Secret story of a desperate journey and a hope that died
In the woods outside a tiny village in France, Vietnamese migrants dreamed of a better life — but found only death, writes Paraic O’Brien
THE tiny French village of Fouquieres-les-Bethune is full of secrets. If you’ve ever driven from Paris to the ferry in Calais, you’ll have driven within metres of the hamlet without noticing it.
It’s set back a little off the A26, hidden from view by a line of trees. It has a small church, Eglise Saint Vaast. Behind the church, a WW1 cemetery. In the middle, there’s a single tombstone to ‘‘An Unnamed German Solider’’. He is, in turn, surrounded by the gravestones of fallen British soldiers.
There are monuments to more contemporary French history here as well. A rundown motel called the Sunset Price Hotel (rooms €33) now houses refugees and migrants who were bussed here after the giant ‘‘Jungle’’ camp of Calais was dismantled. And it’s here, at the Sunset, that we’re told about another village secret.
In the woods, close by, there’s an encampment of up to 30 Vietnamese migrants. It’s a sort of transit point, a ‘‘departure lounge’’ for people being smuggled to Britain. It’s run by people smugglers, who periodically show up to check on the welfare of their clients. There are rumours that the smugglers are armed. We arrive just as it’s getting dark so decide to come back in the morning.
This is our last stop on a fourday journey across Northern France and Belgium. My producer, our cameraman and I were trying to retrace the steps of the lorry container that ended up in Purfleet, Essex with 39 bodies onboard.
According to the scraps of information we had been given, the container travelled through Calais, Dunkirk, the outskirts of Lille, then into Belgium and Zeebrugge. At the port it was loaded on to a ferry headed for Britain. The information we have is incomplete. It is a frustrating, depressing road-trip we are on. Just hours earlier, 39 people travelled the same roads we are driving on. Thirty-nine people began to realise they were running out of air. Thirty-nine sets of dreams started slipping away, suffocated inside an articulated coffin.
We’d started in Calais on Thursday morning talking to Afghan and Kurdish migrants. The bodies had been discovered in the early hours of Wednesday morning, October 23. The migrants in Calais had heard rumours about the nationalities of the dead but nothing concrete. Then, about lunchtime, the police announced that the 39 were Chinese nationals. There weren’t any Chinese migrants in the small network of migrant camps left in Calais so we decided to move on.
In Dunkirk we’d been given an address in the centre of town where the container was supposed to have stopped at. It was a residential street, lined with low rise apartment blocks. I knew that sometimes smugglers accommodated migrants in small hotels and apartments if they had paid top dollar.
We contemplated knocking on doors. There were hundreds of doors, though, and we decided against it. Next stop Bruges and then the giant port of Zeebrugge. The ferry that had carried the container to Britain just 48 hours earlier was back in the Belgian port being reloaded. It was called ‘The Clementine’.
Meanwhile, nearly 8,000 miles away in the small rural commune of Thien Loc, Northern Vietnam, news was filtering through about the 39 dead and people there were starting to panic. Dozens of families in the area knew that their sons and daughters were travelling in the backs of lorries to Britain during the days in question.
It was becoming clear that a large number of the dead were in fact Vietnamese. Vo Nhan Que was beside himself. His son Vo Nhan Du texted him at 3.27pm on October 22, the day before the bodies were found.
“My son told me he’d found someone who took this route — the VIP route.” he said
“He texted his older sister to tell us he was getting ready to get on a lorry.”
He had not heard anything from his son since then, which was not like Vo Nhan Du. His father was convinced that he was one of the dead. Sending sons and daughters to Britain to work in nail bars, restaurants or cannabis farms is commonplace in the commune of Thien Loc.
Young people don’t just leave to make their own fortune. They are often sent on behalf of the family to bolster collective wealth. That is what makes it all the more painful for the fathers and mothers left behind. Bereavement has the sting of guilt in its tail.
Contrary to popular opinion, these young economic migrants do not always come from the poorest families in Vietnam. In fact, the opposite is often true. According to the recent ‘‘Field Survey of Vietnamese Migrants (2017)’, conducted by a group of French NGOs working in the field “only 10pc of the households visited were truly poor in that they did not own their house, were living with members of their family or their house had been repossessed by creditors”.
Back in the village of Fouquieres-les-Bethune, we’re up early on Friday morning. We park the car on the edge of the wooded area where we were told the Vietnamese camp was located.
Our Vietnamese interpreter has arrived and the team talks exit strategy in case there’s any trouble inside. We share our live location with Channel 4 News HQ back in London. It’s about a 10-minute walk into the woods. We start to smell campfire smoke. Through the trees we can see a large blue canvas tent, big enough to accommodate about 50 people.
There are two middle-aged Vietnamese men sitting around a camp fire boiling water for tea. They seem guarded but invite us to join them. They tell us that the rest of men who live here are in their 20s and are still asleep. While we wait for the tea, we look around. This is a highly organised encampment.
