Oh dear, il Duce Nick Griffin, in what appears to be a fit of pique after the Northern League had rebuffed his approaches on forming an EU parliamentary bloc, turned his ire and obvious ignorance of what is actually going on in the region on migrants trying to cross the Mediterranean to Europe.
"If there's measures to set up some kind of force or to help, say the Italians, set up a force which actually blocks the Mediterranean then we'd support that," Griffin told a BBC interviewer. Yet this is exactly what the Italians are doing. Having given Libya 3 patrol boats in May, pushed the Libyan navy in to conduct joint naval patrols as well as intercepting and returning around 400 migrants to Libya in last 3 months, it hardly looks as if the Italians aren't trying to block clandestine immigrants.
Maybe it's just jealousy on Griffin's part. After all Italy is fast becoming the sort of fascist wonderland that he and his neo-nazi acolytes have been dreaming of ever since they bought their first copy of Mein Kampf.
He then added, "But the only measure, sooner or later, which is going to stop immigration and stop large numbers of sub-Saharan Africans dying*... Frankly, they need to sink several of those boats." Then, after the interviewer suggested that the RU wasn't in the business of murdering people he tried to backtrack, "I didn't say anyone should be murdered at sea – I say boats should be sunk, they can throw them a life raft and they can go back to Libya".
But that is exactly what he did mean. After all, most of these boats are detected near to Lampedusa, which is 160 miles off the Libyan coast, so a life raft is hardly going to be of much use. If you can see Lampedusa 10 miles away you are hardly going to swim of paddle the 150 miles back to Africa and it's hardly likely that the Italian navy, even in the current rampantly xenophobic atmosphere, will go back to the days of letting migrants drown as was alleged to happen in the early part of this decade.
And how is he going to sink the migrants' boats other than by shelling them?
* This is a feature of the new media-savvy BNP, false concern and crocodile tears for their targets such as 'British theft of African workers leaves health care and nurses close to collapse' and "We intend to impose punitive taxation on those companies, individuals and corporations in Britain who have profited from the theft of the most skilled and essential people from the Developing World." [check out the BNP's response to the '85 Questions']
Thursday, 9 July 2009
Tuesday, 7 July 2009
The Social Housing Controversy
How can the same story throw up such different headlines? In the Mail it was 'How ten percent of state housing is taken up by immigrants', everywhere else is was some version of 'Immigrants do not get housing priority, study shows' [courtesy of that bastion of liberal thought the Telegraph]. The facts: "Only 1.8% of social tenants had moved to Britain within the past five years. Some 87.8 per cent were British-born and 10 per cent of foreigners who had been living in Britain for more than five years", to quote the Telegraph again.
Yes, the Equality and Human Rights Commission (EHRC) study, conducted by the Institute for Public Policy Research (IPPR), certainly puts a lie to Gordon Brown's idea about giving priority to 'local' people with regard to social housing uptake (even if his idea would have proved to be against current legislation).
Of course that didn't stop the BNP scrunching up their rather narrow collective foreheads as they tried to tackle the statistics and come up with a refutation of the IPPR figures. They turned directly to the original 2007 IPPR study and came to some rather stupid conclusions, needless to say.
After quoting from figures for country of birth vs. percentage living in local authority or housing association housing that show that 80% of Somalis, 49% of Turks, 41% of Bangladeshis, 39% of Ghanaians, etc. live in public housing (they leave out figures for Republic of Ireland 17= with Uganda at 17% and Italians at 10%) their piece says "Despite these figures showing clearly that immigrant groups occupy a massively disproportionate amount of public housing compared to their percentage of the population". The problem is that the figures say nothing about the actual amount living in public housing only the relative numbers of those who have qualified for it and taken it up.*
They then go on to argue, "In the 2007 IPPR report, a study was made of the immigrant groups’ percentage claims for child support. The higher the percentage, the greater the number of children". Wrong again, it is far more likely to be related to age. The migrant population constitutes a much younger population than the aging UK one and OAP's don't clain Child Benefit.**
Which brings us back to the Mail. After trying to have its cake and eat it by both showing what an appalling lot these foreigners are (occupying nearly 400,000 homes, more than 50% of whom live in London, and that 40% of those born abroad who live in the capital are living in subsidised housing i.e. roughly one million "immigrant family members" as they put it) and by laying into Brown, they have to concede that there is no queue jumping. They also take a dig at the Home Office for its dispersal policy which means that migrants awaiting a decision on the right ot remain tend to get concentrated in run-down social housing which tends to be on sink estates which tend to be the BNP's most fertile recruiting grounds. Which is of course justifies, the problem is that they use it not as a stick to beat the Home Office with but as one to beat migration and migrants in general.
