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Calais: road blockade of port after mass evictions

Calais Migrant Solidarity | 27.09.2012 14:36 | Anti-racism | Migration | Repression

September's seen another round of mass evictions in Calais - a large African squat demolished and a lot of shelters by the port evicted and destroyed. Migrants and refugees, forced back onto the street, set up camp occupying a main road into the port in protest.

100 people block the road to the port after being evicted
100 people block the road to the port after being evicted

Riot&border police chaperone council workers putting people's stuff in the dump
Riot&border police chaperone council workers putting people's stuff in the dump

'Salam' the food distribution area before it was evicted
'Salam' the food distribution area before it was evicted

People's belongings being towed away
People's belongings being towed away

Part of the 'Lighthouse' area before it was destroyed...
Part of the 'Lighthouse' area before it was destroyed...

... and after
... and after

The latest Africa House before...
The latest Africa House before...

... the bulldoxzers move in
... the bulldoxzers move in



On Tuesday 25th September a hundred people set up camp in the streets to block the road to the port, after about 60+ people, mainly from Afghanistan, Iran, Egypt and Syria, had been evicted from sleeping in a concrete-yard where charities give out food.

At 6am border police (PAF) and riot police (CRS) came in huge numbers to evict 'Salam', an area where many people have been sleeping since the summer. Throughout the eviction police refused to let people take with them their blankets and sleeping bags, many of which had distributed two days before by Medicine du Monde. Instead they bring in council workers - in boiler suits and dust masks like they're conducting pest control - to put everything in the dump.

In protest people put up make-shift shelters and tents in the middle of a road to the port blocking traffic for the rest of the day amongst a thunder storm and flooding rain. Home-made banners were made and bits of cardboard reading “we are not criminals!” and lots of singing and chanting .

The next morning, Weds 26th, there was more evictions of shelters set up around the port, this time with a mass arrest of about 50 people. Most people were released later in the day but some have been taken to the detention centre.

Earlier this month, on 12th September, another long-standing squat was evicted. The squat was on route to the channel crossing, and from the detention centre, and had gained increasing number of people mainly from Sudan and Chad who had moved here after the mass evictions in the centre of Calais in the Spring. About 40 people were kicked out in the early hours and all their possessions taken to the town dump, although much of this has now been recovered. Soon after bulldozers moved in to destroy the place.

Calais' Mayor, Natacha Bouchart, since getting back from her summer holiday has been thrashing out threats, and not just at 'migrants' and No Borders. The Mayor has been demanding local associations and charities help evict people themselves otherwise she'll close down the area where the charities give out food altogether. A nice bit of bribery – turf out the homeless or she'll starve them out.

The land of the food distribution area is owned by the regional council who have not requested the intervention of the police to evict the place. But once again under the instruction of the Mayor mass evictions continue.

The town hall has also been regularly threatening a shut down a new space, for an internet cafe, workshops, language classes, bike maintenance etc for migrants and locals. They Mayor is obviously threatened by the idea of a safe space for undocumented people where community alliances can be made.

Despite relentless harassment and attacks on people's means of living and existence, the resistance continues... buildings that lay empty will be occupied, fences will be jumped over and surveillance systems will be evaded, friendships and alliances across borders will be made and the daily fight against the greed of this racist society will never end... until the day every person is free.

WHAT WE NEED IN CALAIS

People on the ground, particularly over the winter months

- supporting people find shelters to sleep
- documenting police and state harassment, evictions and attacks
- intervening in police abuse
- supporting people in detention or prison
- supporting demonstrations and actions
- holding workshops, language classes, bike maintenance, building stuff etc... come with ideas
- distributing tents, blankets, clothes, water, firewood

Donations

- Tents, tarpaulin, sleeping bags and blankets - we need lots of them.
- Decent clothes: jackets, jumpers, trousers, T shirts, hats, scarves, gloves, underwear, socks, men's shoes
- Books – in any and all languages especially, English, French, Italian, Arabic, Pashto, Farsi, Tigrinya, Amharic and Greek. Language dictionaries would be really really cool, and really well used. (We have many in German and Swedish already so don’t need any more!)
- Tools/bike equipment – the bike workshop space is good but could be excellent. We need tools and other equipment and as usual more bikes and trailers.
- Phone chargers and English sim cards (Lyca and O2)
- Games – card games, board games, dominoes, footballs, basketballs, etc..
- We are in DESPERATE need of cameras… We are missing so much potential footage that could be used against the police.
- Money to keep the space running and for materials: Account name: ‘Calais Migrant Solidarity’, Unity Bank, sort code: 08 60 01, Account number: 20233983, IBAN code: GB11CPBK08005150073210, Swift/BIC code: CPBKGB22.

