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Before and after: an eviction in Dunkirk, Northern France

28/2/2023

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Before the eviction. A fire to keep warm under a shelter made of wood by activists and organisations. Photo Credit: Hannah Parry
On Tuesday last week, I went along as a volunteer with Roots to the waste ground just outside the port town of Dunkirk.

We refer to it as “going to camp”, but that is a generous term for a large expanse of ground, edged by a stinking ditch, with a few spindly trees here and there, and areas of spiky weeds. People have tents in different areas, trying to create a bit of privacy with tarpaulins strung between them. Piles of rubbish await being burnt for warmth as the temperatures plummet towards nighttime. 



The people staying here are people-on-the-move, numbering roughly 150 at that time. They come from countries including Iran, Iraq, Afghanistan, Syria and Sudan, all with different backgrounds and stories, different journeys behind them. Many of them will have crossed oceans already, in dangerous vessels, many of them will have been illegally pushed back to Turkiye or Libya. All of them are hoping to reach the UK - whether because of language skills, family ties, or belief that the UK will provide a warm welcome and a fresh start. 

The “camp” had two areas where different organisations were providing services. Near the gate were a group with a shower van, hot tea and snacks. Later in the day, an NGO handing out needed equipment and clothing would come by to find out what people were in need of and another with packed lunches. Another area, a 10 minute walk down a mud track, had been cleared and made into a social area. There was a covered area made of rough branches, a couple of structures from palettes and tarps which served as shops and restaurants and another that was a tea stand. This area is where Roots has showers, a water point and where we set up phone charging each day. Huge tents get unpacked an erected in just a few minutes, with a generator powering charging tables and a heater, with partner organisation No Border Medics next door providing medical care in privacy.

Living in a tent in winter is horrible. The cold, lack of hygiene and comfort are evident, but before the eviction by the French authorities, at least there was some semblance of routine and structure.

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A man sits alone on an office chair in the middle of the waste ground. Photo Credit: Hannah Parry
As we prepared to go to camp on Thursday morning, messages whizzed around. There had been an eviction, what should we do? Showing solidarity with the people and being in attendance could be useful, but getting in trouble with the authorities ourselves could jeopardise the organisation. Human Rights Observers were there, monitoring the behaviour and recording illegal and extreme actions. 


The authorities used tear gas, destroyed tents and personal belongings and used heavy machinery to tear up not only the structures of the social area, but the very ground itself to prevent rebuilding and continued activities. The shocking violence of this left a mark with us all that day. We went later in the day and offered charging and met with people. Everyone I spoke to was in shock. Some had had enough warning to gather their things, many had faced similar things before, but many agreed that the methods used by the French were worse than in other countries.

“We have no choice, we’re not going to go anywhere else, so why make it so hard?” one man from Pakistan asked, he lived near the Afghan border and had been approached by the Taliban, and was hoping to join two brothers in England.

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After the eviction. The ground ploughed up so that the showers are unuseable. The structures that provided comfort have been flattened. Photo Credit: Roots
People were relieved to be able to charge their phones, a service that Roots offers every single day. And that was part of our act of solidarity - the authorities destroy, we rebuild. Friday was spent with shovels and rakes, pick axes and two trailers, levelling and clearing ground in a new area, moving gravel to ensure it doesn’t become waterlogged and moving the showers and water points to useful places. As other organisations provided materials for people to rebuild their temporary homes, the futility of police brutality was plain to see. 


But why? That’s always the question I fail to answer.

Because of politics - France receives $75 million from the UK to keep the “problem” of asylum seekers on French soil.



Racism - Safe and legal routes were provided for people fleeing war in Ukraine. What’s the difference between that war and the one in Syria? Just the colour of the people fleeing.


Misinformation - the public is led to believe that Britain can’t afford to accept more people, yet if people were allowed to work instead of being confined to hotels or camps, there would be a lesser cost to the UK, whilst numbers of people arriving to claim asylum was higher in 2002 that it was last year.