* Most of the groups quoted represent only 0.1% of the total population as opposed to 89.9% of the UK-born population. Maybe they should try cross referencing the figures for actual population size (Table 4.2) with those for social housing uptake (5.13). Another obvious point they might try taking in to account is that more UK nationals will own their a home than will people recently granted leave to stay in the country (Table 5.7).
** See also the figures for average household size in Table 4.3.
Yes, the Equality and Human Rights Commission (EHRC) study, conducted by the Institute for Public Policy Research (IPPR), certainly puts a lie to Gordon Brown's idea about giving priority to 'local' people with regard to social housing uptake (even if his idea would have proved to be against current legislation).
Of course that didn't stop the BNP scrunching up their rather narrow collective foreheads as they tried to tackle the statistics and come up with a refutation of the IPPR figures. They turned directly to the original 2007 IPPR study and came to some rather stupid conclusions, needless to say.
After quoting from figures for country of birth vs. percentage living in local authority or housing association housing that show that 80% of Somalis, 49% of Turks, 41% of Bangladeshis, 39% of Ghanaians, etc. live in public housing (they leave out figures for Republic of Ireland 17= with Uganda at 17% and Italians at 10%) their piece says "Despite these figures showing clearly that immigrant groups occupy a massively disproportionate amount of public housing compared to their percentage of the population". The problem is that the figures say nothing about the actual amount living in public housing only the relative numbers of those who have qualified for it and taken it up.*
They then go on to argue, "In the 2007 IPPR report, a study was made of the immigrant groups’ percentage claims for child support. The higher the percentage, the greater the number of children". Wrong again, it is far more likely to be related to age. The migrant population constitutes a much younger population than the aging UK one and OAP's don't clain Child Benefit.**
Which brings us back to the Mail. After trying to have its cake and eat it by both showing what an appalling lot these foreigners are (occupying nearly 400,000 homes, more than 50% of whom live in London, and that 40% of those born abroad who live in the capital are living in subsidised housing i.e. roughly one million "immigrant family members" as they put it) and by laying into Brown, they have to concede that there is no queue jumping. They also take a dig at the Home Office for its dispersal policy which means that migrants awaiting a decision on the right ot remain tend to get concentrated in run-down social housing which tends to be on sink estates which tend to be the BNP's most fertile recruiting grounds. Which is of course justifies, the problem is that they use it not as a stick to beat the Home Office with but as one to beat migration and migrants in general.
* Most of the groups quoted represent only 0.1% of the total population as opposed to 89.9% of the UK-born population. Maybe they should try cross referencing the figures for actual population size (Table 4.2) with those for social housing uptake (5.13). Another obvious point they might try taking in to account is that more UK nationals will own their a home than will people recently granted leave to stay in the country (Table 5.7).
** See also the figures for average household size in Table 4.3.
A Sense Of Deja Vu
In 2002, after reams of column inches (is there a metric equivalent?) hostile to the migrants in Calais trying to cross to England and after numerous news stories quoting politicians from both countries blaming each other for the 'problem', all focusing on the IRC centre at Sangatte,* a series of mini migration summits were held in London and France. On that occasion the resulting deal between the two governments, in the guises of Sarkozy the then French Interior Minister and the Home Secretary David Blunkett, saw the French agreeing to close down Sangatte and the Brits agree to pay £5m for increased security (in the guise of the double fence around the SNCF rail facilities at the Coquelles entrance to the Channel Tunnel) and to take the lions share of the then residents at the IRC centre.
Now we have a deal between Besson and Woolas, against a backdrop of the Sarko-Brown summit in Evian, where the UK agrees to pay £15m in increased security measures (more hi-tech detection equipment) to defeat the so-called people traffickers, with France agreeing to come into line with the UK policy of joint deportation flights, despite previous French refusals to comply with this policy after hostile European Court of Human Rights decisions against such mass forced deportations.