For regular updates on the situation see  http://calaismigrantsolidarity.wordpress.com

Calais Migrant Solidarity
- e-mail: calais_solidarity@riseup.net
- Homepage: http://calaismigrantsolidarity.wordpress.com

Comments

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Useful ideas

27.09.2012 14:55

Claim asylum in France

Fuck off back to your own country

Stop sitting around waiting for somebody else to give you food and shelter

Idea giver


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@ Idea giver

27.09.2012 15:08

Top yourself, as soon as possible.

And mods, can we take this fascist shite down please?

antifash


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@ antifash

27.09.2012 15:13


The public are fed up with mass immigration. That was the message of the public petition on the Downing Street website launched last autumn.
Only 11 of the 36,000 petitions on that site have reached the 100,000 signatures required to trigger a House of Commons debate.
This petition reached that 100,000 within a week, with the resulting debate in the House of Commons today taking place. We will at last be giving voice to the widespread public concern.
Over-crowded: Figures released last week showed that, while falling slightly, net migration to the UK still stands at 216,000 a year
The fact is that the public do not believe the claims of the immigration lobby and they are right. Nor do they think that enough attention has been paid to the impact of such huge numbers on the lives of ordinary people – particularly not by the BBC.
The reality is that we are experiencing by far the largest wave of immigration for nearly 1,000 years.
Certainly, there has been some limited immigration over the centuries and many immigrants and their children have made a positive contribution to this country. But mass immigration is entirely new.
This really is the last chance saloon. If the Government were to lose its nerve and fail to press on with reform we would be saying goodbye to the country we inherited.
Unsustainable: If immigration is allowed to continue at its current rate our population will climb from 62.3 million to 70 million in just 15 years time
The Office for National Statistics recently published the immigration figures back to 1964. It is very interesting to see that, until the early 1980s, more people left Britain than came here. From then until the mid 1990s net migration was never more than about 50,000 a year, and often much less. It took off in 1998 and by 2010 had risen to 250,000 a year – five times higher than in 1997.
There has never been a declared government policy. Nor any planning. And certainly no public support - quite the opposite. By 2008, about three quarters of us wanted to see immigration reduced; half the public wanted it reduced ‘by a lot’.
Their wishes are yet to be met.
The impact of these numbers is already being felt throughout the country and the big cuts to public expenditure are still to come.
A huge job: Mark Harper has been named as the new Immigration minister after Cameron's Cabinet reshuffle. He must implement policies and challenge the crisis facing the UK
Maternity units are struggling. Primary schools are running out of places. And pressure on housing is getting worse, especially given that housing construction has plummeted.
This pressure on services is nothing when compared to what we will face if the government does not succeed in reducing future net immigration.
For the last ten years net immigration has averaged about 200,000 a year.
If that is allowed to continue our population will climb from 62.3 million to 70 million in just 15 years time. About 2.5 million of that will be natural increase – more births than deaths. The other five million will be down to new immigrants and their children.

What that means in practice is that we will have to build the equivalent of our eight major cities outside the capital – that is to say a Birmingham plus a Leeds, a Glasgow, a Sheffield, a Bradford, a Manchester, a Liverpool and a Bristol.
All this in just 15 years! Where will the money come from when the Government is already borrowing £1 for every £4 that it spends?
This is obviously unsustainable. That is why the petition, launched by MigrationWatch UK, an independent think-tank, called for the Government to take all necessary measures to stabilise our population, below 70million.

They will have to hold their nerve in the face of pressure from the immigration lobby.
Foreign students will be a test case. Of course they are valuable if they are genuine in the first place and don’t overstay their visas. But we are currently admitting a quarter of a million every year with no checks on their departure.
The Government must press on with face-to-face interviews before they come and creating some means of recording their departure. Otherwise the student route will remain a back door to Britain and the reputation of our colleges and universities will be dragged through the mud.

Somebody


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How more stupid these racists can be?

27.09.2012 15:49

Buy yourselves a brain and stop repeating the government propaganda you are absurd, you are a shame to the human race. You would had done better if you had remained monkeys.

Racists fuck off


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Look again

27.09.2012 15:55

"Buy yourselves a brain and stop repeating the government propaganda"

Not government propaganda sunshine, the overwhelming view of the British people - how very inconvenient for you.

Somebody


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Sex gangs - the result of immigration

27.09.2012 16:01

As first reported by Nick Griffin MEP way back in 2004, perverted Muslim sex gangs were able to groom, pimp and traffic girls the length and breadth of the UK for more than a decade while authorities covered their own backs and failed to publicly admit the disgusting practice was happening on a daily basis, it has been revealed.

Despite trying to send Nick to prison twice for highlighting the truth, a catalogue of police, social services and intelligence reports shows that agencies in South Yorkshire were fully aware that vulnerable girls were being abused, but a huge list of alleged crimes were not prosecuted.

In one of the cases, a young white girl was sexually abused by a Muslim gang from the age of 12 and was then atrociously offered lessons in Urdu and Punjabi by her local council after her horrendous ordeal at the hands of the vile monsters.

