Calais - no easy answers

A New Year. An old problem. Uppermost in my mind at the moment is the ongoing refugee disaster in Calais. This has been out of the mainstream media for some time now, since the closure of The Jungle in October 2016. Maybe everyone believes that the plan worked – closing the camp, we were told, would make the refugees themselves vanish. You have to wonder where these ideas come from – do the politicians themselves believe these things? Or do they just cynically say them anyway, knowing that the press has the attention span of a gnat and will be gone before you can say “safe drinking water”? As everyone who was previously involved foresaw and warned, the refugees are still there – only now there is nowehere safe for them. Nowhere to pitch a tent. Nowhere to have a shower or use a toilet. Nowhere to cook or to get legal assistance. Nowhere to get warm or dry. No way for charities to keep formal track of who is who, and therefore, much greater difficutly in protecting unaccompanied children. All of this is simply the casual collateral damage of the indifferent lack of provision. But the horror doesn't stop there. The atrocity is more deliberate than that. Official police policy seems to be to harrass the dispossessed – to confiscate or destroy meagre belongings such as tents, blankets or even shoes. To interrupt sleep, to beat up or gas the defenceless. Legalised bullying and state-sponsored violence. An article from The Guardian on 29th October 2017 reports “Police violence towards refugees in Calais has intensified to ““excessive and life-threatening” levels...and the overall situation for unaccompanied minors has deteriorated markedly.” You can read the full article here. https://www.theguardian.com/world/2017/oct/29/calais-child-refugees-police-beatings-harassment

Again, the justification seems to rest in the idea that making a situation hostile will deter people from coming.

Now, I am not for one minute suggesting that there is an easy answer. There never was. The residents of Calais must be deeply frustrated and drained. But maybe we should stop expecting easy answers to life's problems. Maybe humankind has always been this naïve, or maybe it's a new thing. Maybe it's encouraged by the stream of low-quality TV and radio where political discourse is reduced to grotesquely simplified, combative disagreement masquerading as debate. Our First Past the Post electoral system presents voters with a distorted idea that there is an either/or, right or wrong, red or blue answer to everything, and that one side has the monopoly on solutions or correct answers. A news item on climate-change is bafflingly presented with equal prominence given to a climate-change denier. This isn't balance. This isn't helping the populace get deeper understanding of an issue. This is entertainment, turning what are literally life and death questions into a game. (And with shameful irresponsibility, our Government has managed to create a near-exact 50/50 fault-line in the population as to whether the EU is a monstrous representation of foreign meddling or an angelic, perfect and exclusively benign assemblage of progressive cooperation. How can either be anything but a caricature? But I digress....)

So no, there is no easy answer to Calais. In a few weeks I shall be returning for a fourth visit as a volunteer, hoping to ease the horror. Am I helping or hindering or wasting my time? Well, fourteen months after The Jungle was destroyed, there are somewhere between 800 and 2,000 refugees still “Living in Hell” - the title of a report by The Human Rights Watch which accuses French police of recurrent, gratuitous violence and systematic brutality against migrants in Calais. These desperate people are clearly not going away. The question for the politicians should be how to find long-term solutions, which would undoubtedly combine a multi-faceted, complex and flexible network of approaches.

Meanwhile, as the politicians fiddle, it turns out that for me, there is one uncomplicated question after all. It is simply: “can I stand by and watch”? The answer is no.

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