‘This is industrialised storage of humans’

Tony Dyer, the Green Party’s candidate for Bristol mayor, visited the refugee camps in Calais. He found a “terrifying” new container camp to house refugees overnight.

Last week I took four days out of my mayoral election campaign to work as a volunteer supporting people living in the refugee camps in Calais and Dunkirk. Most of my time was spent in the volunteers’ warehouse helping to unload and sort food and clothing, building wooden shelters and chopping firewood for cooking and heating.

I also visited the Calais refugee camp itself. Stepping into the camp you see a scene vaguely familiar from pictures of other humanitarian disasters we have seen on our TV screens from far away lands – but this one is located in one of the richest countries in the world, as close to England as Cardiff is to Bristol.

The scene is one of squalor and despair; muddy tracks, flimsy tents and wooden huts housing a mixture of people fleeing wars, genocide, religious extremism, absolute poverty.

There are people here from Syria, Iraq, Kurdistan, Eritrea, Ethiopia, Sudan and Afghanistan. The former marketing manager for Coca-Cola Afghanistan is a refugee here, as is a former senior official in the Ministry of Agriculture.

You will find engineers, architects, doctors, dentists, the list goes on. Some of the Afghans worked as interpreters for the British Army. When the British Army pulled out, they were left behind. Now they are here, driven from their homes.

The Kurds – attacked by Saddam, attacked by the Turks, attacked by the Iranians, attacked by ISIS – they are here too. Just before I arrived they were attacked again, this time by the French police who bulldozed their tents to create a “no-man’s land” between the camp and the nearby motorway.

Other casualties were a church and a mosque – demolished despite repeated promises from the French authorities they would not be.  

The French police now watch over no-man’s land from their vans – occasionally firing a tear gas round into the camp seemingly out of boredom. Whether through spite or ignorance a number of the tear gas rounds have landed in the family area of the camp – this is the area where most of the camp’s children are living.

Nobody knows for certain, but there are about 600 kids in the camp, most with their parents, a few unaccompanied. Schools are now setting up in the camp to provide them with some form of education – there is no shortage of teachers amongst the refugees.

For all its mud and squalor and the sheer inhumanity of the situation, community is insisting on developing within the camp. On the day I visited, the self-built Ethiopian church with its two storey ricketty wooden tower was conducting a service – the singing of the congregation providing an audio backdrop for my walk down the camp’s “high street”.

Even with the limited resources available, the entrepeneural spirit still shines through. The high street has restaurants, cafes, shops, barbers, etc. Try to imagine Stapleton Road or Gloucester Road but with no paved roads and the shops all single storey and constructed out of wood and tarpaulin with plastic windows instead of glass. And no cars – only the occasion van delivering food parcels to one of the community groups or field kitchens.

Despite the terrible conditions, the human spirit is alive and well here. But that is not true elsewhere in the camp.

The French Government have built a camp within a camp. It consists of about a hundred shipping containers, surrounded by a wire fence. The containers are precisely spaced out with military precision on a neatly gravelled surface.  They are pristine white, and everthing is clean, ordered, almost militarily precise.

The refugees within the container camp have to obey a strict curfew. They are then shut in to their containers overnight – ten people to a container, no windows. They will be let out again in the morning. And the process will repeat.  

There is no room for the human spirit in this camp. This is industrialised overnight storage of human beings. There is no church singing, no cafe chat, no children’s education – and no escape except deportation back to the bloodshed and terror you’ve taken so many risks to escape from.

The Calais camp is awful enough with its terrible conditions (and the often forgotten Dunkirk camp just up the road is even worse) but there is something terrifying about the container camp. Something dehumanising. Something that sends a chill down the spine.

And it raises a question about ourselves and our values as individuals and as a society. Are we really prepared to tolerate this so close to home? Just 30 miles away. And if we are, what are we prepared to tolerate next?