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Some Calais ‘Jungle’ Camp Migrants Get Eviction Reprieve Some Calais ‘Jungle’ Camp Migrants Get Eviction Reprieve
(about 5 hours later)
CALAIS, France — The sprawling migrant camp east of this port city can stand, for now, a French judge ruled Thursday, but some of the residents of the makeshift village known as the Jungle can be relocated. CALAIS, France — Somewhere between the Good Chance Theater and the One Spirit Ashram Kitchen sits the School of Arts and Trades, not to mention the Hamid Karzai Restaurant and Arts in the Village.
Although the judge gave the government permission to move some residents, the court ordered that the “living spaces” — shops, restaurants, schools, churches and mosques — be preserved, lawyers for the migrants said. The French government had sought to level the camp in Calais, which is home to at least 1,000 migrants and probably many more. Amid it all, countless ragged tarpaulin tents house grim-faced migrants, who are tended to by dozens of earnest European volunteers, distinguished by exotic body piercings and dreadlocks.
The migrants who live there and their advocates had feared that bulldozers would immediately move in and level the camp. Instead, the judge’s ruling means it will not be dismantled immediately, and the migrants will not be expelled right away, the lawyers said. This is the camp called “the Jungle,” home to perhaps 1,000 or 3,000 refugees, depending on who is doing the counting. While not Europe’s largest migrant camp, it may be its most emblematic. It is certainly its most convenient, less than two hours by train from Paris or London.
“It creates difficulties for the prefecture to execute it,” said Julie Bonnier, the principal attorney for migrant associations challenging France’s plans. “I’m not unhappy at all because they have protected things that are important to the refugees.” That has helped make the Jungle a magnet for celebrities, and for just about every benevolent and not-so-benevolent organization on both sides of the English Channel — and the migrant issue — to make their case.
At the same time the French interior minister, who had sought the camp’s immediate evacuation and destruction, hailed the judge’s decision as “backing the government’s action at Calais” to “shelter the Calais migrants and reclaim the encampment.” It is also the place that France would like to see close, which it announced plans to do last week. And on Thursday, a judge in the regional capital, Lille, gave permission to do so, sort of.
The Calais camp has come to symbolize much of Europe’s ambiguous response to the refugee crisis. The migrants must leave the camp, Judge Valerie Quemener ruled, giving no timetable. But she also said the state could not immediately level the whole thing and expel the migrants.
Perched on the edge of the English Channel and full of Afghans, Sudanese, Iraqis and Syrians desperate to reach England — for what they see as its more liberal social benefits and work rules — it has been both tolerated and neglected by the French state. What the migrant associations most feared — that bulldozers would immediately move in — appears to have been staved off, at least for the moment.
The result is a mud-filled assemblage of makeshift tarpaulin tents stretching out over dozens of acres where only a handful of volunteer organizations provide the most basic of services. Judge Quemener also ruled that the state could not get rid of the oddball restaurants, places of worship, schools, theater, library and other community places that have taken root, courtesy of the energetic volunteers.
For months the government has said the camp poses an intolerable security challenge for the state, citing clashes between migrants trying to get to England through the Channel Tunnel, on trains and trucks, and the hundreds of police officers who now surround the site. Not surprisingly, her mixed decision was seized upon by both sides as a victory.
Thousands of the migrants have been moved out, some to shelters scattered throughout France, and others to an encampment of metal containers adjacent to the muddy tent city. But many have remained inside the Jungle, where an oddball civic life has taken root, helped by a myriad constellation of volunteer organizations. Restaurants, schools, places of worship, clinics and even a theater have been established. French officials publicly breathed a sigh of relief, saying Judge Quemener had backed their contention that the migrants had to go. Advocates for the migrants expressed satisfaction that the judge had decreed that the elements of associative life they take most pride in here — schools, the theater and other places — must be preserved.
Advocates for the migrants said that while they do not sanction the Jungle’s continued existence — conditions there are miserable — they mistrust the state’s intentions. “I’m not unhappy at all, because they have protected things that are important to the refugees,” said Julie Bonnier, the migrants’ main lawyer.
