French ports strain under weight of new migrants
‘The Jungle’ is gone, but refugees are still queuing to cross to the UK, writes David Chazan in Dunkirk
France is struggling to cope with a new wave of migrants desperate to reach Britain barely four months after the sprawling Calais “Jungle” shanty town was bulldozed. More than 1,500 migrants, mostly from Iraq and Afghanistan, are crammed into unheated, waterlogged chipboard huts at a state-funded camp beside the nearby port of Dunkirk, less than 50 miles from Dover. Its population has more than doubled from about 700 before the Calais camp was closed.
Hundreds of other migrants are sleeping rough in muddy woodlands on the fringes of Calais, where the mayor has banned food handouts to try to deter people congregating in the area and setting up new camps.
About 200 migrants arrive in Paris each week from Italy after crossing the Mediterranean in small boats, joining more than 1,000 already in the French capital. Most will head north, lured by people-traffickers offering to smuggle them across the Channel for about £2,000. Gilles Debove, a police union spokesman, said about 300 migrants a day are being turned back at the ports of Dunkirk and Calais, and at the entrance to the Channel Tunnel.
“A lot of them are minors and many are released. To be honest, we no longer know what to do with them,” Mr Debove said. Dozens of accommodation centres set up across France when the Calais camp was cleared in October are already full. “The system is saturated,” Mr Debove said.
Hundreds of migrants are gathering at Channel ports in Normandy and Brittany, such as Cherbourg and Roscoff, where they try to slip abroad ferries bound for England or for Ireland where they can take the “backdoor” route into Britain by crossing the soft border with Northern Ireland.
The official camp established last year in Dunkirk is turning away new arrivals. There are plans to close it or reduce its capacity to about 300 people, who would be allowed to stay only a few weeks to stop the traffickers using it as a transit centre. Some residents and charity workers speak of beatings and rapes in the squalid, debrislittered camp, but few are prepared to leave, unless it is to go to Britain.
“Going away from the border is a problem for us. Here we can try to go to England,” said Simon, 39, a Kurd from Iraq who has been at the Dunkirk camp for two months with his wife and three children, aged six, four and three. As two of his children took turns on a tricycle, clearly accustomed to the bitter cold, Simon said: “We don’t want to stay in France. The language is a problem for us and we think we’ll be safer in the UK. Where can my family go if this camp is closed?”
Migrants say people from the camp are still succeeding in reaching Britain, generally after repeated attempts. Barbara, a charity volunteer, showed a drawing of a man on a flying carpet in the colours of the French and German flags. “The boy who drew it has gone,” she said. “His family must have got across to England.”
Javed Isakhel, 17, said: “I’ll try to go to England tonight in a lorry. If not, I’ll come back here. I know many people who have got across.”
Shivering in threadbare tracksuit trousers, the Afghan teenager said he had spent 10 months at the Calais camp. When it was closed in October, he was bussed to an accommodation centre in the south-western city of Bordeaux, but he rejected efforts to encourage him to settle in France.
“I spent a few days there and then I came here,” he said. “I didn’t want to be so far from the border with Britain.”
Less than 20 miles from Dunkirk, the mayor of Calais, Natacha Bouchart of the centre-Right Les Républicains party is determined to prevent migrants setting up new, unofficial camps around the city. She sees charities who feed and clothe them as well-intentioned, but misguided.
Charity workers vowed to defy the mayor’s ban on food distributions in the area around the site of the former “Jungle” camp, which once sheltered 10,000 people. “This decision is scandalous and shameful,” said Gaël Manzi from Utopia 56, one of the charities providing meals for up to 300 migrants a night around Calais.
Mrs Bouchart said she would take further measures to deter migrants. “There were complaints from businesses in the industrial area. It is my duty to do something. If the food distributions move to different locations, I will issue other orders,” she said.
Mr Debove, the police spokesman, said some charities were deliberately straining limited police resources.
“Some charities are sending underage migrants to police stations to overload us with people. We have to register them, then we book taxis to take them to centres for processing, but after a few kilometres they tell the taxi to let them out.”