Mayor of Calais ’shocked’ as ‘outsiders’ defy authorities to open shelter for migrants in sub-zero Calais
‘Le hangar a été loué pour y stocker du matériel… pas pour accueillir des personnes.’
The story is moving fast. British media reports Sangatte bis opening in Calais. Radical British activists No Borders defiant. La Voix du Nord identifies mysterious hanger. The mayor blaming outside agitators. ”To see these people from outside of Calais come to forment trouble in the heart of a neighborhood without taking into account the local Calais population is scandalous,” she declares. Les anglais ont débarqué, so to speak….
VdN interviews Natacha Bouchart.
Moving story … following.
This is current statement on No Borders website:
Activists from the transnational No Borders network and the French organisation, SôS Soutien aux Sans Papiers, have opened a large warehouse for migrants in Calais[1]. The building is to be an autonomous space for migrants and activists struggling for the right to freedom of movement. It will be host to information-sharing, debate and practical solidarity. The Kronstadt building is located in the town that has become the symbol of Fortress Europe, a place where police arrests and beatings of migrants are a daily occurrence, and where night-time pursuits are relentless[2].
By this act, they stand in solidarity with those for whom border and immigration control is a discriminatory, oppressive and unjust reality. In a real democracy, every person enriches society in myriad ways, and no-one is surplus to requirements; neither the unemployed, the young, the old, or the foreign. The space, the activists emphasise, is NOT to be a new Sangatte. No band-aid such as Sangatte could suffice to deal with the horrors undergone by the thousands who seek protection or survival from authoritarianism or capitalist wars while arbitrary national borders remain in place. Plans are afoot to hold meetings with organisations and local residents to define how they wish to support and to participate in the project.
http://london.noborders.org.uk
http://calaismigrantsolidarity.wordpress.com
NOTES
[1]The No Borders Network use direct action and practical solidarity to fight for freedom of movement for all. They form part of the Calais Migrant Solidarity group which has maintained a continued presence in Calais since last summer.
[2] For a summary of police activities in December, please see our report here:
http://www.indymedia.org.uk/en/2010/01/444188.html
Problème résolu
Nous, organisations et citoyens soussignés, refusons que l’aide aux migrants soit considérée comme un délit.
Nous sommes scandalisés par les mises sur écoute, les intimidations et les arrestations de bénévoles.
Nous soutenons et soutiendrons toutes celles et ceux qui sont ou seront inquiétés par les autorités pour avoir tendu la main à des hommes et des femmes innocents, abandonnés dans nos fossés par les États européens.
Nous demandons la mise en place d’une nouvelle politique de l’immigration, une politique à visage humain, soucieuse de la dignité et des libertés de chacun.
Le drame de l’après-Sangatte a trop duré.
À Norrent-Fontes, le 28 février 2009
Organisations signataires :
Amnesty international, ANAFE, L’Auberge des migrants, La Belle Etoile, Collectif d’aide aux migrants de Angres, CSP 59 (membre de la coordination nationale des sans-papiers), C’SUR Calais, Emmaüs Saint-Omer, Ligue des Droits de l’homme Boulogne, Ligue des Droits de l’homme France, Médecins du monde, RESF 59/62, RUSF 59/62, SALAM Nord/Pas-de-Calais, Secours catholique Saint-Omer, association Solidarité Migrants (Oise), Terre d’errance Norrent-Fontes, Terre d’errance Steenvoorde
Site internet du manifeste : http://manifestemigrants.wordpress.com/
The migrants of Calais
Top from left: Salam Aid worker distributes bread; the film Welcome angered the French government; migrant washes himself in cold water in Calais. Bottom from left: British group No Borders has plastered Calais with posters, its attempt to hold a demonstration drew 500 police; migrants wait for the evening meal station to open near the Calais docks.
Jonathan and Marie-Jo, Anglo-French reporting team, have been to Calais to investigate the situation of migrants in the port & tunnel portal zones. Here is a very brief summary of the trip:
In January 2010, an extremely complex situation is revealed in Calais. It has been a cold winter and Canute-like efforts by French and British authorities to disrupt the tide of migrants do not seem to have stopped more from arriving at the channel ports, hoping to reach the promised land of Britain. The exiles come mainly from zones of conflict, mostly Afghanistan, Iraq, Somalia, Sudan and Kurdistan. The migrants are 95% male, and have an average age of about 22, although some of them are children.
