in Calais, the worst anti-migrant devices rewarded in a satirical prize list
This first “Barbed wire awards” ceremony was organized by some forty associations, including Emmaüs, the Abbé Pierre foundation and Médecins du monde, to make fun of the “hypocrisy, absurdity and inhumanity” of ” unprecedented repressive arsenal” deployed on the Franco-British border.
“Golden barbed wire” to police violence
The prizes were awarded in a cinema in Calais, in the presence of association activists, as well as some exiles and inhabitants of this city whose urban landscape is marked by the walls, fences and barbed wire imposed in recent years. They presented a “Golden Barbed Wire” to police brutality, epitomized by the case of Bhrané, an Eritrean who had his jaw fractured and his skull uprooted by a tense LBD40 shot in the face on November 11, 2020. He was hospitalized for two months in Lille, according to the organisers. Bhrané filed a complaint, but there was no follow-up, and he has since been deported to the Netherlands, where he had already been denied the right to asylum, indicated the Legal Cabane, Calais association of access to rights.
In the “tableware” category, the 20 successive prefectural orders issued since September 2020 to ban the distribution of foodstuffs in certain areas of the coast were awarded. Other measures, including the destruction of forests, the closure of beaches, the installation of bicycle hoops under bridges and rocks around a disused supermarket to prevent setting up tents there, were in the running. After thanking the Minister of the Interior Gérald Darmanin for his “ingenuity”, the participants symbolically handed over the awards to the town hall of Calais.
“Brotherhood Challenge”
About a thousand migrants live around Calais, in temporary camps from which they are expelled very regularly to avoid the reconstitution of a slum.
The president of Secours Catholique, Véronique Devise, called for “the immediate cessation of the sterile policy of fighting against fixation points, and the establishment of migrant houses on the coast”. “The challenge of fraternity can be taken up: the unprecedented surge of solidarity of the French for the benefit of the Ukrainians […] is proof of this,” she underlined, preserving the hope that “welcoming Ukrainians opens the way to welcoming all other exiles”.
At least 348 people have died at the border over the past 20 years, including five since the start of this year.