The first policy did not result in the desired out come. there were hundreds of migrants in northern France before Sangatte and there were hundreds after Sangatte, and the new policy is doomed to fail too. The French may destroy all the Jungles as they have pledged to do, they may increase the daily repression of the migrants as has already begun, they may detain and deport every single migrant they can lay their hands on (even though this in many cases would be against EU law) but they ultimately will not stop people from coming.
However much they would like us to believe that it is the so-called 'pull factors' that draw people to risk their lives and liberty in travelling half way around the globe, often taking years to reach their preferred destination. It is the 'push factors' that western governments have to address; it is the arms trade that drives conflicts in the third World; it is the World Bank and IMF deals that sees the annexing of Third World resources or having vast infrastructure programs that they do not need forced on them, driving those countries even further into structural debt and environmental degradation; it is the international 'police actions' i.e. wars that seeks to maintain the West's security at the expense of other people's, it is the neo-colonialism that sees rich countries buying up whole tracts of Third World land to protect their own food security or to produce vast mono-cultures of out of season flowers or non-essential foodstuffs like tea and coffee. Not to mention the ravages of global warming that is already severely disrupting weather patterns in Africa and Asia and will continue to drive mass migration beyond the problems that at present remain internal to those continents.
These are the factors that force people from the relative safety of their homelands and onto the road to an unknown and far from safe future, not the glossy synthetic worlds of Hollywood and the BBC. People traffickers have not created this problem as the yellow press like to think, the people traffickers (like all good capitalists) merely exploit a situation where migrants are only judged by the value they can bring to the countries that deign to let them enter these promised lands.
* The French Interior Ministry invited the Red Cross to open the centre in an attempt to make the migrants less visible, by moving them out of Calais itself, and basically passed the buck on to the IRC, thereby avoiding having to deal with what was an obvious humanitarian crisis and allowing the government to effectively carry out a blanket denial of refugees status to the migrants without actually having to process any asylum applications from them.
Now we have a deal between Besson and Woolas, against a backdrop of the Sarko-Brown summit in Evian, where the UK agrees to pay £15m in increased security measures (more hi-tech detection equipment) to defeat the so-called people traffickers, with France agreeing to come into line with the UK policy of joint deportation flights, despite previous French refusals to comply with this policy after hostile European Court of Human Rights decisions against such mass forced deportations.
The first policy did not result in the desired out come. there were hundreds of migrants in northern France before Sangatte and there were hundreds after Sangatte, and the new policy is doomed to fail too. The French may destroy all the Jungles as they have pledged to do, they may increase the daily repression of the migrants as has already begun, they may detain and deport every single migrant they can lay their hands on (even though this in many cases would be against EU law) but they ultimately will not stop people from coming.
However much they would like us to believe that it is the so-called 'pull factors' that draw people to risk their lives and liberty in travelling half way around the globe, often taking years to reach their preferred destination. It is the 'push factors' that western governments have to address; it is the arms trade that drives conflicts in the third World; it is the World Bank and IMF deals that sees the annexing of Third World resources or having vast infrastructure programs that they do not need forced on them, driving those countries even further into structural debt and environmental degradation; it is the international 'police actions' i.e. wars that seeks to maintain the West's security at the expense of other people's, it is the neo-colonialism that sees rich countries buying up whole tracts of Third World land to protect their own food security or to produce vast mono-cultures of out of season flowers or non-essential foodstuffs like tea and coffee. Not to mention the ravages of global warming that is already severely disrupting weather patterns in Africa and Asia and will continue to drive mass migration beyond the problems that at present remain internal to those continents.
These are the factors that force people from the relative safety of their homelands and onto the road to an unknown and far from safe future, not the glossy synthetic worlds of Hollywood and the BBC. People traffickers have not created this problem as the yellow press like to think, the people traffickers (like all good capitalists) merely exploit a situation where migrants are only judged by the value they can bring to the countries that deign to let them enter these promised lands.