This is a story replete with bitter ironies. The policies of the British and French governments may not have kept the exiles at home but the officials have succeeded in making migrant lives more miserable, once they are in Calais.
It might be asked from a saloon bar in the UK, why would the migrants think that Britain was a land of milk and honey? None of them will qualify for welfare. Jobs are scarce and they are forbidden to work hence forced if they can find a job into the most marginal and exploited employment.
Improved security on the tunnel and around the port has made it harder to cross and the bribes more costly.
There have been well-mediatised efforts to destroy and disrupt migrant camps, but now there are more of them, and smaller, as the migrants have dispersed.
Pins mark ‘jungle’ settlements
The migrants are now all along the coast in Bologne certainly but as far south as Caen and north into Belgium. Many have moved inland to autoroute lorry parks (‘aires’) where they attempt to find concealment among cargoes destined for Britain and others are biding their time alongside the Canal St Martin in Paris.
With no legal status in France, but all the normal basic human needs , the migrants present policy dilemmas and political pressures as well as ignite defiant acts of generosity. This isa country that boasts that it is a land of welcome and asylum, yet the National Front remains a potent political force and Sarkoszy’s ruling UMP is obsessed with ‘Frenchness’. Polls do not show huge sympathy for migrants. The political and legal conflicts and problems are multiple.
In France it is illegal to help illegal migrants and worst of all to provide accommodation or to host a migrant. «Toute personne qui aura, par aide directe ou indirecte, facilité l’entrée, la circulation ou le séjour irrégulier d’un étranger en France, sera punid’un emprisonnement de cinq ans et d’une amende de 30 000 euros.» (L’article L622-1 du Code de l’entrée et du séjour des étrangers).
Nevertheless, there are defenses to this seemingly endlessly vague and broad law, and seeming exceptions.
If anyone is breaking the law they include the socialist regional government which is subsidising relief efforts, and even the UMP mayor of Calais, who is providing a space for the migrants to receive meals. Many other organisations and individuals are also defying this law. Others are operating in shadier territory.
The police have the ability to arrest anyone they like in France and hold them incommunicado in the squalid conditions of garde a vue for 48 hours, and they have used this power against selected activists in Calais.
The contradictions and cruelties of the migrants of Calais are the theme of Phillipe Lioret’s Welcome (2009), a gritty example of filmaking that tells the wider story of the migrants through the tale of just one. It is not necessary to speak much French to understand the film that in any case includes numerous passages in English.Welcome was condemned by the French ‘national identity’ minister Eric Besson, a former socialist whose former colleagues believe has sold his soul to the devil to become a minister in Sarkozy’s government.It is now many months since the film was released but the conflicts in policy exposed by it remain acute.
Activities by NGOs and charities working in Nord-Pas de Calais are loosely coordinated by the C’SUR (Collectif Soutien d’Urgence aux Réfugiés) coordinated by the activist priest, l’abbé Boutoille, who is a strong critic of the government’s national identity policies.
We saw in action: Association Belle Etoile (lunch time meals); association Salam (morning tea, evening meals, clothing, blankets, tents and first aid). We also encountered observers from the UNHCR and France – Terre d’Asiles. Other organisations involved in helping migrants to have basic human rights: Secours Catholique : Showers & sanitation; Transportation of migrants to PASS (Permanence d’Accès aux Soins et à la Santé); paperwork for acquiring political refugee status or “demandeurs d’asile” asylum seekers. MDM (Médecins du Monde). Auberge des Migrants (help Belle Etoile with lunches)
CADA (Commission d’Accès aux Documents Administratifs ); No Borders – agitate for political rights of migrants; Le GISTI (Groupe d’Information et de Soutien des (Travailleurs).
In Bailleul (near Lille), a hospital has accommodation available for migrants who are recovering from serious illnesses and surgeries.
Although it seems that each NGO has its specific task, tensions have been mentioned (political, personality clashes, and competition to attract media attention) .
