Migrants: situation blocked in Calais, “we are waiting for political courage”, call for hunger strikers
The situation is bogged down in Calais. The mediator sent on a mission by the government, Didier Leschi, director of the French Office for Immigration and Integration (OFII), “does not provide solutions” for migrants, lamented Thursday evening the priest and the two activists hunger strikers, demanding an “urgent response to the crisis before Monday, end of the winter truce”. “He was sent as a technician and does not provide a solution to our demands, which are in priority the stopping of evictions” from the camps, declared Thursday evening Ludovic Holbein, one of these strikers, during a press point in front of the Saint-Pierre church in Calais.
“We cannot wait, we need an urgent response before the start of the winter period on Monday. The 1,500 exiles who are in Calais cannot wait, ”he insisted, alongside the two other strikers, Philippe Demeestère, a 72-year-old Catholic Relief chaplain, and Anaïs Vogel, another activist.
All three assured Thursday evening that they would continue their fast. “We are waiting for political courage,” they said, regretting the “electoralist” objective of sending the mediator by the government. According to witnesses, they appear tired after three weeks of fasting.
“It obviously lacks humanity, but also logic”
On site for two days, Didier Leschi met them twice on Wednesday and Thursday. After qualifying their first discussion as “fruitful”, he suggested at midday on Thursday, after a meeting with several associations in the field, to work better “upstream” of the dismantling of camps in order to “improve the updates. “Shelter for exiles”.
“With the associations that I started to examine this Thursday morning, on the solutions and measures that could be considered,” he explained. He proposed to carry out a social diagnosis of the populations, but also to formulate accommodation and shelter proposals, before the camps are dismantled. It also plans to warn migrants upstream, so that they can collect their personal belongings and their tents, which makes it possible to obtain the new equipment return procedures that the competent authorities are putting in place.
In a joint statement, 150 associations joined Tuesday in the demands of activists in Calais. “We can clearly see the difference between a tent abandoned for a month and a tent abandoned for a quarter of an hour, but they do not, blows Pierre Roques of the association L’Auberge des migrants. They throw away without blinking medical prescriptions, phones, clothes… All this so as not to create a point of fixation. It lacks humanity obviously, but also logic, because it is far from solving the problem. According to local associations, the situation of some 1,500 migrants present in Calais is inhuman, with evictions from their camps several times a week, and the confiscation of their tents and their personal effects.