* The French Interior Ministry invited the Red Cross to open the centre in an attempt to make the migrants less visible, by moving them out of Calais itself, and basically passed the buck on to the IRC, thereby avoiding having to deal with what was an obvious humanitarian crisis and allowing the government to effectively carry out a blanket denial of refugees status to the migrants without actually having to process any asylum applications from them.
Monday, 6 July 2009
Strange Times?
Well it's nice to know that the UNHCR, by opening a new office in Calais, has done a major service for the estimated 2,000 plus migrants in Northern France by highlighting their plight. Never let it be said that lazy journalism and old news can't be useful, even if it ignores months of effort on the part of hundreds of No Borders activists in organising the Calais No Border Camp - after all the mobilisation of 3,000 police and the imposition of a near curfew in Calais itself to quell a non-existent rebellion is was so obviously a non-event.
The facts: the UNHCR had been working with France Terre d'Asile in Calais for a month and they also decided to open an office in the town, a fact that had already been press released this earlier this month. In that time had only persuaded 17% of the 120 migrants they had seen take up their offer to help them start asylum applications to remain in France.
Hardly major news! So why have the British news papers started devoting their column inches to stories from the 'Jungle'? [1, 2, 3] Why suddenly stories about English speakers who worked for the military in Afghanistan but who have had to flee Taliban threats when the military abandoned when their services were no longer needed; about 15 year olds who fled the same country when they refused to be suicide bombers and their families sold their house to pay for the smugglers' fee to get him to safety in the UK? These migrants' stories have been there waiting to be 'discovered' for years. Why now?
Clearly it couldn't be that there had just been No Border Camp in the area, a fact that was largely ignored except for whatever sensationalist copy could be wrung from it*. What is it that has got journalists engaging with what is really going on in and around Calais and why are they beginning to write stories that do not conform to their usual yellow press agenda? Even the Telegraph, one of the paper that managed a fantasy story about the Calais Camp's Saturday demonstration ending in a riot**, has finally gotten in on the act by publishing a story entitled 'Migrants are going to Britain, come hell or high water' has allowed a glimpse of the reality of situation to creep on to its pages. That said there is the usual rubbish about people wanting "to go to England because the people smugglers tell them it is a beautiful place" (this courtesy of a UNHCR spokeswoman). Strange times indeed.
* The Mail printed 3 stories in the week leading up to and during the camp, with the Sun chipping in with 2.
** When nothing happen during the Saturday march, they left the field to the Telegraph (1) and the Express (2) to invent tales of riots and "British tourists (being) caught up in the violence". [see Camp website for coverage]
The facts: the UNHCR had been working with France Terre d'Asile in Calais for a month and they also decided to open an office in the town, a fact that had already been press released this earlier this month. In that time had only persuaded 17% of the 120 migrants they had seen take up their offer to help them start asylum applications to remain in France.
Hardly major news! So why have the British news papers started devoting their column inches to stories from the 'Jungle'? [1, 2, 3] Why suddenly stories about English speakers who worked for the military in Afghanistan but who have had to flee Taliban threats when the military abandoned when their services were no longer needed; about 15 year olds who fled the same country when they refused to be suicide bombers and their families sold their house to pay for the smugglers' fee to get him to safety in the UK? These migrants' stories have been there waiting to be 'discovered' for years. Why now?
Clearly it couldn't be that there had just been No Border Camp in the area, a fact that was largely ignored except for whatever sensationalist copy could be wrung from it*. What is it that has got journalists engaging with what is really going on in and around Calais and why are they beginning to write stories that do not conform to their usual yellow press agenda? Even the Telegraph, one of the paper that managed a fantasy story about the Calais Camp's Saturday demonstration ending in a riot**, has finally gotten in on the act by publishing a story entitled 'Migrants are going to Britain, come hell or high water' has allowed a glimpse of the reality of situation to creep on to its pages. That said there is the usual rubbish about people wanting "to go to England because the people smugglers tell them it is a beautiful place" (this courtesy of a UNHCR spokeswoman). Strange times indeed.
* The Mail printed 3 stories in the week leading up to and during the camp, with the Sun chipping in with 2.
