The closure of the Sangatte centre near the Channel Tunnel hasn't stopped the influx of refugees, reports Lara Marlowe from Calais
Remember Sangatte? France finally shut down the refugee camp within sight of England eight months ago, at British government insistence. The giant warehouse near the Channel Tunnel had housed some 60,000 mostly Kurdish and Afghan immigrants since 1999.
Sangatte was the last stop on their trek to Britain, a place to gather strength for the dangerous thrust across the Channel. The warehouse was dismantled and the British authorities heaved a sigh of relief. Britain's nightmare of the tunnel as a conduit for illegal immigrants ended. Electrified fences ensured there were no more television images of refugees swarming onto trains. The problem was supposed to be over.
But the refugees didn't stop coming. Fleeing mullahs and warlords, the poverty-stricken and dictators - thousands still gravitate to the Channel coast, within sight of their dream of England. In Calais, police round up close to 100 refugees daily to send them to asylum centres in faraway Metz and Limoges. It takes less than a week for most to sneak back to the coast.
Because the refugees have family and friends in England and can work there without residence papers, only a few bother with the roulette of a French asylum application. Hiding in a freight lorry before it boards a cross-channel ferry offers hope of salvation.
"Sangatte was like a sink," says Jacques Murat, a retired zinc factory worker and a volunteer with the refugee support group, La Belle Étoile. "The interior minister, Nicolas Sarkozy, pulled the plug and drained it, but he forgot to turn the tap off."
Monique Delannoy is a trained nurse who operates a medical van at Calais' main gathering place for refugees, a shabby parking-lot next to the railway tracks, known as Portakabin.
"As a human being, it's intolerable for me to see other human beings left in the street," she says. Delannoy has three Afghans, two of them aged 15, living in her home. "Our minister thinks it's a triumph to have shut down Sangatte," she says. "But they're still here."
Delannoy gestures at the men waiting for medical help for blistered feet, scabies, lice, boils. A 25 year-old Iranian painter pulls up his shirt to show her a jagged wound from a barbed-wire fence in Calais port. She gives muscle-relaxants and anti-inflammatory drugs to Kurds with pinched sciatic nerves from sleeping on the ground.
"It's as if our minister had a big pimple on his nose," Delannoy continues. "We're witnesses to the fact that this misery continues."
The constant arrival of refugees from the Middle East, Central Asia and the Horn of Africa has created a verbal - sometimes physical - battle, pitting refugees and support groups against the majority of townspeople and security forces. With a population of 80,000, Calais is France's biggest communist-run municipality, a place of industrial decline and high unemployment.
It's not uncommon for cops to pursue immigrants through the streets. Refugee support groups accuse police of beating them with night-sticks, a charge that is denied by police commissioner Aurélien Cros.
"When they go peacefully there's no problem," he says. "But if they run, you have to tackle them and pin them down. You have to search them; a lot carry knives. The support groups film everything and put it on their website."
Jean-Claude Lenoir, a computer science teacher and the president of the Calais yacht club, says it was police brutality that inspired him to join the umbrella support group C.Sur (Collectif de soutien d'urgence aux réfugiés) last autumn.
"I live in central Calais. It was happening on my doorstep," he explains. "They cornered a Kurd next to the rubbish-bins by the church and beat him with night-sticks. It's worse since Sarkozy came to power - the police think they're untouchable. They didn't use these methods before."
Britain agreed to accept two thirds of Sangatte's inhabitants in exchange for the camp's closure. The announcement prompted hundreds of refugees to try to force their way into the camp, to be repelled with tear gas by riot police. Seventy refugees occupied the Church of Pierre and Paul in Calais, demanding that they too be admitted to Sangatte. Lenoir joined other volunteers in delivering food to the church every evening.
"I began taking very young or wounded people home, with my wife Joelle. We put them in the guest room. Some of them were handicapped; there was one guy with no legs," he says. The Lenoirs' son and daughter, in their 20s, joined in.
"It's brought so much to us as a family; it's almost selfish," Lenoir says. "When you're happy, it seems indecent to leave others in misery around you."
Lenoir enabled refugees to obtain Western Union money transfers from their home countries by using his address on documents.
"Sometimes it was less than €200, shared among several people," he says. "But because they're here illegally, the moment money is involved, the authorities assume it's about trafficking."
On May 30th, Lenoir was charged with helping illegal aliens to remain in France. His identity papers have been confiscated; he is barred from contact with refugees and must check in at the police station every month. If convicted, he could lose his teaching job.
"I'm so disgusted that I wouldn't even appeal," he says. He adds that immigration police follow his yacht because they suspect he's smuggling refugees to England. "But most of all, it's about intimidation."
Support groups accuse police of tormenting refugees with tear gas.
"I've treated a lot of tear-gas burns on faces," says Delannoy. Last spring, Cros recounts, the owner of a warehouse where refugees often sleep began judiciary proceedings to regain control of his property. When half a dozen police went to remove the refugees, they found 100 men inside.
"They were outnumbered. They sprayed tear gas to protect themselves," he says. Likewise, police sometimes use tear gas to force refugees out of lorries in Calais port. "The police aren't covered if they're hurt inside a lorry, because it's private property. So they use tear gas. We told them not to, but sometimes they do it. Tear gas makes you cry for an hour; that's all."
Cros calls the support groups "extreme left-wing", but those I interview seem to be motivated more by humanitarianism than Marxist ideology.
"The associations blind themselves to the criminal aspects, to the trafficking," Cros says. "They think they're helping poor people, but they make it possible for traffickers to exploit them. We offer the immigrants a place to stay, but not in Calais."
