I was a racist - but now I love a refugee
The widow of a bigoted French policeman fell for a migrant in the ‘‘Jungle’’ at Calais - and is now on trial for helping him flee to Britain.
Bulldozers were crushing wooden cabins. Tents were going up in flames. Gas canisters were exploding in the heat. Anarchists were hurling stones at lines of riot police. Yet, amid all the mayhem as the evacuation of Calais’ makeshift migrant camp got under way last year, a love affair was beginning.
It was an affair that would grip the French media, turn the lives of its protagonists upside down, and leave one - a lovestruck single mother - facing prosecution.
Beatrice Huret, the widow of a French police officer and one-time National Front voter, will stand trial next week on peoplesmuggling charges for helping the Iranian asylum seeker she met that day to reach Britain.
Arrested by the very officers with whom her late husband used to work, she is accused of being part of a gang that aided and abetted illegal immigrants, an offence that carries a theoretical sentence of up to 10 years in prison. Three other defendants will be in the dock with her; they deny the charges.
Huret’s lawyer will say that whatever her co-defendants did, she is no people smuggler; that love, not money, was her motive; and that her only crime was to help her boyfriend to set sail for Kent in a rickety boat.
The case, to be heard in Boulogne in northern France, might have gone unnoticed if Huret had not written a book, Calais Mon Amour (Calais My Love), about her relationship with Mokhtar - she will reveal only his first name - the Iranian Kurd for whom she fell head over heels.
The book has captured the imagination of the French media and was described by news magazine L’Obs as a moving account of the madness of love.
An energetic 44-year-old, Huret speaks brightly, but admits to being worn out by her legal woes and by her fortnightly four-hour drives to Sheffield to see Mokhtar, who has obtained refugee status there on the grounds that having converted to Christianity, he faces persecution in Iran.
She and her 76-year-old mother live with Florian, Huret’s 19-yearold son, in a pleasant white-walled house surrounded by woods in Wierre-Effroy, the village outside Calais where she grew up.
Huret was 20 when she left home after meeting and falling in love with a 37-year-old police officer in a discotheque. He was straightforward, strict, authoritative, reliable, reassuring - and racist, she writes in her book.
‘‘It was totally linked to his job,’’ she says. ‘‘He fell into a spiral where there was not a single one of his colleagues in the police who had anything good to say about foreigners.’’
When her husband worked at Calais police station, he would come home to tell his wife that the only people he arrested - the only people who committed crimes were north African immigrants.
Huret’s husband voted for the National Front, and so did she, being a submissive housewife in those days, she says. He even persuaded her to stand for the farright party in local council elections - which, fortunately, given the way her life has changed, she lost.
‘‘I just followed my husband and did what he said. I didn’t have the internet and didn’t want to check what I was being told.
‘‘I was unemployed because there were too many foreigners in France and they were taking our jobs and everything else that goes with that - the welfare benefits, the millions they cost us. That was what I heard at home all the time.’’
Huret says it was as though she had been brainwashed.
‘‘You need to find someone to blame for everything, and that person is easy to designate. It is the foreigner.’’
Despite the endless flow of prejudice that surrounded her, Huret says she was already moving away from her husband’s extremist ideas before his death from cancer in 2010. Afterwards, when she returned to live with her mother, she ditched them completely.
Yet she never imagined that the next man with whom she would fall in love would be one of the migrants that her husband blamed for so much.
Indeed, she never imagined going into the Jungle at all until she picked up a young African hitchhiker on her way home from her job, training home helps to work with the elderly, in February 2015.
He wanted to go to the camp. She dropped him off and was horrified at the squalor.
‘‘The vision of tents, mud, all those people crowded together, all those people wandering around, I felt like I was in another country,’’ she says. ’’Driving away, I said to myself, ‘We cannot let that happen in France’.’’
She launched a Facebook appeal for clothes for the migrants, distributed them, then started to help out in a food kitchen at the camp.
In March 2016, Huret arrived to discover the camp ablaze, with police evacuating the northern half of it. A fellow volunteer told her that nine Iranian migrants had sewn up their lips in protest. Mokhtar was among them.
‘‘He gets up and gestures to me to sit down in an armchair,’’ she writes. ‘‘I turn my head a bit because I don’t want to show that I have tears in my eyes.
‘‘He offers me a cup of tea. I say yes. He brings me the tea very delicately. And we look at each other for the first time.’’
In the days that followed, she returned to bring the Iranians orange juice that they could drink through a straw. ‘‘And each time he offers me tea. And each time I try to avoid his gaze and each time, boom, our eyes meet.’’
They did not speak much, though. Mokhtar could only murmur through stitched-up lips, and at the time Huret’s English was minimal.
When he disappeared from the camp a few days later - having unstitched his lips - she did not know his name, let alone where he had gone. In fact, he had been conned out of €1000 by a lying trafficker while trying to get to Britain, and had been picked up by an ultra-left activist near Calais.
The activist, whom Huret knew from the Jungle, phoned her to ask if she could put up two destitute Iranians for a couple of days while they regathered strength before another attempt to cross the Channel. She went around to meet them and found herself face to face with Mokhtar.
‘‘He was really joyful and he kept saying how sweet I smelt, how he liked my perfume [Coco Mademoiselle]. I said to myself, ‘Oh la, la! What is going to happen when he gets to my house?’.
‘‘I knew I was in love, but I didn’t want to be in love. It wasn’t something I had planned, I was happy on my own and he was a refugee leaving for England. I said to myself, ‘Forget it’.’’
Besides, she had convinced herself that she could not have an affair with a younger man, and he
Huret would have liked Mokhtar to stay with her in France. ‘‘But I never told him. I thought I didn’t have the right to deprive him of England. That was his dream. I couldn’t put him in a golden cage.’’
So after a month of bliss in Wierre-Effroy, she helped him and his Iranian acquaintance to purchase an old boat in which they set out for Britain with a third Iranian.
The rickety boat almost sank, but the men were rescued by British coastguards.
Mokhtar had not left proof of his presence in another country, which meant his claim was approved.
Back in Calais, police were investigating allegations that some of the left-wing activists present in and around the Jungle had been paid to help migrants to stow away in trucks bound for Britain. The activist who asked Huret to put up Mokhtar was arrested and will go on trial as well.
By tapping his phone, police unearthed Huret’s role in buying the boat on which Mokhtar had reached Britain, and she was detained.
Her house was raided by officers who thought she was a fully fledged trafficker, to the astonishment of her mother and son.
‘‘There was a moment during the search when the police officer says to my son, ‘You know your mother is sleeping with an Iranian?’, and I see my son go pale and I think, ‘Oh la, la!, how is he going to react?’. And he turns to the police officer and answers calmly, ‘No, sir, my mother is not sleeping with an Iranian, my mother is in love with an Iranian, and I know him very well because he spent a month here and he is my friend’.’’
Huret hopes that the judges in Boulogne will understand that message, leaving her free to continue her fortnightly trips to see Mokhtar in England.
‘‘We don’t have any plans for the future,’’ she says. ‘‘I just let him get on with his life in England and we will see what happens.
‘‘We started out on a day-to-day basis, and that is how we are continuing.’’ – The Times