** When nothing happen during the Saturday march, they left the field to the Telegraph (1) and the Express (2) to invent tales of riots and "British tourists (being) caught up in the violence". [see Camp website for coverage]
Friday, 3 July 2009
Italy Approves New Anti-Immigration Bill
Yesterday the Italian Senate gave final approval to legislation allowing unarmed citizen patrols and creates tough measures aimed at fighting 'illegal' immigration. The legislation, already passed by the Chamber of Deputies, makes entering or staying in Italy without permission a crime punishable by a fine of €5,000-€10,000 and lengthens the amount of time migrants can officially spend in detention from two to six months.
The new law, which even the Vatican has condemned, also creates an offence of knowingly renting housing to an 'illegal' immigrant at the time a lease is signed or extended punishable by up to three years in prison. It also makes it a imprisonable offence to force children to beg, a measure obviously targeted at gypsies and Roma people. And to top it all off it officially sanctions mayors to form unarmed vigilante patrols ostensibly to help police and soldiers fight crime on the streets but the provisions have widely been flagged up as 'anti-foreigner' patrols - back to the days of the Black Shirts it would seem.
This comes a day after another boat holding 89 migrants, including nine women and three children, had been intercepted 30 miles off the island of Lampedusa when their boat got into trouble and they activated a distress signal. An Italian naval vessel transferred the migrants to an oil platform near the Libyan coast late Tuesday before being handed over to the Libyan navy.
As part of a pact concluded earlier this year Libya agreed to curb the number of migrant boats leaving its shores for Europe, to take back migrants picked up by European navies in the Mediterranean and to hold joint naval patrols with Italy. This policy has resulted in a sharp drop in the numbers of migrants making it to Malta and Lampedusa, the 2 main landfalls for migrants sailing from Libya. For example, during April and May only two vessels carrying a total of 99 migrants arrived at Malta compared to 872 African migrants in the same period in 2008. In Lampedusa arrivals have declined 33 per cent and 95 per cent in April and May respectively, compared to the same period in 2008, according to UNHCR figures.
The new law, which even the Vatican has condemned, also creates an offence of knowingly renting housing to an 'illegal' immigrant at the time a lease is signed or extended punishable by up to three years in prison. It also makes it a imprisonable offence to force children to beg, a measure obviously targeted at gypsies and Roma people. And to top it all off it officially sanctions mayors to form unarmed vigilante patrols ostensibly to help police and soldiers fight crime on the streets but the provisions have widely been flagged up as 'anti-foreigner' patrols - back to the days of the Black Shirts it would seem.
This comes a day after another boat holding 89 migrants, including nine women and three children, had been intercepted 30 miles off the island of Lampedusa when their boat got into trouble and they activated a distress signal. An Italian naval vessel transferred the migrants to an oil platform near the Libyan coast late Tuesday before being handed over to the Libyan navy.
As part of a pact concluded earlier this year Libya agreed to curb the number of migrant boats leaving its shores for Europe, to take back migrants picked up by European navies in the Mediterranean and to hold joint naval patrols with Italy. This policy has resulted in a sharp drop in the numbers of migrants making it to Malta and Lampedusa, the 2 main landfalls for migrants sailing from Libya. For example, during April and May only two vessels carrying a total of 99 migrants arrived at Malta compared to 872 African migrants in the same period in 2008. In Lampedusa arrivals have declined 33 per cent and 95 per cent in April and May respectively, compared to the same period in 2008, according to UNHCR figures.
Wednesday, 1 July 2009
UNHCR Returns To Calais
In a move that appears to herald the agency taking on the role of the 'good cop' to the International Organisation for Migration's 'bad cop', the United Nations Refugee Agency (UNHCR) has announced that it is formally establishing a full-time office in Calais. The UNHCR had previously operated in the Calais area when the Sangatte Red Cross centre was open and had returned in June to work alongside France Terre d'Asile, a French migrant support organisation working allowed to work in detention centres.
Part of their new remit seems to be to take over the propaganda program that the IOM had been operating recently, painting as dark a picture of the chances of the migrants getting to the UK, and of getting a job and surviving here, even if they managed to get across the Channel. This would then allow the IOM to pursue their main task, offering migrants financial inducements to get them to return to their country of origin. However the way this operates often leaves no real alternative for the migrants other than accepting the offer as the IOM work in the French detention centres, and if their offer is not accepted the migrants are deported anyway.
