Refugees
“The jungle of Calais” will be demolished
In the past week, the French authorities had promised the refugee camp would only be cleared slowly and carefully. After protest actions, Barbara Wesel reports now of a fast-track procedure.
The second day of the eviction in Calais was largely peaceful. A massive police presence, the demolition of the protected work.
A couple of desperate activists had risen to the roofs of the huts, hoping to protect them. But the French police was started on the second Räumungstag with a few hundreds, and had dragged the protesters off very quickly. Some of the helpers broke out in tears, you realized that you power against the state, nothing more could do. Some of them had spent months, in order to make the huts in the camp, winterfest, to organize clothes and food. Temporary schools were built, a mosque and a Church. Now you have to watch your work within a couple of days is smash.
“We do not want that the refugees are here with the police alone,” says Sophie, who also goes around on this day and unmoved distributed cups with bean soup, while in their back the demolition excavator to. She works for “La Vie”, an organization which has been engaged from the beginning in the so-called “jungle” of Calais. “We do not know whether our community kitchen, or the school… you have promised that you would only destroy the huts, where nobody lives. But yeah, you tear away all at once. We don’t know at all what is the worst thing for us.” The refugees would ask the helper how it should go and what they could do, but Sophie can give any advice.
Nothing should remain on the site are
The government in Paris wants to get rid of the eyesore
Interior Minister Bernard Cazeneuve during the day to inform that he regretted the violent clashes from Monday in which several police officers were slightly injured. The demolition of the refugee camp would now proceed without further delay. The eviction went ahead as well swiftly: Behind the protection of the police patrols, construction workers beat the cabins with a crowbar is small, then the excavator and shoveled everything in a huge Container. Mattresses, sleeping bags, shoes, pots and pans – everything that had brought the inhabitants in the morning in safety, was moved to plan with mountains of broken slats and plastic. A group of Afghans rolled an empty oil drum in a wheelbarrow. They needed it again later as a fire pit. Others stood perplexed around and saw the destruction. You can withdraw provisionally in the rear part of the bearing back to only be in a few weeks cleared. The southern area but, to be settled to the newly built container camp, perhaps a square kilometer in size and yet tight, it will be in a few days.
Many of the refugees will be able to watch the eviction – Protest is futile
What happens to the inhabitants of the jungle?
“The French government destroyed a community of people that had to live here, because the police had distributed in the previous year from other places in Calais. So the jungle is eventually incurred, because the authorities wanted to have all the refugees in one place,” says the Benedictine monk, John Martens, came a month ago, as a clergyman, assistance from Belgium to Calais. He tells of a young Eritreans who had come via Libya and Italy to Calais. The man eventually ended up in the jungle and is now desperate to know more cases like his there are hundreds of them. A lot of Afghans and hundreds of Sudanese from the embattled South of the country are stranded here, all of them had the dream of an easy Passage to the United Kingdom. But since the port and the Eurostar and are secured fenced, there is hardly a Chance to reach the British island illegally. Many who stayed back in the jungle of Calais, see no Alternative for another escape. There are so many traumatised young people, are the Benedictine told, what I hear again and again:”My life has no value any more.”
The government has broken their word
“In the last week, they promised that they would convince the people to move, and you do not force sell”, writes Bernard Schriek of the charity organization Secours Catholique. “But you have broken your word.” Most of the refugees tried to get their Relatives to the UK. Others would have even a residence permit or an asylum application in France. But the country offered no place of residence, where they could integrate in the society. Many are now drawn to the coast in the direction of Belgium, the authorities there have already aufgergiffen around 600 refugees. “The Problem is shifted simply in other places such as, Grand Synthe, or Norrrent-Fontes,” says Bernard Schriek. Then new storage would occur, only that the conditions there are even worse than the last time in the jungle.
What is revealed to the eviction – the absolute lack of perspective
At the end of the path
A group of people sitting at their fire. Wind and rain sweep over the Camp. After the neighboring huts were torn away, is your home open in the storm. You have a grace period of one night, the next day, the excavator will reach you. What do you want to do? “I’ll stay here in Calais, if necessary, I have to sleep on the street,” says Muhammed. “I’m not going out of here, I want to go to England”. Why not just in France to apply for asylum, after all, nobody in the South will also be deported from there to Sudan? “We don’t trust the authorities, they have not treated us humanely,” he complains. And his friends see things the same way: France is bad, all the way. Only no one has a Plan where to go. Germany, Belgium, or back to Italy…. The Sudanese people shake their heads. “I’m at the end of my path,” says Muhammed is still goodbye.