The British newspaper “the Guardian” investigated on everyday migrants life in Calais. Today we shall propose some abstracts and a resumè of the study.
”On a freezing January night in Calais, those who could most use a hot meal and a blanket are, curiously, those who look terrified when they see the mobile soup kitchen coming: they think it’s the police. ‘They’re everywhere’, said Houcine, 27, shivering in a thin suede jacket on a dark side street. ‘They are after you the whole time. If they catch you they take you away, 50, 100, 150 kms. If they catch you twice, you get two months in jail’. It is hard to tell how many migrants like Houcine, an Iraqi Kurd who left his home three months ago, are on the streets of Calais. Local associations that try to help them say 250; authorities reckon 30-40. Since the Sangatte refugee centre was closed to new arrivals on November 5, the Nord-Pas de Calais prefecture says about 1,800 have been bussed out. Of those, 1,000 have applied for asylum in France and maybe 300 have tried to return to the Channel coast. Most seem to be avoiding Calais, and for good reason. Police patrol the railway and bus stations, and CRS riot police are stationed outside the town hall and Notre-Dame church, where charities like Secours Catholique, C-Sur and Médecins du Monde used to hand out food and clothing. ‘There has been a crackdown, some mass arrests’, said Fabrice, a Red Cross worker. ‘We don’t keep to a fixed itinerary because if we do, the police will be waiting. We can’t give refugees a choice between hot food and getting arrested’. The Red Cross ran the Sangatte camp until, under a deal between the interior minister, Nicolas Sarkozy, and his British counterpart, David Blunkett, the last residents were evacuated and the building bulldozed on December 23. Members of the camp staff were behind the decision to launch the new Calais welfare service, dubbed ‘son of Sangatte’ by some of the British press. It is identical to 42 others the organisation runs: two ageing white vans, each carrying soup, sandwiches, tea, blankets and warm clothing. ‘This is not a second Sangatte,’ said Hugues de Diesbach, the local Red Cross president. ‘We are simply responding to the humanitarian problem: it is very cold, and we have to give people hot meals and clothing when they need it. We are not offering them lodging.’ But a bed is what Houcine and his three friends – the only refugees Fabrice and his colleagues could find in Calais last night during a four-hour search – would like. They were preparing to spend the night, wrapped in their new blankets, in a shop doorway. ‘There’s nowhere to sleep and my feet are cold,’ said Aidar, who arrived in Calais on Christmas Eve and claimed not even to have heard of the Sangatte camp, let alone its closure. ‘The French people here are nice to us. But the police are very hard.’ As they were when Sangatte still existed, the residents of Calais are divided over the refugees’ plight. But between 30 and 50 refugees find a bed each night with sympathetic Calais residents. ‘If not they sleep where they can, in doorways, on wasteland, in empty houses,’ said Valerie Robillard of the Calais Green party, a member of the C-Sur collective. ‘But they’re moving further away all the time, to escape the police.’
