“It’s infinitely worse compared to the jungle dismantled in 2016”, described Saturday, October 23 on franceinfo Claire Millot of the Salam association which helps migrants in Calais, five years after the dismantling of the famous jungle in October 2016. “The jungle was a castle compared to today”, she explains, speaking of a situation “inhuman”.

franceinfo: Five years later, what is the situation there?

Claire Millot: When you think of the great Calais jungle that was dismantled in 2016, in comparison it was a castle compared to what exists today. Currently, there are only tents and tarpaulins which are dismantled systematically and practically every day. The state authorities decided not to leave in that place. And every day the gendarmes come with a cleaning team, collect the survival equipment and take people out. It is infinitely worse compared to the jungle dismantled in 2016. It is terrible. The Calais jungle was not really a jungle, but rather a slum. There were shelters built with pallets and pieces of wood. People could stand, they could tinker with heating systems and scavenge old furniture. Currently, it is not even a slum, it is really a jungle and not even complete. People don’t even sleep with a tent, not even with a tarp.

“There are a lot of people sleeping outside with nothing on them, and they are starting to get wet, it is starting to get cold, we have just wiped the storm Aurore. It is a choice which is terrible.”

Claire Millot

to franceinfo

In a report published in early October, the Humans Rights Watch association denounced the state’s deterrence policy which subjects migrants to “daily humiliation and harassment”. Is that what you are describing?

That’s quite right. That is to say, state policy is “no fixing point”. It is applied to the letter in a way that is completely inhuman. This is something that is awful because we completely forget, in a situation like this, that they are all the same people. I think of the people who make these decisions. Has Monsieur Darmanin, the prefect Le Franc, ever spent a night out with nothing? We believe that there are close to 2,000 people sleeping outside on site at the moment. Do we really have to do this? Do we really have to make things inhuman? The only possible choice is to welcome them properly. We must offer them a situation where they are accommodated, where they can calmly reflect on whether they really want to go to England or whether they should not seek asylum in France with the right to work quickly. They must be treated like people. I feel like I’m rambling on a bit, but it’s my obsession. These are people like us, people who are cold at night, who are wet, who are hungry if they have no food, who are thirsty if they do not have to drink, who need to drink. wash.

In these conditions, in what way do associations not belong to they still manage to work, to help these migrants on a daily basis?

We continue. We have people who are cold and hungry. We do our best to ensure that everyone has something to eat every day. We still manage to collect blankets, we regularly distribute blankets saying “whatever we can do, the little bit we can do, we do it”. We distribute breakfast every morning and try to find a hot drink for everyone. It must be said that these are people like you and me. These are people who fled the war, who suffered a dictatorship. These people have to be found a place. We brought in Afghans because the Taliban took power in Afghanistan. But the Afghans who have been there for a few months, then they are entitled to nothing. There are also Eritreans, who fled an absolutely appalling dictatorship. There are Syrians, everyone in France knows about their civil war. I’m not talking about Iran or Iraq, because it’s much more complicated depending on the location. All these people did not leave for nothing. You don’t leave your country like that on a whim, saying to yourself “here, I’m going to look elsewhere”. If we leave our family, this country whose language we speak, in which we have a job or in which we study, for a country where we do not speak the language fluently, it is good that we are forced to do so. And that is a really terrible choice.