Part of their new remit seems to be to take over the propaganda program that the IOM had been operating recently, painting as dark a picture of the chances of the migrants getting to the UK, and of getting a job and surviving here, even if they managed to get across the Channel. This would then allow the IOM to pursue their main task, offering migrants financial inducements to get them to return to their country of origin. However the way this operates often leaves no real alternative for the migrants other than accepting the offer as the IOM work in the French detention centres, and if their offer is not accepted the migrants are deported anyway.
Tuesday, 30 June 2009
Calais: Whither The Apocalypse?
Well, civilisation as we know it failed to end during last week's No Border Camp in Calais. No riots occurred, no fences at the entrance to the Channel Tunnel were torn down, no hotels were set on fire, no babies were found with their heads bitten off. In fact nothing much happened to disturb the tranquillity of the town whatsoever, unless you include the antics of the local authorities, the police and the press.
During the build-up to the Camp the police, judiciary, town and regional authorities had, to varying degrees, sought to create an atmosphere of fear and trepidation. Initially they chose to ignore us, not returning phone calls and cancelling meetings. Then, when they realised we were not going to go away, they started to brief against us, co-opting the press into what moved from being a campaign of disinformation to one of vilification. There were constant media enquiries as to whether we had any 'violence' planned, whether we expected the 'black-block' to 'infiltrate' the protests, etc. (see previous posts).
And they then started to believe their own propaganda, planning for a massive police operation to combat what they now believed would be mass civil insurrection. Additional CRS companies were ordered into the area; new summary orders were passed banning the sale of petrol, gas canisters and knives; temporary laws banning the wearing of masks and hoodies and gatherings of 5 or more people were introduced.
So what happened to all the 'terrorists'? Well their were certainly plenty on the streets. Many were gathered at road blocks and in groups armed with riot gear and dressed in the dark blue uniform, others were charging around in groups of 4 in unmarked BAC (Brigade Anti-Criminalité - the cowboys who patrol les Banlieues) cars. All were terrorising the locals as the No Border campers alike.
The police briefed the media that there were up to 3,000 of them in the area and, given that they outnumbered the 500 at most on the Camp site 2 to 1 (assuming they ran 3 eight hour shifts), they had little else to do apart from the constant harassment of the stopping and searching of anyone who vaguely looked like they might be involved with the Camp.
In fact, there was little or no Freedom of Movement in Calais through out their presence. Someone from the Camp were even stopped, beaten up, handcuffed and thrown into the back of a van whilst going to buy loo rolls. He was told "we're not your English bobbies!" and only got away without further injury because the cops were 10 minutes from the end of their shift and just let him go.
Much was made in the UK press, well the Mail and the Sun, of the arrests made during the week. The full count is not in yet but, apart from the arrests from the blockade of the detention centre at Lille (26 detained, 15 released after 24 hours & charged with organising an unapproved demo; others refuse to give fingerprints and held for 35 hours without water, access to a doctor or vegetarian food, abused and forced to sleep on the floor) and the one woman caught shoplifting, almost all stem from the temporary legal orders brought in before the camp.
Twenty people were arrested for handing out copies of the camp newspaper, Nomade, in the centre of town on Boulevard Lafayette. Startled onlookers watched as dozens of CRS and BAC officers arrived within seconds of the leafleting beginning. All were handcuffed, some after being wrestled to the floor, and arrested for an 'unauthorised demonstration'. They were kept for hours in custody and 2 face additional charges of 'insubordination' i.e. being rude to the police. (Activists were also told by the police that there was an unofficial ban on them downtown as well.)
The rest were for possession of camping equipment (camping knifes, tent poles, mallets for tent pegs, machette for chopping fire wood), the possession of hoodies (hooded jackets including waterproof cagoules and scarves were routinely confiscated) or banners (banners and banner poles were also confiscated). One person was arrested for possession of petanque balls (the banning of boules games!
Of the 'outrages' expected by the authorities, the only thing approaching that was on Friday evening when a small number of activists temporarily blocked the A15 motorway down into the Docks. The police responded by firing tear gas at the handful of protesters and smoke grenades into the camp site. The CRS however managed to block the motorway with their vans for nearly an hour! And that was it.
