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2012-11-17 09:19:21
By Charlotte Pritchard
Ten years ago, French authorities decided to shut down the Sangatte Red Cross
asylum centre near Calais because they said it had become a magnet for illegal
immigrants hoping to come to Britain. But it seems migrants in the city are as
keen as ever to cross the English Channel.
The seagulls bicker and squabble in the open yard of the soup kitchen,
impatient with the migrants who - crouched on the concrete, mechanically
spooning pasta - rarely flick them a crumb from their rations.
It is a damp, dull day and the sun and sky seems to have sapped the colour from
everything beneath it.
The huddled men in their dirty hooded tops and jackets make a solid block of
drab misery. Even the seagulls are granite, grey and greasy.
A young Afghan man is begging the elderly woman handing out small plastic pots
of pasta, for more. There is not enough, she tells him firmly, shaking her
head.
Continue reading the main story
The Sangatte Red Cross asylum centre pictured in 2000 The Sangatte centre was
designed to hold about 900 refugees, but the Red Cross said numbers peaked at
about 2,000
He is not the first to ask for more today and he will not be the last.
The pasta, in a watery tomato sauce, is woefully insufficient to feed the
300-or-so migrants who come to the soup kitchen every day, and the charity
workers know it.
But for the last 10 years, ever since the Sangatte centre closed, it has been
up to just a handful of volunteer groups to look after all the migrants who
come to Calais in the hope of crossing the Channel to England. And they do
still come.
All the charity workers I talk to agree that Sangatte needed to be closed, but
all insist that some other infrastructure should have been put in its place.
Near the port I meet Anwar, an unkempt, sallow Syrian man in his 30s who tells
me he fled in terror from his home town near Damascus after his younger brother
was tortured by supporters of President Assad's regime.
I learn that he is unmarried, is very close to his little brother and that he
is an industrial chemist. He has only been in Calais for six weeks but he has
already tried more than 30 times to climb into, under and above lorries in his
bid to get to England.
"Why England?" I ask. "You speak fluent French, why not claim asylum here?"
He looks at me for a few seconds before saying: "Come with me, come and see
where I live."
Start Quote
Are they really worth less than cattle? Our police hound them and hunt them
down
Pierre Local resident
In the next street, directly opposite some private houses, I see a row of
makeshift tents fashioned from patched tarpaulin, rubber sheets and supermarket
carrier bags.
Anwar lifts one of the tarpaulins and shows me a filthy mattress littered with
damp blankets, odd shoes and some mouldy bread. It smells as acrid and rotten
as a sick room and I have to withdraw my head quickly.
"Seven of us sleep here. But in the night the police come," he says. "They
spray everything with gas so we can never use it again and then we have no
cover from the rain and no more clothes.
"In Syria," he continues, "we see television programmes about France - we learn
it is the country of freedom, of human rights and solidarity."
He looks at me closely and asks: "Do you think this is a country which respects
human rights? I have nothing here, Madame."
In the queue for the minibus to take the migrants to nearby shower blocks, I
chat to Pierre - an elderly local man, with very pale, watery blue eyes who
used to volunteer at Sangatte and now helps out at the soup kitchen, despite an
obvious illness that makes him shake.
Local charities struggle to help the migrants
His account of the last day of the asylum centre has biblical overtones.
"It was five degrees outside and raining so hard that everywhere was flooded,"
he says quietly. "And when these exhausted men came looking for a bit of
shelter they were just turned away and the door locked on them."
He lifts his trembling hands. "That night the local farmers brought their
cattle in for the winter because they said the weather was too harsh."
He nods his head towards the group of migrants and gives me a lopsided smile.
"Are they really worth less than cattle? Our police hound them and hunt them
down like plague victims."
The town hall is reluctant to provide more permanent shelter in case, like
Sangatte, it should act as a magnet and swell the migrant numbers further.
Just outside the town, on the edge of an industrial estate, two small
portacabins make up the migrants' shower block.
The men push one another in their haste to get in, snatching the phials of
medicated shampoo and shower gel offered by the hassled charity workers and
clamouring for clean clothes and underwear.
At the door, a handsome, clean-shaven man with gelled-back hair is trying to
catch my eye. I go over to him with a smile, offer my hand and introduce
myself.
Only when he fixes me with a look of reproach do I realise I have met him
before.
"Madame," he reminds me quietly. "I am Anwar, the industrial chemist from
Syria. You were a guest in my house."