Rotherham Council offered the lessons to the victim, who was known by authorities to have been sexually exploited by the grooming gang, in an effort to engage her in education.

The evidence shows that authorities knew of the problem and of the offenders, mostly cowards of Pakistani culture who were sexually exploiting vulnerable girls, but neglected to acknowledge that it was happening right on their doorstep.

An expert on child welfare said the agencies' disinclination to tackle Muslim street-grooming networks was 'the biggest child protection scandal of our time'.

The documents outline several cases of sexual exploitation for which no one was prosecuted, which includes various cases such as fifty four Rotherham children being linked to sexual exploitation by three brothers from a Pakistani family, incredibly eighteen girls knew one brother as their 'boyfriend' and he was suspected of getting several of them pregnant.

A further report for the police discovered another 61 girls who were linked to sexual manipulation by three brothers from another Pakistani family. It identified 41 of the brothers' friends, who allegedly used girls for sex.

Also a 14-year-old girl was thought to have been held in a flat and forced to perform gross sex acts on four Pakistani men and an Iraqi Kurd asylum seeker who will have travelled through many safe countries to arrive in soft-touch Britain.

Another disgusting revelation found a 15-year-old girl had spent days in hospital after a broken bottle was allegedly forced inside her by two men in a park.

Among the papers is a private police intelligence report from two years ago which warned that thousands of sexual exploitation crimes are committed in South Yorkshire each year.

'Possibly the most shocking threat is the existence of substantial and organised offender networks that groom and exploit victims on a worrying scale, Practitioners throughout the force state there is a problem with networks of Asian offenders both locally and nationally’ the report states.

'This was particularly stressed in Sheffield and even more so in Rotherham, where there appears to be a significant problem with networks of Asian males exploiting young white females.'

The report states that the sordid groups of beasts are thought to have trafficked victims to other cities and towns all over the country.

Shamefully, despite knowing of the problem that young girl’s lives were at risk, another report warns against drawing too much attention to the ethnic origin of the alleged abusers!

It states: 'Great care will be taken in drafting...this report to ensure that its findings embrace Rotherham's qualities of diversity. It is imperative that suggestions of a wider cultural phenomenon are avoided.'

Rotherham MP Denis MacShane said: ‘The sexual violation and commercial exploitation of young girls by older men is a growing problem and needs far more public policy attention.

'The Rotherham police exposed, arrested and broke up an evil gang of internal traffickers who were sent to prison.
'But it is clear that the internal trafficking of barely pubescent girls is much more widespread and I regret that the police did not tell Yorkshire MPs about their inquiries.

'We need clear leadership from government to eradicate this evil.'
The problem gained notoriety in January 2011 after former Home Secretary “Heart of Straw” accused some Pakistani men of seeing white girls as 'easy meat' for sexual abuse.

He said at the time: 'There is a specific problem which involves Pakistani heritage men... who target vulnerable young white girls.
'We need to get the Pakistani community to think much more clearly about why this is going on and to be more open about the problems that are leading to a number of Pakistani heritage men thinking it is OK to target white girls in this way.'

He continued: 'These young men are in a western society, in any event, they act like any other young men, they're fizzing and popping with testosterone, they want some outlet for that, but Pakistani heritage girls are off-limits and they are expected to marry a Pakistani girl from Pakistan, typically.

'So they then seek other avenues and they see these young women, white girls who are vulnerable, some of them in care... who they think are easy meat.
'And because they're vulnerable they ply them with gifts, they give them drugs, and then of course they're trapped.'

Whilst it is acknowledged that at long last these disgusting paedophiles are now beginning to be brought to court for these heinous crimes, many, many of our young girls could have been saved if the authorities had gone after the Muslim monsters instead of orchestrating as vicious campaign to have Nick Griffin imprisoned for telling the truth.

We will continue to campaign on our streets until every last one of these cowards is languishing in prison and deported when released, or preferably hung by the neck.

BNP
- Homepage: www.bnp.org.uk/news/national/see-no-evil-hear-no-evil


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Bless your cotton socks

27.09.2012 16:03

I hope the rest of the British public are not so bonkers to believe of the construction of all these new major cities!

Racist fuck off


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Fuck the BNP

27.09.2012 16:08

You are all a bunch of paedophiles

BNP fuck off


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Can't deny it can you ?

27.09.2012 16:17

Abuse and name calling but no FACTS to dispute what has been written. The BNP tells the truth and the Left just keeps shouting in the hope that people wont hear.

BNP


one good thing about those bulldozers...

27.09.2012 17:52

if they bulldozer those old sheds, thats one less tv show with Kirstie Alsop and some other channel 4 goon, devloping an old french shed into a guesthouse, pricing the locals out of the local neighbourhood.

Bit of a shitter for the africans though.
Let them into England, we got plenty of empty houses they can squat.

oh wait thats a illegal.

cdfghdl


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