Camped in Calais, Migrants Defy French Resettlement Plan
Camp’s growth is held up by far-right National Front as government’s failure to manage migrant crisis
By Noemie Bisserbe
Updated Dec. 6, 2015 8:15 p.m. ET
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CALAIS, France—The French government recently flew Khalil Mahmoud more than 500 miles to France’s sunny south as part of a plan to disperse refugees bottled up at the English Channel.
A few days later, though, the 28-year-old Syrian had already gone back north to the Jungle, a migrant camp that sprawls across windswept dunes on the channel’s French coast.
A recent government campaign to dismantle the camp—relocating more than 2,000 refugees and migrants, including Mr. Mahmoud, to other parts of France and Europe—is running up against a defiant migrant population.
Migrants say leaving the Jungle, as its inhabitants and Calais locals have dubbed it, would mean abandoning their goal of living and working in the U.K.
That resistance has helped transform the Jungle from a makeshift camp into a tent city replete with schools, grocery stores, restaurants and houses of worship. In October, a record 6,000 migrants were living in the camp, double the number living there in August, according to French authorities. “The only thing that is missing now is stoplights,” said Didier Degrémont, vice president for Secours Catholique, a Catholic charity helping migrants in the area.
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The Jungle’s expansion is fueling momentum for France’s far-right National Front, which preliminary results showed had taken the largest share of support in a first round of regional elections on Sunday. French President François Hollande is under pressure to show his government’s decision to welcome thousands of Syrian refugees won’t expose the country to new terrorist threats. Two of the suicide bombers involved in the Nov. 13 terror attacks in Paris reached France after blending in with waves of Syrian migrants entering Greece.
Marine Le Pen, the National Front’s party leader, has pointed to the camp as a symbol of the government’s failure to manage the refugee crisis and as a gaping hole in the country’s security apparatus.
Ms. Le Pen herself is standing in elections that will decide the Calais region’s next president. In that region, where Ms. Le Pen is heading the National Front ticket, the far-right party took an enormous lead with 40.64% of the vote, according to preliminary results. If Ms. Le Pen wins a second-round vote next Sunday, the victory would mark the highest office ever attained by the party, which is positioning her to challenge Mr. Hollande for the presidency in 2017.
The Jungle also illustrates the challenges the European Union faces with its own plan to redistribute migrants—many of them refugees fleeing violence in Syria and Iraq—across the bloc. The resettlement plan was designed to ease the pressure on Germany, the U.K. and other strong EU economies that have become magnets for migrants.
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Those living in Calais, however, have their own plans for laying down roots in Europe. Several hundred migrants every night attempt to sneak into trucks that drive through the tunnel to reach the U.K., hoping to reach economic opportunity and family members.
For years, France’s border with the U.K. remained porous, allowing scores of migrants to reach the U.K. As recently as Oct. 9, a group of 180 migrants managed to sneak into the U.K. from Calais overnight, said a French official.
A U.K. Home Office spokeswoman declined to comment on whether there were any arrests that night. The government said migrants have been stopped 40,981 times after crossing into the U.K. from France in the year ended April 2015.
Since then, France has reinforced security at the port of Calais and the entrance of the tunnel that crosses the English Channel, erecting high razor-wire fences and deploying 1,200 police in the area.
“Now, barely anyone makes it across,” the French official said.
The camp’s growth is stoking tensions with local residents. In November, Doctors of the World closed a clinic in the migrant camp after it was ransacked at night. A few days later, a camper that Doctors of the World used to provide showers was set on fire outside the group’s office in central Calais.
Jean-François Corty, who heads the group’s French operations, says the fire “wasn’t an accident,” adding that Doctors of the World has filed a complaint with police. “Many people here don’t like what we do,” Dr. Corty said. A spokesman for French police declined to comment.
Riots also routinely erupt inside the Jungle, and migrants often clash with police around the port and the tunnel. “We had never seen such violence,” a police officer said.
Migrants wash and gather water at The Jungle, a migrant camp in Calais, France, on Thursday. The camp’s population swelled to over 6,000 in October, although it has since eased following a government campaign to resettle migrants across the country and Europe. ENLARGE
Migrants wash and gather water at The Jungle, a migrant camp in Calais, France, on Thursday. The camp’s population swelled to over 6,000 in October, although it has since eased following a government campaign to resettle migrants across the country and Europe. Photo: Jeff J Mitchell/Getty Images
To roll back the camp, the French government has adopted measures to persuade migrants to leave Calais and, if necessary, to remove them by force. The government has begun moving refugees to official shelters and detention centers across France, according to police and aid workers. In some cases, these people say, French authorities are sending the refugees to neighboring EU countries. Those countries include the U.K., which contributed to the bottleneck in Calais by sealing off its border to migrants aiming to sneak across the channel.
French officials say hundreds of refugees from Syria, Iraq or Afghanistan have been sent to Germany, Italy and Hungary in compliance with the Dublin convention, a European Union treaty that requires refugees to seek asylum in the first European country they enter.
French officials also quietly arranged for the temporary relocation of a dozen Syrians living in Calais to a government shelter in another part of France, a French government official said. That step allowed French officials to eventually send the Syrians to the U.K. without alerting the public to the fact the group was once in Calais.
The U.K. government, which has officially agreed to receive only Syrians in refugee camps, said it wasn’t aware of any such transfer. “We can’t find any evidence of that,” a British government spokesman said.
Since Oct. 21, police have taken into custody more than 1,100 migrants in the area, sending them to detention centers across France. There, the migrants are questioned and fingerprinted. If refugees can prove they are from Syria or other conflict zones, French officials can’t detain them for longer than a week as authorities can’t compel them to seek asylum in France or return them to a war zone under French law.
“There’s not much we can do,” a French official said.
Local officials have also started making rounds in the camp, offering to transfer migrants to emergency housing in other parts of France, regardless of whether they are entitled to asylum.
So far, about 1,500 migrants in Calais have taken up the offer. “Many have already applied for asylum in France,” said Pascal Brice, who heads the French Office of Protection for Refugees and Stateless Persons, or OFPRA.
Overall, officials say the campaign has helped reduce the camp’s population to 4,500 as of December. Some, however, are unwilling to give up on reaching the U.K. Others simply don’t trust French authorities.
“They won’t even tell us where they are taking us,” said Ahmad Al-Ahmad, a 29-year-old mechanical engineer from Syria who has been at the camp for two months. “I don’t know anything about this country and I don’t know anyone here,” he said.
Some French officials are skeptical of whether the measures are working. Flying migrants to other parts of France and Europe does little to prevent them from crossing back over the bloc’s porous internal borders to return to Calais.
Husain Ali, a 26-year-old Syrian student, was recently detained in Calais and sent to Metz, near France’s border with Germany. When police released him days later, he immediately took a train back to Calais.
Mr. Mahmoud was a soldier in Syrian President Bashar al-Assad’s military who deserted three years ago. He has spent about five months in Calais, where he makes nightly attempts to sneak onto U.K.-bound cargo trucks.
In late October, Mr. Mahmoud was arrested in Calais and placed on a flight to the town of Nimes near France’s southern border with Spain.
After a brief stay in a detention center there, however, he hopped on a high-speed train back to Calais. Mr. Mahmoud, who has four brothers in Britain, said he won’t apply for refugee status in France. “I need to get to the U.K.,” he said.
—Jenny Gross in London
contributed to this article.
http://www.wsj.com/article_email/camped-in-calais-migrants-defy-french-resettlement-plan-1449443928-lMyQjAxMTA1MjAyNzMwMjcyWj