There is no doubt in my mind - the solution to easing the hardship of people forced to flee is to provide safe and legal routes to claim asylum, as were provided for Ukrainian refugees. Let people apply, their claims processed in a timely manner, and let them work while they are waiting.

If you too think that spending huge amounts of money causing physical and emotional harm to people is wrong, please get involved. Donate to Roots, write to your MP, follow Refugee Council on social media to stay informed. Comment below with thoughts or questions.


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Roots - Volunteering in Northern France

18/2/2023

1 Comment

 
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Sometimes I struggle with identity. I’ve been lucky enough to have a huge variety of work in my life, and the travel has opened my eyes to some many different cultures, friends and issues. Once your eyes are open, it's impossible to close them again.

Living in small-town Germany, playing the church organ is pretty nice. But even though I help out remotely with the work of Are You Syrious (an advocacy and humanitarian organisation based in Croatia) I feel the need and want to do more.

So on Monday I will be joining the organisation Roots in Dunkirk, France. Roots works in an area near Dunkirk where people gather in a make-shift camp. Helen Tennyson, a frequent volunteer a Roots, and an excellent friend, wrote a Special article for Are You Syrious. Part of that article is published below.

I’m excited to travel to France on Monday. It’s a selfish excitement, I’ll get to meet new people, learn new things and have a break from my normal routine. However, I also know that the work is important, it’s easy to become numb to the news in the media, the number of people suffering becomes nothing more than figures. But every statistic represents real people and with individual stories. And those individual stories contribute to a wider, global narrative of racism, discrimination, persecution, oppression and human rights abuses.

Over the years, I’ve asked my friends and contacts to support different projects that I’ve become involved with. If you are able to, donations to Roots enable them to pay for fuel for hot showers and mobile phone charging, two things I would certainly not like to live without. Thank you.

Click here to donate.


Stand by for updates from my time there, and feel free to comment and get in touch with any questions. Here's Helen's piece giving plenty of details about Root's work, originally published on Medium here.


AYS Special: Dunkirk, France — Roots reflection on the year.

Background


Roots is a French association working in Grande Synthe, an area of northern France close to Dunkirk, providing services to people living in the informal camp located on that site. The camp used to be predominantly made up of families, largely from the Middle East, but in the last year, due to the conditions in Calais being so hostile, we have seen a lot more diversity in terms of the demographic of people staying there. The number of people in the area fluctuates, and can be anything between 300 and 1000 people, depending on the time of year and the weather.

Everyone here wants to reach the UK for one reason or another. Over the summer, for example, we found that numbers in the camp were lower because there was a long period where the sea was relatively calm, and so people were able to leave more easily. At the moment (Christmas 2022) there are about 500 people living there to whom we provide services on a daily basis.



The Environment


A few years ago, Roots was a much smaller organisation that primarily focused on recycling batteries into charging packs which were distributed by other organisations to people who needed them. We also took care of maintaining the camp area as a living space, including cleaning water points and removing litter, as well as conducting basic repairs on broken facilities there. Our work has always been environmentally influenced. Climate action is everyone’s responsibility, and so waste, and how we use and dispose of waste, is really important. We repurposed batteries, but also tables to provide charging and now we have built showers and water points out of all sorts of repurposed materials. Our main project running at the moment is to provide a constant source of water to people living in the camp.

    “All activism is linked and our work is as much linked to climate action as anything else we do.”

It is an ethical difficulty for us as an association that works environmentally to be using so much diesel driving around water. One of our goals for the next year is to buy an electric van so that our carbon emissions are lower. To fund it will be a challenge, but all activism is linked and our work is as much linked to climate action as anything else we do. Most of what we build is made from materials we have repurposed or recycled into things we can use. The containers we use to make shower cubicles and water points (they’re called intermediate bulk containers or IBCs) are donated, and our charging tables and barbershop were also built in our warehouse from other ‘waste’ materials. As much as we have grown over the last 18 months, our original ethos remains the same. We are committed to our original environmental approach, but our first and foremost aim is to maintain a standard quality of living for the people in the Grande Synthe camp.

