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Desperately seeking El Dorado

Vaiju Naravane

They are known as the "Refugees of Calais." Hundreds of poor young men, mainly Afghans, Pakistanis, Kurds, Iraqis, Eritreans, Senegalese or Cameroonians, eke out a sub-human existence while waiting to cross the Channel to Britain and asylum.

— Photo: Lola Barosso.

Young migrants in the woods outside Calais.

A MEAN north wind blows across a blustery English Channel and the mercury reads one degree Celsius. An overnight downpour is now down to a powdery drizzle but the ground is sodden wet, the sky a dark menacing grey. Through the misty haze, across the choppy sea, the English coast appears as a dull, blurred outline. The Bois de Garenne is a small wood somewhat removed from the centre of the northern port city of Calais, but a mere five hundred metres from the nearest row of warehouses whose corrugated roofs are visible between the bare and blackened trees.

Anwar, Ijaz, Niaz, Danesh, Hussain, Ali, Barkat, and Roshan crowd around a small fire outside their makeshift shelter built from lopped off branches, plastic sheeting, old blankets, and assorted rags. It stands in a clearing atop a small rise, giving them a bird's eye view of the city and of their El Dorado, Britain, which lies just beyond. "That is where I want to go. That's our goal, our Manzil, where we will get jobs, housing, and working papers," says 14-year old Anwar, the youngest of the group of Pakistani youths from Peshawar.

Their ages range from anywhere between 14 and 30 and they wear what has become the uniform of the homeless economic migrant: three or four layers of tee shirts topped by cheap hooded polyester ski jackets, sneakers and jeans, all handed out by charitable organisations.

The firewood is wet and green and the dense grey smoke smarts the eyes. "Fire off, fire off, police, he come," says Moustache, a humanitarian worker so named because of the luxurious growth upon his cheeks and chin. Gesticulating furiously, his inadequate English deserting him altogether, 47-year-old Charles Framzelle who works for a catholic charity warns them of an impending police raid.

All he gets in return is a cynical laugh. "What will they do? They've arrested me five times already. They'll destroy our hut again, smash our bottles and upturn our cooking pots. They'll rub our faces into the dirt, crush our backs with their boots. At the worst they'll arrest us for 48 hours. And we'll come back and build our hut again as we have done so many times, Inshallah. We have lost our fear of them now. All we want, all we hope and pray for, is to be able to get across to Inglaind one day, the sooner the better," says 28-year-old Ali, who once bartered steel vessels for old clothes in the streets of Karachi. There is a twinkle in his eye and a broad smile on his face as if the daily tussle with the police were just a big joke, an endless game of cops and robbers.

Meet the "Refugees of Calais," an estimated 800 to 1,000 of them, mainly Afghans, Pakistanis, Kurds, Iraqis, Eritreans, Senegalese or Cameroonians who have congregated on this city, often at huge expense and almost always at the mercy of venal people smugglers. They are, for the most part young, semi-literate, and jobless, living in unimaginable squalor and misery in the midst of relative wealth and well-being. They have landed here at the northern tip of France after months spent on the road, travelling through Iran, Turkey, Greece, Albania, Bulgaria, the Balkans or Italy in the desperate hope of reaching Britain as stowaways on trucks making the Channel crossing. The sums they paid their "agents" are astronomical — upwards of 12,000 euros, six lakh rupees.

"They have nothing. They have burnt their bridges, sold land, animals, whatever they possessed, in order to get here and they cannot go back," says Moustache. The only way out for them is forward, he explains and no one knows when the crossing can take place. On an average about 40 of them make it to Britain every month. The rest are turned back and they keep trying every other night until they succeed.

Why Britain? Because the asylum laws in that country have been traditionally more lax than elsewhere in continental Europe. But that has changed. The British government is now far less tolerant of asylum seekers and many from Calais find themselves sent back to the place where they first landed on the Continent. The refugees, however, refuse to believe that their city of gold has clanged shut its gates. They persist in believing that they will be given jobs and housing or that their own communities whether Afghan, Kurdish or Pakistani will help them out.

"Living like savages"

"Every night they try to sneak onto lorries, some even sell their bodies in return for a crossing. In the meanwhile, they live here in the woods like savages, without water or electricity, suffering from bronchitis because of the constant damp, from scabies, fever, and diarrhoea. They relieve themselves in the bushes and there is nowhere for them to wash except for the twice weekly showers organised by the humanitarian associations where they fight to get their turn. May be in warmer climates it is less difficult to live in the open. The temperatures are near freezing point now. But for the associations they would die from cold and hunger," Moustache points out.