It is clean and well kept. There’s a cooking station, a cleaning area and a games area (a half-finished game of Xiangqi, Chinese chess sits on a car tyre). There is also a shrine with candles and incense burning inside.
Through our interpreter, one of the men explains that they pray in front of the shrine before taking any sort of journey. You get the sense that a lot of praying happens here. Our interpreter asks the older men where they’re from. They say they are from districts in the far north of Vietnam. He knows they’re lying to him because of their accents. It’s becoming clear that these two older men are working as ‘‘minders’’ of the group on behalf of the smugglers. We need to be careful.
Over the next couple of hours, the others start to wake up and come out of the giant canvas tent. There are about 20 men living here. Their phones have been taken away by the smugglers, so they have not seen pictures of any of the 39 people thought to have died in the lorry. We start to show the group some of the photos that families in Vietnam are circulating.
Suddenly, a young man in his 20s called Duc recognises a face. It’s a picture of Vo Nhan Du from the Thien Loc. My colleagues had been talking to his father in Vietnam the day before. Duc tells us that Vo Nhan Du had stayed in the camp for a week back in September. Then one day he packed his clothes in a rucksack and left. Duc thought he said he was leaving for Germany but wasn’t sure.
Duc smiles easily and doesn’t seem as suspicious of us as the others. I ask him why he’s here. What follows is a unique insight into the mechanics of the Vietnamese people smuggling business.
The 20 or so men in this camp paid Vietnamese smugglers the equivalent of €15-20,000 for a standard smuggling package called the ‘‘Grasshopper Package’’. This means you fly from China to Russia. Once in Moscow, you set off (sometimes walking, sometimes on the back of trucks) through Belarus into Poland and then Germany.
From Germany there are different options but many end up in camps like this one in France. A couple of times a week, the smugglers will arrive in the middle of the night and take a group of Vietnamese migrants with them to a lorry park nearby. The smugglers will try to break into a lorry parked there over night and hide their clients inside. It’s called the ‘‘Grasshopper Package’’ because the migrants are ‘‘jumping’’ into the backs of lorries, without the knowledge of the driver.
Duc believes that the 39 people who died had upgraded to a different package. The ‘‘VIP route’’ costs anything up to €30,000. The crucial difference: there’s a designated lorry for the final leg of the journey to the UK. People on the ‘‘VIP route’’ may also be accommodated in safe houses or small hotels instead of camps like the one we’re in. Duc couldn’t afford this package so opted for the cheaper ‘‘Grasshopper Package’’. That still costs up to €20,000.
So how could he possibly have afforded that? I ask. He explains that, in fact, he couldn’t afford it. His family borrowed the money off smugglers, on the understanding that Duc would pay it back in instalments, after he’d arrived and found work in the UK.
“They lent me the money and I work to pay them back later. They said they would tell me the exact price when I arrived in the UK. My family gave them the title deeds for our house and lands as a guarantee on the loan. They said the price would be between €15-20,000.” The price fluctuates depending on levels of risk, according to Duc. “They also said the price varies depending on ‘hot periods’ of time.”
The expectation now, with the discovery of the 39 bodies and the heightened security presence at ports, is that the price will go up.
As we discuss the logistics of the operation with Duc the two older men we first met become more interested in our conversation.
Duc explains that every couple of nights ‘‘the agents’’ or the smugglers show up at camp. There are usually about five men in two cars. According to Duc, they wear balaclavas.
They bring a small group of them to different lorry parks, sometimes driving for as long as an hour.
Duc cannot tell what nationality they are but thinks they might by Afghan. We find out from a separate source that they are more likely to be Iraqi Kurds.
The people smuggling business is incredibly adaptable, it is the ultimate ‘‘globalised’’ business. Vietnamese gangs ‘‘subcontract’’ sections of the journey to Kurds depending on expertise. Kurds do the same to Afghans and vice versa. The model changes on the ground depending on ‘‘hot periods’’. The model will change again off the back of this latest tragedy.
We feel it’s time to leave. The two older men we first met are getting fidgety. We say our goodbyes and leave. At the edge of the woods we get into our car. As we pull away, a black Audi passes us and parks in our space. There are two men inside. They look Kurdish. One of them gets out of the car and walks into the woods.
As we travel back to the comfort of our hotel, thoughts turn to Vo Nhan Du, the young man from Thien Loc, and to his distraught father. Truth is, we won’t know whether the young man was, in fact, one of the 39 dead until after the post-mortems are complete. Truth is, we don’t know where he went after he packed his bag and left this camp a month ago.
Maybe the young man will show up somewhere in Europe. Perhaps, he made it to the UK. Maybe there’s some innocuous reason why he’s lost telephone contact with his family. Or, maybe there’s not.
Either way, imagine being the father having that conversation with yourself.
‘He texted his older sister to tell us he was getting ready to get on a lorry’