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Is the toilet seat really the dirtiest place in the home?

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."