A SENIOR official with the humanitarian organisation Médecins Sans Frontière has urged the UK and France to consider doing more to absorb some of the thousands of refugees mired in “subhuman” conditions in camps in northern France.
Michaël Neuman, director of studies at MSF’s reflection centre and an advisor for MSF operations with migrants, who was last in the Calais camp some 11 days ago, made his call shortly before addressing an event at Glasgow University last night.
Photograph by Colin Mearns
The event, Médecins Sans Frontières and the European ‘Refugee Crisis’ - A Focus on Calais, came a day after French authorities demolished a makeshift church and mosque at the Jungle as part of a plan to clear a 100m (328ft) security zone around the perimeter.
MSF provides primary healthcare and shelters to the most vulnerable and has helped improve the sanitation for the five to six thousand migrants in Calais. It has also been given permission to build a new camp for 2,500 people currently stranded in appalling conditions at an informal site in Grande Synthe, near Dunkirk. This new camp, Mr Neuman said, was an “emergency measure” but would at least allow its residents to live with greater dignity.
Mr Neuman said: “Calais and Grande Synthe are both small places where people stay at night in very miserable conditions. The problems in Calais concern both the living conditions and the lack of perspective for these people who are basically stuck in the north of France.
“MSF has been providing good-quality healthcare and that has undoubtedly been useful to the migrants. We have also designed and distributed around 150 wooden shelters for families, which are much more suitable to live in than tents. But Calais and Grande Synthe are not suitable for living in in the long term, so there are limits to what can be done.
“In the last six months the French state has demonstrated a clear lack of willingness to improve people’s living conditions by keeping them in very precarious conditions and not offering them any clear viable option to get out of the camp.”
There were only up to 9,000 people in the French camps, a tiny proportion of the refugees who have made their way into Europe, he said. “The resolution for them will only come from a compromise to be found between the UK and France with regard to how best to accommodate them.
“No-one wants to stay in Calais or in Dunkirk. No-one wants a permanent camp there. People want to go to the UK. They have a project. Both London and Paris need to consider options to absorb some of these people.
“There are precedents. When the Sangatte camp was dismantled in 2002 it was done in conjunction with the UK. Some 1,200 migrants were sent to the UK.
“It is a good step that the UK is considering welcoming a few unaccompanied Syrian refugee children who are already in Europe, but that alone will not solve the wider situation. Without that type option, I think people will keep coming and being stuck in totally subhuman conditions, at the mercy of smugglers, at the mercy, sometimes, of the police, and at the mercy of some of the camps’ violent neighbours. "
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