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Photo Credit: Authorities disturbing the ground to make it unlivable. @charitableroots
Evicitions

In November 2021, there was a huge camp eviction. Small camp evictions are really common, they can occur from once a week or two, to every day. These involve police removing tents and belongings from people and clearing the area for an extended period of time, but usually people are able to return to the area later the same day. Big evictions are less common, and involve moving the whole camp to a new area, often bringing in machines to turn up the ground of the previous camp to make it uninhabitable. Evictions are the product of the “hostile environment” policy employed by governments on both sides of the Channel. They are used in an attempt to make people feel unsettled, both physically and mentally, and to stop people from making a stable life and a home where they are. They are inefficient and wasteful in every regard, and are distressing to witness, let alone be a part of.

That big eviction resulted in people being moved to a site that had no access to running water. In previous camps there had always been access to water, with water points put in by the state which we had maintained through jet washing and providing soaps and other hygiene products we had received. Since that eviction, the role of Roots has changed considerably. We responded to the situation and so built water points from repurposed IBCs and installed them in the new camp. We engineered a system with another IBC in the back of our van that could pump water from the source (about an hour and a half on foot from people’s living space) into our IBC and then into the water points we had installed. The water project has meant that Roots has undergone considerable growth since last year. We’ve been running water all day, every day, and this has given time to run other projects alongside that one. We now run charging and hot showers in conjunction with other organisations, and we are working on having new projects set up in the warehouse as well.

“Cooperation is essential to effective action and so we try to talk with people as much as we can.”

Collaborations

We work closely with other organisations to provide consistent and useful services. This includes No Border Medics, a new organisation, as well as Mobile Refugee Support, to try to tackle the scabies outbreak in camp. We combine our hot showers with the scabies treatment from the medics and a set of new clothes from MRS to try to make the treatment as effective as possible.

We also work closely with the people occupying the space so we can make sure that what we provide is useful and wanted. We have made sure that the barbershop runs alongside the showers, for example, because of people giving feedback that they would like to be able to have mirrors and shave after the showers. Cooperation is essential to effective action and so we try to talk with people as much as we can. The nature of what we do enables this, because our services run for extended periods of time making it easier to develop relationships and ask for feedback from everyone.

We work not only with people on the ground, but also with the state. Recently we have been involved in meetings with local authorities (who must remain anonymous for job security at the time of writing), to try to resolve the issue of safe water access. As an organisation, our overall goal is to not have to provide these services. It is the state’s job to fulfil its basic human rights obligations, such as providing access to water and power. At the moment, France is failing in its role as a human rights promoter, and it is actively obstructing access to water. In Calais, police have repeatedly slashed water points to stop people on the move from having access, and there have been examples of this in Grande Synthe too. A few months ago the CRS (a branch of the French police) conducted a routine eviction and slashed our central camp water point. It served no purpose other than to promote violence and fear. Our other water points remained intact, so people still had access to water, and when we replaced the water point it was not damaged again. In evictions, the destruction of other people’s property is the goal, and it is a huge waste of time, money and resources.

Violence

As an association, when it comes to evictions we are privileged. Despite the odd incident such as above, our equipment is normally neither removed, nor damaged — we are not the main target of police brutality. It is usually reserved for people living in the camp, who are continually harassed, subjected to confiscations and arrests, and forced to witness violent acts against their property (and persons) on an all too regular basis. The tactics that the police employ are oppressive and shameful. They create an atmosphere of fear and fatigue and yet do nothing to stop the flow of people coming to northern France. The play out of evictions is always the same, people are warned, they leave, the police destroy, and people resist and rebuild. It is a macabre dance that all parties seem to be trapped in, but as long as these actions continue, we will too.
There will always be violence at borders, so long as borders exist, but there will also always be those who fight for change, peace and freedom of movement for all.
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    Hannah the traveller

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