Yesterday saw the latest visit to Calais by French Immigration Minister Eric Besson in his on-going campaign to turn the Calais region in to a 'migrant-free zone'. Besson, a former economic adviser to the previous French Socialist President Ségolène Royal who gained his job after campaigning for the Presidency of right-winger Nicolas Sarkozy, was in Calais ostensibly to deliver a speech to the the Calais business community, also broadcast on French radio, about his latest plan to rid Calais of the 'Jungles'.
This visit had been preceded by mass arrests on Wednesday* and yesterday again saw the CRS seal of the main 'Jungle' in the scrub area near the industrial zone bordering the port. This time, rather than sending in 300 CRS, riots vans and bulldozers, they could only muster 14 cars and their attendant police officers. Others were of course busy being part of Besson's security detail, but another group were involved in the totally pointless exercise of sealing off one the areas where humanitarian groups regularly provide much needed food to the migrants, sites whose use under a long-standing agreement with the local authorities. In response, the residents of the 'Jungles' held a spontaneous demonstration demanding an end to the constant and ever-increasing levels of police harassment.
Strangely, for someone who claims he wishes to rid Northern France of the migrant 'problem', in his speech Besson outlined his desire to 'replace' the 'Jungles' by a series of 'mini' welcome centres set up along the French coast, offering food, showers, and information about how to claim asylum. At the same time, he said the French army would be sent in to permanetly raise the 'Jungles' to the ground.
This however would not 'solve' the 'problem'; all it would achieve would be to make the migrants less visible, dispersing them into smaller pockets spread around the Calais area. And needless to say, the level of police repression required to keep the migrants out of Calais and away from the port area would be much greater than they suffer at present.
On top of this Besson, just like the Calais mayor Natacha Bouchard, continues to claim that Britain is a 'soft touch' for migrants, that it should "tighten its controls, and pay a bigger share of the financial burden" whilst at the same time urging Britain to remove passport controls with France (i.e. join Schengen) so the migrants do not congregate in Calais bottleneck are allowed to cross to the UK so that the UK can deal with 'problem' instead of the French.
Clearly here is a politician thrashing around in deep and politically murky waters that threaten to overwhelm him. He is stuck in the middle of the English Channel/la Manche not knowing which way to swim; wanting to appease his political masters and play-up to the French public on one hand by appearing to 'stick it to' les Rost Bifs, whilst desperately trying not to alienate Phil Woolas, his mealy-mouthed political doppelgänger on this side of the Channel, and risk losing the chance of co-opting the British into any solution to his 'problem' that he can manage to cobble together before his political capital runs out.
Maybe he even hopes to pull of the sort of coup that Sarkozy himself pulled off in 2002, when he managed to engineer the closure of the Red Cross centre at Sangatte in return for the UK not only accepting 3/4's of the migrants housed there at the time but also footing most of the £4.9M bill for SNCF to complete the double perimeter fence around the Channel Tunnel entrance? Perhaps Besson also sees it as a route to the French Presidency too? Either way he merely resembles someone who is clearly out of his depth.
*Of the 200 or so people arrested in the mass raid on the main 'Jungle' 2 days ago, most had been released later the same day, but the 9 people known to have been held overnight have also been released. No traffickers were found during the raids, as we fully expected, and it appears that only a handful of vulnerable Afghan juveniles were successfully intimidated into signing up for return to Afghanistan.
No comments:
Post a Comment