforcements would serve to reduce police violence. “The CRS [riot police] will perhaps be less aggressive, less stressed out,” he said. “There might be fewer arms broken by batons.” Reports of police violence are not new, peaking with operations to disperse migrants, such as when the Sangatte refugee camp closed in 2002 and after the razing of the so-called “jungle”, a shanty town of makeshift encampments, was ordered in 2010.
A damning report published in November 2012 by the official French rights ombudsman, the Défenseur des droits, underlined a catalogue of police abuse of migrants. This included unwarranted arrests, the hounding of certain individuals, identity controls and arrests carried out close to medical aid centres and food distribution points, the destruction of personal property and evictions carried out without legal foundation. The report, which was sent to local police authorities, had the effect of reducing the number of such incidents but not their eradication. Associations dedicated to helping the migrants have set up a helpline mobile phone number the migrants can call in such cases, but no complaints have been made by them to date.
The interior ministry this month announced that a day centre for the migrants will be soon be created, with a capacity for 400 people, access to showers and drinking water, initially for a six-month experimental period. But at nightfall, the migrants will find themselves back in the street. “It’s becoming untenable,” said Secours Catholic regional director Vincent De Coninck. “Winter is coming, and it will be harder still. We are in face of a humanitarian crisis of a size never known here. In all logic, refugee camps should be opened, in small entities managed by organisations whose job it is to do so, like the [United Nations] High Commission for Refugees.”
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- The French version of this report can be found here.
English version by Graham Tearse