The volunteers, Cros claims, frighten the refugees with tales of beatings and forced repatriation. "Whenever there are big problems, it's because the support groups are there, stoking the flames. Sometimes they roll on the ground and scream. They call us bastards, fascists, Nazis. And when we book them for insulting public servants, they say: 'We didn't do anything'."
The refugees were in a festive mood at the evening meal distribution point, under the awning of a ferry company warehouse in Calais port. The voice of Kurdish singer Zakaria Abdullah boomed from the cassette player in a volunteer's car.
"I get on well with French girls," an Algerian rai singer boasted. "I'm from a middle-class family in Oran. But Algeria is finished. I've made it to England twice; both times they deported me. I'll try again tonight, after I've eaten. If you wear stylish clothes and put gel in your hair, it's easier to get through."
Sometimes the confrontation between the local population and refugees is almost comical. The weather was freezing when Sangatte closed last December, so Kurds took shelter in disused German blockhouses from the second World War. One night they stole several prize ducks from a pen.
"The tame ducks are trained to make mating calls to attract wild ducks for hunters," Cros explains. "Each duckis worth €3,000. When the hunters found their ducks roasting outside a blockhouse, they started a fight with the Kurds, and we had to intervene."
In the fray, a blanket inside the blockhouse caught fire, leading to accusations by support groups that the police had torched the Kurds out of their squat. Cros ordered the blockhouses sealed on grounds of safety.
This summer, police were called to the Calais slum of Fort Nieulay, where a high percentage of the population vote for the National Front.
"Some immigrants invite French girls from the slums to restaurants and hotels," Cros says. "It feeds the locals' primitive racism. A young woman in Fort Nieulay married a Kurdish refugee and had his child. She got pregnant by a second Kurd. Her family, who are unemployed drunks, started slapping her around."
The French woman took refuge with half a dozen Kurds in an apartment. "In the housing projects, as soon as there's a fight a crowd forms," Cros adds. "By the time we arrived, there were a hundred people. We had to use a couple of tear-gas canisters to get the girl and the Kurds out of the apartment, so we could protect them. A refugee stabbed a young Frenchman in the back. The young man had a few stitches, and the Kurd who attacked him got away."
For her extraordinary generosity to Kurdish refugees, Mireille Lecoustre has been portrayed as a secular saint in French media. The 49-year-old welfare recipient's house in the Calais suburb of Marck is, she admits, "a mini-Sangatte". Since Lecoustre first started taking in Kosovars in 1999, she estimates she has lodged at least 500 people, most of them Iraqi Kurds. Five or more sleep in her house every night, returning at 3 a.m. after each failed attempt to cross the channel. At 11 a.m., Lecoustre wakes them with tea. After the refugees shower, Lecoustre takes the bus into Calais, then spends the day in the park and at meal distributions with her Kurdish friends. They communicate by hand gestures and a few words of English.
Libération newspaper published two pages with the headline "Mireille, Great Soul of Calais". To the annoyance of volunteers who feel she is not an appropriate spokeswoman for refugee support groups, France's three leading television stations have filmed a sanitised version of Lecoustre's story. When we meet in the railway station café, it is clear that this lonely, waifish woman is an outcast who has made Kurdish refugees the centre of her existence. Six of them, she says, became her lovers.
"One morning they don't come back, and I know they've made it to England. Three times I went into deep depression," she says. Lecoustre nods towards Kardo, the sullen Kurd she has brought with her to the station. "He lives with me for the time being, but he's made it clear he wants to go to England. I don't want him to stay with me and be unhappy. Men are not animals you keep on a leash."
In June, Lecoustre sent the four youngest of her 11 children to foster families. They visit her on Sunday afternoons, when the judge decreed she must empty her house of refugees. One of 14 children herself, Lecoustre grew up in foster homes before working in a biscuit factory and briefly marrying a steel miner. Her neighbours no longer speak to her, and cafés turn her and her Kurdish friends away on the pretext that they frighten clients.
"Other French people haven't lived in misery like the Kurds have," Lecoustre says. "I know what it is to sleep rough. I got divorced. I had to sell my jewellery to eat. I haven't had a happy life; now they bring me a little happiness."
In recent weeks, as the Iranian regime repressed student demonstrations, the number of young Iranian men reaching Calais rose sharply. Fighting in eastern Sudan sparked an influx of Sudanese.
"What happens in Calais is a direct result of events elsewhere," says Kais Latif, an Iraqi immigrant who works as an interpreter for the French authorities. Since the US invasion of Iraq, Kurds, who represent 80 per cent of refugees in Calais, have dropped to a little over a third.
"We see more Iraqis who were in the police, and civil servants. They don't say so, but you can tell," Latif adds.
When I left Calais, my taxi driver to the train station was Dimitri Pakhomoff, the kindly 67-year-old son of Russians who fled the 1917 revolution. Because he speaks Russian, Afghan refugees at the Sangatte camp used to call Pakhomoff for lifts to the Channel Tunnel, or into Calais. Police wanted to make an example by charging him with helping illegal aliens to circulate, Pakhomoff says. He is appealing a two-year suspended prison sentence.
Though he describes the refugees as good, polite people, Pakhomoff says he would not pick them up in his taxi if he had it to do over again; the experience has been too costly. That is precisely the lesson that French authorities want people to draw from such cases.
"The police believe that if there were no organisations feeding refugees, they wouldn't come to Calais," Pakhomoff says. Are they right? He pauses for a brief moment.
"No. The refugees would be even more miserable, that's all."