On Saturday the police were at their most unhelpful. At first they tries to stop and search all 500 people making their way from the Camp to the start of the big demonstration at the Lighthouse. They confiscated a few jackets and scarves and even tried scanning peoples' SIM cards in an info trawl but this was stopped when camp lawyers got in touch with the sub-prefecture (people detained by the police also said that all videos and photos on phones and cameras seized even though it's illegal).
Eventually they realised there were too few of them to achieve this and gave up on the idea. But rather than allowing the group to make their way directly to the Lighthouse (a half hour walk at most), the CRS constantly blocked the route and it ended up taking nearly 3 hours to get there. Fortunately the March had waited for the Camp to arrive, and it set off at 12:15 on the route eventually negotiated between local trades unions and the Calais sub-prefect (the original route to the Coquelles CRE was redundant as it had been emptied of migrants and the authorities had refused to negotiate with No Borders).
Ranged against the 2,000 or so people on the demonstration was a helicopter, water cannon at the port entrance, mobile fences blocking off the side roads, police armed with automatic weapons, smoke & tear gas grenades, rubber bullets and body armour; and that was just the plain clothes BAC, never mind the CRS who probably outnumbered the demonstrators just by themselves.
Needless to say, the march (just like the Camp itself) past of peacefully (even more peacefully as there were NO arrests*). The only disturbances were to the cops' macho demeanour when they were faced by the Rebel Clown Army, a force never before witnessed on the streets of Calais.
All in all, the Calais survived the police occupation force though it did put a dampener on Camp activities (and Camp numbers as a number of activists were scared away by the thought of constant harassment if not the cracked heads that had been promised by some of the Lille CRS). Many migrants preferred not to run the gauntlet of police around the Camp, though those that did enjoyed participating in the Camp; the food, the films, the free internet access and especially the chance to play football - the cops always break up any football game the migrants normally try to hold.
The other thing all the migrants enjoyed for the duration of the Camp, even those that didn't make it there, was the fact that the cops were all too busy harassing the Camp (and the Calaisiens who looked like they might have anything to do with the camp) to bother with them for the week. But no doubt they can expect to be regularly tear-gassed, beaten, arrested and have the 'Jungles' and their few meagre possessions destroyed now the Camp has gone.
*That didn't stop the Telegraph on Saturday and the Sunday Express claiming, respectively, that there were "brawls" when "2,000 demonstrators were met by a similar number of French riot squad officers, who deployed tear gas in efforts to disperse troublemakers" and "protest in support of illegal migrants trying to get into Britain turned violent yesterday" under the title Riot at Migrant Protest.
During the build-up to the Camp the police, judiciary, town and regional authorities had, to varying degrees, sought to create an atmosphere of fear and trepidation. Initially they chose to ignore us, not returning phone calls and cancelling meetings. Then, when they realised we were not going to go away, they started to brief against us, co-opting the press into what moved from being a campaign of disinformation to one of vilification. There were constant media enquiries as to whether we had any 'violence' planned, whether we expected the 'black-block' to 'infiltrate' the protests, etc. (see previous posts).
And they then started to believe their own propaganda, planning for a massive police operation to combat what they now believed would be mass civil insurrection. Additional CRS companies were ordered into the area; new summary orders were passed banning the sale of petrol, gas canisters and knives; temporary laws banning the wearing of masks and hoodies and gatherings of 5 or more people were introduced.
So what happened to all the 'terrorists'? Well their were certainly plenty on the streets. Many were gathered at road blocks and in groups armed with riot gear and dressed in the dark blue uniform, others were charging around in groups of 4 in unmarked BAC (Brigade Anti-Criminalité - the cowboys who patrol les Banlieues) cars. All were terrorising the locals as the No Border campers alike.
The police briefed the media that there were up to 3,000 of them in the area and, given that they outnumbered the 500 at most on the Camp site 2 to 1 (assuming they ran 3 eight hour shifts), they had little else to do apart from the constant harassment of the stopping and searching of anyone who vaguely looked like they might be involved with the Camp.
In fact, there was little or no Freedom of Movement in Calais through out their presence. Someone from the Camp were even stopped, beaten up, handcuffed and thrown into the back of a van whilst going to buy loo rolls. He was told "we're not your English bobbies!" and only got away without further injury because the cops were 10 minutes from the end of their shift and just let him go.
