2,000 Refugees Given Three Days to Leave as Bulldozers Move Into France’s Calais ‘Jungle’ Camp

Up to 2,000 migrants and refugees in a section of France’s Calais ‘Jungle’ camp are to be forcibly evicted from their makeshift shelters, after French police gave them until Thurs., Jan. 14., to leave.

The ‘Jungle’ is used by up to 5,000 asylum seekers as a base from which they attempt to enter Great Britain via the Channel tunnel. Residents at the informal refugee camps they will peacefully resist eviction, which would see them moving into a purpose-built facility nearby, where French police say residents can live in warmer and sturdier containers. However, aid workers at Calais say the affected asylum seekers are frightened by the new site, which they describe as resembling a prison and containing no communal areas – in contrast to their current informal settlement, which has makeshift churches, mosques and kitchens. The residents also believe they will be forced to apply for asylum in France once inside the official camp.

From VICE News:

In a statement sent to VICE News, UK-based volunteer organization Help Refugees said: “Our Calais teams have just found out we have only three days to move and relocate approximately 2,000 refugees, including over 300 women and 60 kids, as the French government bulldoze a significant section (nearly one third) of the entire Calais camp, a much larger area than the associations on the ground have been previously told about.

“The area proposed includes approximately 500 shelters we, and other aid groups have built.”

The “ridiculously short timescale” meant organizations would only be able to support with the relocation of 1 in 10 of those people affected, estimated aid movement Worldwide Tribe. “That leaves 1,800 people, who may well be forced out of their ‘homes’ by bulldozers, with nothing,” it said in a statement. “That means 450 shelters, funded by donations and built by volunteers, will be destroyed with complete disregard. Who knows how many personal belongings, family photographs, important documents will be lost along the way, like they were when bulldozers last took to the camp.”

Mohammad, a refugee from Afghanistan who has been living in the Jungle for three months, told VICE News there had been no “dialogue or negotiation” with the migrants before the command was given.

“Refugees here have planned that they are going to [stay] and they are not going to accept the government plan,” he said, adding that people feared the French authorities were creating a surrounded area “like a prison.”

He also pointed out that many of the shelters in the disputed land had been built with donations from British people. “The British government are paying the French government to destroy all of it,” he said.

Mohammad said that the refugees and migrants had resolved to keep it peaceful but “we don’t know what’s going to happen.” He said the camp’s population don’t have any trust in the police and the French authorities.”

Migrants and refugees living in the Jungle complain about being tear-gassed, or removed to detention centers without being allowed tell their friends or family what has happened.

“When it comes to human rights , when it comes to democracy that’s all for Europeans, that’s not for refugees,” Mohammad said, adding “people know the French government doesn’t really care about people, if they cared they wouldn’t come [to us] like that.”

“There should be a political or safe solution because it’s not worth putting that many people in danger. They really need to think about it again.”

Read the full story here.

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