Читать книгу The Migrant Diaries - Lynne Jones - Страница 18

It is not what I expected. After all the news reports about the erasure of part of the Jungle, I pictured something shattered and flattened. Instead, I walk straight into the opening ceremony for ‘the secular school of Chemin des Dunes.’ In an open space between four makeshift classrooms sits a play castle with a crocodile painted on it. Here, a cluster of French educators stand beside Zimako the refugee founder, while he makes a speech.

He rejects the word Jungle because of its associations with inhumanity and chaos:

– This place is the land of heroes who have crossed thousands of miles to find peace and escape the terror or the militias and terrorists. Change will come when we will all be together… our public space is open to all. It is a place of meeting, exchange, fraternity among people where everyone has the right to speak, a space of freedom.

Beyond the school, where the family camp was, there is now a wide, muddy Cordon Sanitaire between the Camp and the fenced motorway to the port. Inside banks of heaped earth, the squalid tent city has morphed into a shanty town. Huts of wood and plastic are closely packed along cobbled streets. Cafés, restaurants and shops jostle in the Afghan area. St. Michaels is still standing. Jungle Books has transformed from a small library into a network of rooms, where language classes in French and English go on all day long, next door to a new radio station.

The information centre now has comfortable chairs, a kettle, and racks of leaflets in every language: how to seek asylum in every European Country, what are your rights in detention, how to apply to join family in the UK. A first aid post stands opposite, opening when the MSF clinic outside the Camp is closed at weekends. I follow the cobbled road around a loop between yet more wooden and plastic shelters to an area of close packed caravans and discover a legal support centre in a beautiful wooden hut besides the Dome, where volunteer lawyers give free advice.

Coming back, I stumble across the new container camp. It is in the middle, next to Chemin du Dunes. There is a large fenced area with a ditch around it. Inside there is a grid of white containers stacked two stories high, currently completely empty and completely alienating. It’s as if someone dropped a space station in the middle of a medieval marketplace. I hear my name being shouted. I turn and there is Adam from Darfur, in a white Peruvian woolly hat with earflaps running after me.

– Lynne! Lynne! Do you remember me?

– Of course I do! I am so pleased to see you and glad you are not injured or arrested. Where are you staying? I could not find your tent…

He takes me to the small new hut he shares with a friend. He has stopped trying the train. A British lawyer is helping him get to his uncle in the UK. As he is an unaccompanied 16-year-old, there is some possibility.⁷ Meanwhile, he just sits in his hut and waits. He curls up on his bed and looks at me. The energy that was there three months ago has gone—this is not the young man who sang pop songs for us in the Dome.

– Do you do anything with your days?

He shakes his head.

– What about the Jungle Books where I took you?

He shrugs.

– And there is a new school, and a Darfuri school and English classes.

Again, a sad shrug.

– What do you dream of doing when you get to England?

– I want to study, I want to learn.

– Well, why not start here? It’s free, there are teachers and books. If you don’t like the idea of class, we could go to the library together and get some. What sort do you like?

– Ones that give me wisdom…

– OK … I think we can manage that. Let’s meet and go together.

We make an appointment for Monday morning. A friend has arrived.

– He is already French—Adam tells me.

The friend has asylum in France. He came when he was 13 and went to the accommodation centre in St. Omer. I just want to go to my uncle—Adam says again.

Riyad has acquired a caravan. He invites me in. He is doing an interview with a visiting barrister, so I get to hear in forensic detail what’s actually been happening in the last few months. He’s been assaulted without provocation three times since I last saw him, most recently, two weeks ago when he was just walking into Calais. A policeman parked a car, jumped out, and came over spraying tear gas from a cannister into his eyes, and then started beating him until he fell to the ground. Then he yelled—go back to the Jungle—got in his car, and drove off. The other two occasions happened near the train station.

– They just set on you with sticks, kicking you once you are down. I was kicked in the head and stomach and left vomiting. He shows us a scar on his hand where he protected his head. Two months ago, we were just walking to the camp when five of them jumped out and attacked us with sticks. We just ran.

And now there are the attacks on the camp. The most recent one was a few days ago. A right-wing group started throwing gas cannisters into the Kurdish area. The enraged Kurds responded by throwing stones with slingshots. Then the police let loose with tear gas and rubber bullets. My friend Rowan’s car was getting hit from both sides. Riyad says the tear gas and rubber bullet attacks are frequent and indiscriminate, occurring without provocation, and can go on for an hour or more.

– They don’t care. They chased a Sudanese guy a few weeks back. He ran out into the road, got hit by a truck, and was killed. The fascists are worse. He thinks the right-wing groups and police are hand in glove. One night, while walking home he had saw a well-known fascist car and hid while two men holding knives searched for him with a torch. They talked on a radio. Three minutes later the police arrived and started searching too. They did not find him.

– Fascists came into the camp three days ago. Four of us went to police to complain and they just said, ‘go back to the Jungle.’ They all wear police uniforms, but without markings… they are all the same, but these guys are worse than the police. Three people are missing. They have disappeared without a trace. Twenty people are in hospital, but if you complain, they do nothing. If they see us being attacked, the police stick their thumbs up (Riyad demonstrates) and give the guy a pat on the back: ‘good job!’

The Jungle, Calais, February 2016

– And forget going to the hospital. They treat you like a bowl of shit. If you come from here, they leave you sitting there for eight hours, then send you away with nothing. I went with a cough and fever. They would not look at me. A friend went with a swollen hand, but as he was not seeking asylum in France, they said they could not see him. He returned with a volunteer and it turned out he had broken his arm. If you go with a volunteer, it might be OK. The ambulances won’t come into the camp. I called them three times. Once for a woman about to deliver a baby, once for a man with a heart attack, another time a man was stabbed. Every time, we had to carry them out of the Jungle ourselves.

Riyad stares down at his feet. He looks exhausted and very sad. He has tried the train thirteen times.

– And you ask me why I don’t want to stay in France. He shakes his head. I won’t stay here.

While we are talking, a man knocks on the door. He is a thin young Afghan in army fatigue trousers. He wants to talk to the Barrister. He was a British army translator. Everyone else he worked with already has asylum in the UK, including a friend who was in Calais.

– Some army guys helped them. But I was in Germany at the time. The barrister explains that there is no actual law, and it would have been easier if he had applied from Afghanistan.

– I could not stay, I was facing death threats.

She says she will try to get in touch with the army officer who helped, if he can give details. He does not have any, just a phone number for the friend of a friend. This is how it goes—tiny painful steps. But for most, these run straight into a brick wall. The barrister says the reality is that there is no legal route for adults from the Jungle to get to the UK, unless they have a husband or wife already there. Nothing else counts.

This discussion has left all of us tired and depressed. We decide to go and eat in the Kabul café. Tom and Shizuka have just arrived, and in the warmth and light with music on the DVD monitor, and plates of rice and chicken in front of us, it could be an evening out with friends anywhere. I feel completely at home.