Much was made in the UK press, well the Mail and the Sun, of the arrests made during the week. The full count is not in yet but, apart from the arrests from the blockade of the detention centre at Lille (26 detained, 15 released after 24 hours & charged with organising an unapproved demo; others refuse to give fingerprints and held for 35 hours without water, access to a doctor or vegetarian food, abused and forced to sleep on the floor) and the one woman caught shoplifting, almost all stem from the temporary legal orders brought in before the camp.
Twenty people were arrested for handing out copies of the camp newspaper, Nomade, in the centre of town on Boulevard Lafayette. Startled onlookers watched as dozens of CRS and BAC officers arrived within seconds of the leafleting beginning. All were handcuffed, some after being wrestled to the floor, and arrested for an 'unauthorised demonstration'. They were kept for hours in custody and 2 face additional charges of 'insubordination' i.e. being rude to the police. (Activists were also told by the police that there was an unofficial ban on them downtown as well.)
The rest were for possession of camping equipment (camping knifes, tent poles, mallets for tent pegs, machette for chopping fire wood), the possession of hoodies (hooded jackets including waterproof cagoules and scarves were routinely confiscated) or banners (banners and banner poles were also confiscated). One person was arrested for possession of petanque balls (the banning of boules games!
Of the 'outrages' expected by the authorities, the only thing approaching that was on Friday evening when a small number of activists temporarily blocked the A15 motorway down into the Docks. The police responded by firing tear gas at the handful of protesters and smoke grenades into the camp site. The CRS however managed to block the motorway with their vans for nearly an hour! And that was it.
On Saturday the police were at their most unhelpful. At first they tries to stop and search all 500 people making their way from the Camp to the start of the big demonstration at the Lighthouse. They confiscated a few jackets and scarves and even tried scanning peoples' SIM cards in an info trawl but this was stopped when camp lawyers got in touch with the sub-prefecture (people detained by the police also said that all videos and photos on phones and cameras seized even though it's illegal).
Eventually they realised there were too few of them to achieve this and gave up on the idea. But rather than allowing the group to make their way directly to the Lighthouse (a half hour walk at most), the CRS constantly blocked the route and it ended up taking nearly 3 hours to get there. Fortunately the March had waited for the Camp to arrive, and it set off at 12:15 on the route eventually negotiated between local trades unions and the Calais sub-prefect (the original route to the Coquelles CRE was redundant as it had been emptied of migrants and the authorities had refused to negotiate with No Borders).
Ranged against the 2,000 or so people on the demonstration was a helicopter, water cannon at the port entrance, mobile fences blocking off the side roads, police armed with automatic weapons, smoke & tear gas grenades, rubber bullets and body armour; and that was just the plain clothes BAC, never mind the CRS who probably outnumbered the demonstrators just by themselves.
Needless to say, the march (just like the Camp itself) past of peacefully (even more peacefully as there were NO arrests*). The only disturbances were to the cops' macho demeanour when they were faced by the Rebel Clown Army, a force never before witnessed on the streets of Calais.
All in all, the Calais survived the police occupation force though it did put a dampener on Camp activities (and Camp numbers as a number of activists were scared away by the thought of constant harassment if not the cracked heads that had been promised by some of the Lille CRS). Many migrants preferred not to run the gauntlet of police around the Camp, though those that did enjoyed participating in the Camp; the food, the films, the free internet access and especially the chance to play football - the cops always break up any football game the migrants normally try to hold.
The other thing all the migrants enjoyed for the duration of the Camp, even those that didn't make it there, was the fact that the cops were all too busy harassing the Camp (and the Calaisiens who looked like they might have anything to do with the camp) to bother with them for the week. But no doubt they can expect to be regularly tear-gassed, beaten, arrested and have the 'Jungles' and their few meagre possessions destroyed now the Camp has gone.
*That didn't stop the Telegraph on Saturday and the Sunday Express claiming, respectively, that there were "brawls" when "2,000 demonstrators were met by a similar number of French riot squad officers, who deployed tear gas in efforts to disperse troublemakers" and "protest in support of illegal migrants trying to get into Britain turned violent yesterday" under the title Riot at Migrant Protest.
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