Other participants in this drama include of course several police forces which have their own rivalries, priorities and political masters,
Recently, British and French ministers including Besson visited an enhanced joint migrant intelligence center with headquarters at Kent Police offices in Folkstone. This includes a French officer as well as officers from the UK Border Agency and one must presume others unmentionable. The British and French also share the cost of migrant deportation flights to Afghanistan.
On the French side, strong deployments of CRS and National Police and Gendarmes surveil and control migrants and sometimes arrest them. Physical mistreatment of migrants by the police has been repeatedly alleged.
The French mobilised 500 police to control a street protest in the Calais area sponsored by No Borders,.
There are further British support groups interested in the situation. A British lawyer is coming to Calais soon to advise migrants.
NoBorders alleges police brutality towards the migrants. Migrants are themselves the victims of criminals especially of the ‘mafia’ of passeurs who promise to arrange passage to England in return for cash. There is no evidence that the police interest in the migrants has translated into prosecutions brought against these passeurs.
Calais is in a fascinating and extraordinary corner of France that has inspired writers and artists from Danny Boon to Emile Zola. This is the land of the Ch’tis - influenced by Flanders, England and its position at the portal of the channel tunnel (tunnel sous la Manche) as well as a thriving ferry port.
Coal and lacemaking have lost importance here but the port and tunnel are booming and Calais is a major entrepôt with millions of tons of freight passing by rail and truck to and from the UK. This is the short crossing to the UK dense with vehicles and the magnet for those seeking entry into Britain.
Who these people are, what they want, where they are from, and how they got here, is not always clear. Some of them are doubtless not the people one might wish taking up residence. Others are surprisingly personable. No easy answers.
Calais migrant solidarity blog in English here
France – pays d’accueil
Calais – 22 January, 2010
Not like the brazen giant of Greek fame,
With conquering limbs astride from land to land;
Here at our sea-washed, sunset hates shall stand
A mighty woman with a torch, whose flame
Is the imprisoned lighting, and her name
Mother of Exiles. From her beacon hand
Glows world-wide welcome; her mild eyes command
The air-bridged harbor that twin cities frame.
“Keep, ancient lands, your storied pomp!” cries she
With silent lips. “Give me your tired, your poor,
Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free,
The wretched refuse of your teeming shore,
Send these, the homeless, tempest-tost to me,
I lift my lamp beside the golden door!
-“The New Colossus” by Emma Lazarus
Richard Holbrooke is psychotic
He is saying the attack on Kabul will fail. But it succeeded. The Taliban are saying that 20 of their fighters – the number believed responsible for this morning’s operations – are equal to 20,000 foreign soldiers. I wish I could say they were equally delusional.
Vévé de Baron Samedi
The conscience is moved by the news from Haiti. The media reports seem almost completely untrustworthy. We are asked to believe that survivors have been protesting the slow arrival of aid by building road blocks out of corpses. It is such a delicious meme – rich with the spectre of Baron Samedi (think Geoffrey Holder in Live and Let Die).
You notice the victims are black, the rescuers mostly white. You re-read The Comedians – meeting again Brown, Smith and Jones – and are dazzled all over again.
The eye falls on the evocation by Brown of Frère Laurent, in the French version of Romeo and Juliet: ”a sentence that I had reason to remember: Le remède au chaos n’est pas dans ce chaos. “
The power of naked
Here are the results of my survey of modern naked behaviour. This is not a scientific poll – it is a sounding.
Half of us sleep naked, to the despair of pajama manufacturers. Half of us walk naked around our own houses. Of those who have their own private swimming pools, 90 per cent swim in them naked. Half the British population has stripped for a charity calendar. Perhaps.
Men and women are equally interested in nakedness – being naked and seeing other people naked. Half those studying bare breasts in The Sun every day are female.
There are some national differences. But there is still plenty of nudity even in chilly Britain where we have naked bike rides (sounds uncomfortable), nude days at theme parks, lots of nude beaches, and mediatised nudity on a heroic scale. Nude is no longer especially rude although exposure does not limit the potential for embarrassment.
Nudity is a subject of endless fascination for everybody – moral philosophers, psychologists, artists, editors – but it is a complicated subject. There is a place where nudity segues to perversity and becomes in itself a symptom of madness. What are we to make of all this flesh?