But if there was something for everyone in the judge’s decision, it was less clear that there was an actual solution to the increasing permanence of the camp, which has become an epicenter of both despair and disruption.
Over the last year, the police have been sent in to surround the 45-acre, mud-filled jumble of torn tents, with no sanitation or heat. Clashes have multiplied, and clouds of tear gas have floated over the Jungle’s muddy lanes.
After the ruling, French officials said the migrants would now have to live in the metal containers set aside for them next to the Jungle, or be dispersed in reception centers across France.
Many of the Afghans, Sudanese and Iraqis in the camp resist such a move because it takes them farther from their promised land, England, where they see more attractive social benefits and opportunities for work.
But the stern tone of the original government order — which had set a deadline of 8 p.m. Tuesday for the migrants to leave — appears to have been forgotten.
And for now, life in the Jungle goes on, even as many of those who live there appear to regard some of the added elements — the offbeat civic life so prized by the volunteers — with bemused detachment.
Groups including the serious and long-established, like Doctors Without Borders, and those whose militant talk brims with denunciations of “the fascist police” have staked claims here.
Celebrities routinely use the place as a stage to express indignation over the living conditions; well-dressed young people can be seen filming videos of themselves, or bending over at odd angles to take photographs.
On a recent morning, a young woman was even spotted walking her dog through the camp. Another boisterously sang “La Marseillaise” to a bemused-looking Afghan.
The French state has neglected the Jungle, hoping that its unpleasantness would stop the migrant flow. But the migrants have kept coming, and the dire conditions have only increased the attractiveness to the volunteers, while multiplying the exasperation of the French authorities.
Tuesday was mask-making day at the theater. Under the theater’s large white canvas geodesic dome, some young Afghan men were hanging out in the back in the freezing cold, fiddling with cellphones, while another dashed madly about with a video camera, filming all who entered.
“I think it’s really important,” said Joe Murphy, 25, one of the organizers, a writer and playwright from England. “It’s basically a place where people can come and talk all the time.”
Thursday was kite-making day at the theater; on Wednesday, a masked mock “trial” of the Jungle had been staged.
A volunteer at the theater with cropped purple hair explained to a group of bewildered-looking refugees, “I’m not Christian or Muslim, I’m punk.”
Inside a darkened shack powered by a generator nearby where migrants had gathered to recharge their cellphones, the preoccupation was with England, and what would happen if the authorities succeeded in dismantling the Jungle.
“It’s worryful for us, if they plan to destroy this camp and they don’t have any plan for the people who are living here,” said Habib Sadat, 31, an Afghan. “That’s not good, not good.”
He does not want to stay in France. “The French have some bad relations with the refugees,” he said. “Every day around the camp, we see the police with gas.”
Down the street at the Secular School, under a corrugated metal roof, young men were earnestly learning how to pronounce French numbers under the guidance of a Haitian teacher.
A volunteer in a bunny jumpsuit darted among groups of migrants. Others embraced the migrants. At the One Spirit Ashram Kitchen, signs exhorted the diners to “Stay Healthy, Drink Super Chai” or to “Eat Raw Garlic.”
“It’s both horrible and wonderful,” said Di Parkin, a retired Englishwoman who had come for the day to help out.
On evenings, the generators go on, and so do the lights. The shops and restaurants on the muddy dark main street are suddenly illuminated. Sudanese tunes and other pop music pound from the shacks.
People — mostly young men — from half a dozen nations stroll back and forth. An imam’s call to the faithful wafts over the tents. The liveliness of this scene is in contrast to the moribund stillness of Calais itself, a northern French city long down on its luck.
Inside the shacks, some of the men prepare themselves for the frequent — and fruitless — assaults on the heavily guarded and barricaded Channel Tunnel.
Few make it through. One freezing night this week, dozens tried at once; it was all over within minutes, the only vestige half a dozen French police vehicles filled with bored-looking officers at the roundabout near the tunnel.
“We’re still between earth and sky,” said Muhammad Ali, a bespectacled, middle-aged Afghan farmer. “It’s a horrible situation for all of us.”