Tuesday 21 April 2009

Mass Raids In The Calais Area

Early this morning, 2 days before the French Immigration Minister Eric Besson is due in town, a major police operation took place in the Calais area that saw nearly 300 police and CRS arrest some 200 undocumented migrants.

Police surrounded one of the major migrant squatter camps, known as 'Jungles', in Calais shortly after 07.00, arresting 150 migrants in an operation that ended at 10:30. A further 33 were arrested at motorway rest stops outside the city and 11 in the nearby town of Saint Omer. Most appear to have been taken to police stations in Calais, Boulogne and Lille as well as the detention centre at Coquelles.

The arrests were allegedly "an attempt to dismantle people trafficking networks. It's an operation to destabilise the networks and try to find the smugglers," according to Calais mayor Natacha Bouchart. However, it follows a week of almost constant attacks by police on the 'Jungles' in and around Calais, that saw regular tear gassing of the migrants' squats and arrest of their occupants.

Anyone with a modicum of knowledge of the situation will realise that the traffickers would not be in the Jungles at 7 o'clock in the morning - they do not live in the Jungles and most of the occupants would be asleep anyway after a night out trying to gain access to the lorries parked-up waiting to cross the Channel. This appears merely to be more of the same intimidation tactics that the police and CRS routinely use against the migrants. Except this time it is on a larger scale, no doubt in order to impress Besson in advance of his visit to Calais.


**The will be a No Border Camp in Calais from 23-29 June, jointly organised by the UK No Borders Network and activists from Northern France, Belgium and Holland, details of which will appear here in the run-up to the camp.**

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