It is timely that Philip Carr-Gomm, a writer in Lewes, Sussex who specialises normally in the mystical and Druidic, should have authored A Brief History of Nakedness (Reaktion Books, London, 2010).
In a lavishly illustrated tour of the horizon, from religious and artistic confrontations with nakedness, to the quotidian nudity of today, Carr-Gomm advances the thesis that there has recently been a fundamental shift in attitudes towards nudity. He posits this began in the sixties and heralded a shifting of the idea of nakedness from something perverted to something socially responsible and even heroic. Even before the body scanners are rolled out to strip us all naked at the airport, this is the age of bare, he proposes.
Perhaps. The sixties were without doubt a social-sexual milestone but a point of departure? I am a little more sceptical. I’d propose that the Internet has had more to do with demystifying the human body – of which there is no nook or cranny that is not a click away. The counter-argument, and Carr-Gomm makes it himself, is that human fascination with the nude is eternal. So technology has really changed nothing other than to make the nude prosaic and maybe slightly less interesting. Books. Films. Videotape. The Internet. Nudity is a cross-platform driver. There has been a widening experience of nudity since the sixties, but this has also coincided with the availability of cheap holidays to climates where it is fun to be nude.
I am not certain whether nakedness is a serious subject to be lightly treated, or the opposite. Philip Carr-Gomm obviously isn’t completely sure, either, because this is a serious and funny book that is certainly revealing, and also very naughty, with extraordinary pictures of naked people, often behaving very oddly. The copy I received did not have an index but there will be one when the book is released. This ought to be something of a classic in its own right, given the depth and eccentricity of the subject. An amazing story. Read it naked.
Jon Stewart is often very feeble
Mullen can’t beat the Taliban but Stewart was a pushover
Jon Stewart’s team has done a lot to puncture the media bubble but bring in a guest and usually he turns to mush. Why is he so often timid and useless in his interviews? There is something missing.
His performance grovelling before chairman of the joint chiefs Mike Mullen was only a recent example of his tendency to slaver at important guests and refuse to confront them with really hard questions.
Stewart was completely unconvincing with Mullen from the start of this ill-fated segment. In the first 10 seconds he swallowed entire Mullen’s brush-off of the American role in Yemen and threw away the story of the week in America’s endless war. The interview proceeded to degenerate into a love-fest for the fighting men and women of America – and leave everything else out of it. This could have been Fox.
Stewart may make jokes about Yemen but maybe he could find in himself a higher comedic purpose. Stewart is quick to pillory Fox and its bubble head discourse. This has been his greatest achievement. Fox is ridiculous and dangerous. And the Pentagon is not?
Stewart’s cringing deference to powerful people from Washington and Hollywood is the worst part of his show. Sometimes, he gets the better of his guests. But usually he doesn’t even try.
It is no defense for Stewart to answer that this is ‘just’ comedy. This is his usual cop-out. I remember Stewart going on CNN to tell them they were broadcasting crap. Pots, kettles and the colour black come to mind. Stewart can read a script but can he hold a brief?
Sadly, Stewart has plenty of previous. He has recently been indecently chummy with Janet Napolitano, the secretary in charge of America’s homeland security theatre. The less said about the frequent appearances on Stewart’s podium of John McCain and Bill Kristol the better.
Letting guests push their books, movies and spin is fine – but only if Stewart pushes back. Otherwise he’s hardly different from all the other dripping wets on the telly. Stewart has done a reasonable job going after the media side of the media-industrial-military complex but he needs to grow some balls. Stewart has to prove he is at least as good as his writers and more than a mere performer.
Meanwhile, demonstrating further contempt for his UK audience, it is no longer possible to watch The Daily Show online in the UK, so Britons will at least be spared the embarrassment of reviewing Stewart’s feeble performance. Or Mullen’s bizarre attention to his crotch as he walked onto the set.
Many days later. Is this fair? I am reminded of JS evisceration of CNBC’s manic-depressive Cramer. But Cramer wanted to debase himself and regretted it only later. I still Jonathan Stewart needs discipline and must establish himself as someone reliable in an interview and not just a heap of mush.