Calais is a frontier town and a natural crossing point for those seeking a better living across the Channel. "In the early 1990s after the fall of the Berlin Wall we saw lots of Czech, Hungarian, Romanian, and Polish gypsies trying to get across. They were escaping persecution and discrimination in their home countries. They were followed by Kosovars and other Slavs from the Balkans. And in 1999, in response to so many homeless, hungry people, the Red Cross set up the Sangatte refugee camp. At its apogee, the camp housed as many as 2,000 people. But then the British decided to crack down on their asylum laws and our own Interior Minister Nicolas Sarkozy was only too happy to oblige by closing the camp on a freezing day in November 2004. Since then these unfortunate people hang around in the city centre or build their slums in the woods," says Jean Claude Lenoir who works for an association called Belle Etoile.

Humanitarian workers take great personal risks on behalf of the refugees. It is illegal to assist clandestine aliens in any way whatsoever and Moustache was given a five-year prison sentence for coming to their aid. "Of course it has never been executed. But the sentence is like a Damocles sword hanging over my head."

Catholic priest Paul Falala, who one night decided to "practice civil disobedience" and open the church door to shivering refugees, feels France is losing its human values. "The laws proposed by Sarkozy and passed by Parliament are so repressive that helping a fellow man in need has now become a crime," he says.

Monique Delannoy, a professional nurse, is one of several persons who founded Csur, a federation of humanitarian associations that regularly helps the refugees with food and clothing. "We serve them a meal every day at 2 p.m. As far as possible we try to give them a hot meal but we are often short of money and have to do with cold lunch packets. On a typical day they get half a loaf of bread, some cheese, fruit and yoghurt, and a bottle of mineral water."

The municipality in Calais is led by a communist mayor. Afraid of the rising support for the extreme right-wing, xenophobic National Front, he dare not show any sympathy for the plight of these poor migrants. "One would expect more from the communists. But they are as opportunistic as the next person and of course Calais is divided down the middle. There are many who see these people as scum that needs clearing out," explains Moustache.

At the Gecko feeding centre, the line is long and the refugees surge forward, shoving and pushing, hurling abuse at one another to get at the food packets. Quarrels between different groups often break out, some of them serious. In late December a group of Kurds and Iranians attacked sleeping Pakistanis with knives and iron rods injuring 18, two of them seriously.

"We were told the culprits would be arrested but we see no evidence of that. They tried to extort money saying they would help us go across. But who has money here? And those who do would much rather keep it and attempt a crossing on their own," explains Niaz. He says getting across is all a question of luck. "I have been rotting here for the past five months. I know of people who came here and found a passage within a week. What will I do? I will keep trying of course because now I have no money to go back and nothing in Naoshera where I belong." When pressed about his reasons for leaving he refuses to elaborate, saying simply "Majboori thi."

Many leave their countries because of sheer economic misery. Others suffer religious persecution, have problems with the law, or are being chased by enemies in clan warfare. Several of the Pakistanis said they had to leave because staying would mean certain death at the hands of their enemies.

"You never know if they are telling the truth. If you ask their age they will uniformly say `15' because minors cannot be expelled under French law. Their desperation is so great that many have defaced their thumbprints to avoid identification. They do it with cigarette lighters, razors, knives. They have no papers. That makes it difficult to expel them. So the police do their best to make their lives as miserable and hard as possible," says Moustache.

Indeed on the way to the feeding centre several cruising police vehicles flash by, followed by dark blue vans that bear a strange resemblance to dog catchers' vans. With most European nations voting right, stopping illegal immigration has become a major issue within the EU. In 2004, the EU set up a body called Frontex, the European Agency for the Management of Operational Cooperation at the External Borders. Based in Poland the organisation aims at making Europe's borders watertight through measures that include training border guards, beefing up customs, coast guard and police services.

But a new realisation is dawning: no wall, no fence, no system of policing, no legal framework can or will stop people fleeing oppression and poverty in their own countries. The millions the EU has sunk into security measures have not, and will not, dissuade the world's desperate poor from trying again and yet again. So, although the inclination will be towards increasingly restrictive legislation, European nations now agree that they have to make a more genuine effort to help the south attain its development goals. Until that is done, such misery, a blot on the West's claims to practising and defending human rights, is bound to continue.

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