CAUGHT IN THE CAMP

Home secretary David Blunkett has called for Sangatte to be closed, claiming that huge numbers of asylum seekers are using it as a stopover point on their way to Britain. Ann Widdecombe even called it a 'departure lounge'. What's the truth of the matter?
Widdecombe must use totally different airports from me, because I've never been in a departure lounge which is ringed by wire fences, and in which hungry people have to pick berries to feed their kids.

The camp is in a huge prefabricated industrial warehouse on the outskirts of Sangatte village, which is a ten-minute drive from Calais. It's a Red Cross refugee camp, not a detention centre, but conditions are so bad that it's little better than one. The people in the camp belong to the sans papiers--people without identity papers--so the French state washes its hands of them. They receive no state benefits, and depend on charity and their own ingenuity to fill their stomachs.

Of course, many at the camp want to come to Britain, not because they think the country is a 'soft touch'--they know about the draconian asylum policies and racist newspapers--but because, like many of the Kurds, they speak English and have an established community in Britain. Contrary to the garbage in sections of the press about the French encouraging refugees across the English Channel, refugees at Sangatte told me that controls at Calais are tight, and their attempts to come to Britain are being thwarted.

How many people are in the camp, and what are conditions like inside?
There are about 1,600 people, mainly young men, but also women, older men, and some children. The Red Cross is extremely wary of journalists as, quite understandably, are many of the refugees themselves. So I never actually got inside the camp itself.

Talking to asylum seekers, however, it seems that people sleep in tents inside the centre. As you can imagine, facilities for cleaning and cooking are extremely basic, and privacy is impossible.

While I was in Sangatte village about 80 people lined up against a farmhouse wall, sheltering from the wind and rain. It turned out they were waiting for coaches to take them to what they call 'the commune', a municipal hostel in Calais.

One Kurdish man told me that people get one night in the hostel, and if they refuse to leave, the cops come and take them back to the refugee camp. With 80 out of 1,600 people getting a night in the commune, you would be lucky to get a bed there once every three weeks.

You mention the police returning refugees to the camp. Did you notice that there was a big police presence around Sangatte?
Regular police drove through the village every 15 minutes or so while I was there. More importantly, though, the special paramilitary police, the CRS, are permanently based on the outskirts of Sangatte. It seems unlikely that they were based there before the camp opened. If you stand at the gates of the camp for any length of time you will see CRS vehicles speeding up and down, to and from the camp. There is intense police activity around Sangatte.

You said there are children living in the camp. Don't the French authorities make special arrangements for people with kids?

As I say, these are the sans papiers, the non-people of French society as far as the authorities are concerned. That includes children. To give families with little ones proper accommodation would be to acknowledge their existence and make them, in the racist parlance, a 'French problem'. One of the most moving things I saw while I was in Sangatte was a family with two young children walking into the camp, utterly penniless and exhausted. The contrast with the massive wealth on display in the centres of Paris and London was absolutely enraging.

British politicians have called for the camp to be closed. Could that happen?
I think that's extremely unlikely. The beauty of Sangatte for the French authorities is that it takes asylum seekers out of the centre of Calais and puts them out of sight and mind. The French government is no different from the British state in this respect--tourism is a far higher priority than the rights of refugees. Of course, a Red Cross refugee camp is preferable to sleeping on the streets of Calais, but a country as wealthy as France can afford much better than the squalor at Sangatte.

A French court recently turned down the Eurostar train company's case for the closure of the Sangatte camp. How is the British Home Office dealing with the decision?
I think Blunkett realises that the camp won't close, so he's resorting to really disgusting methods in attempting to deter refugees from coming to Britain. It's a disgrace that the French Red Cross is allowing this, but officials from the Home Office are gaining access to the camp to show videos and distribute leaflets telling asylum seekers that Britain has vouchers and detention centres, and that their lives would be even harder over here.

You were in Sangatte two days after the attacks in the US. What effect did the events have among the refugees?
Two of the largest groups of asylum seekers at Sangatte are people from Iraq and Afghanistan. People were obviously appalled by the loss of life in the US, but they were also deeply worried that their families back home would become targets for Bush's retaliation.

One guy from Iraq said he was horrified by the attacks, but that he had never seen such concern in the west for the hundreds of thousands of Iraqi victims of the US and Britain.

Desperate for work, food and shelter--these refugees face a daily battle to survive