In Wapping did Rupert Murdoch declare a stately pleasure dome – look on his works and despair
The Greatest Empire the World has ever Known
Today’s Times newspaper speaks of British forces handing ‘control’ of Helmand to the Americans in March. This is dishonest so many ways. In a story that is transparently briefed by the MoD and informed by the usual suspects, we are asked to believe that the British are in control of anything at all, when it is obvious the British Army is not in control, but has been soundly defeated.
Britain has already previously suffered imperial defeat in Afghanistan so it takes a government of special genius to come back for a second helping and an especially stupid and/or craven media not to notice when a tiny little event comes along to ruin the good war narrative - like we lost.
The full stupidity and horror of British Army operations in Afghanistan has yet to be fully documented but it began with promises from the government that maybe not a shot would be fired. Then, a million bullets later, British officers were boasting how many Afghans they were killing. Then, the British were unable to move, because Gordon Brown had cancelled the helicopters, as the Taliban drove the soldiers back to bases from which they would emerge only to be immediately killed and maimed by mines.
A number that must now be close to 2,000 British soliders have been maimed, killed and driven mad and thousands and thousands of Afghans have also been killed, maimed and ruined in Helmand. Only for the situation to be worse. Thanks to us.
With at times no helicopters at all, the vainglorious, counter-productive operations of the Bitish army are entirely consistent with the press-on-regardless, even if it’s not working tradition of a fighting force that has been entirely incompetent for much of the past century, and with a long-time proven track record of failure against Muslims. That brave young lives have been wasted is to the shame of not just the politicians but also the senior leadership of the forces who value their careers over candour.
The result of the Bitish operations in Helmand is a place where far from there being any evident progress, everything is measurably worse, and a military-media-industrial complex has emerged to ensure that the truth about this is concealed. I am not reading about this in The Times.
The big stories like Afghanistan show how the important media in Britain and the United States are now almost entirely unreliable. The Times, a flagship of the Murdoch empire, a global media brand, is merely one example of the institutions that have become ethically and professionally diseased, their pages given over to stories invented by people whose motives and agendas are undisclosed.
Media studies is derided but every young person must be taught that they are being lied to. Academic media studies normally ignore this point.
Content analysis of media always fails because it neglects the problem of what isn’t published. It is what is not said that is really important. What is not said is what counts.
As it was not said in The Times that Obama’s insane re-launch of the failed Afghan War is not even being delivered – because after capitulating to his generals, the Pentagon is finding it not so easy to deploy 30,000 soliders to Afghanistan, where every drop of fuel must be flown in, or fought for.
Surging all these soldiers into Sanguin by March! The Times as usual is sourced from Whitehall and so none of this seems to have occured to anyone, unless I have missed it. Doubtless someone at the Times could point me to various sceptical comments but it is the position of The Times, consistent with all Murdoch media, to support the extension of wars.
The Times has refused to report that the British Army has lost its bloody war in Helmand and is now getting ready to leave while buglers sound the advance, as they did in Basra. In Iraq, too, the Times pretended a false narrative. It was obvious for months or a year that the British had been defeated – but in The Times, they pretended that we were handing ‘control’ of the City to the Iraquis!
Spasmodic efforts by the Times that might have revealed the truth have been systematically gutted as with Anthony Lloyd’s series in which a lot of this was hinted at before the conclusion was reached that with one more heave everything might be alright. So there are passages of passable journalism – but with a conclusion that is consistently perverse.
The Times failed in Iraq and it is failing again in Afghanistan.
It is not just the Times – Sky and the BBC broadcast fantasy stories from the war zones every day. The Guardian is hated most of all by its own readers. The American mainstream media is equally psychotic. But the Times, where I once briefly worked, a long time ago, is a special disgrace. If it is not Rupert’s exclusiveplaything, it is only because it is now also the sandpit for James.
Why cannot journalists tell the truth? I intend to explore this question further.
Journalists are dangerous and unscrupulous foes. I know because I was/am one. I have made more than my fair share of mistakes in the past but what I do not ‘get’ is how a newspaper that ought to be kicking down the doors (as Murdoch would have done, when he was young), has now become a satrap of government and corporate spin doctors. Murdoch is losing money on this paper and who can be surprised.
The dead hand of the print unions has been replaced by the almost-dead hand of a Rupert Murdoch and his gruesome minions building a palace to a dead religion by the Thames.
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