3 Mental Images From Calais: Hope, Hate and Happiness

http://www.nytimes.com/2016/10/28/insider/3-mental-images-from-calais-hope-hate-and-happiness.html

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Times Insider delivers behind-the-scenes insights into how news, features and opinion come together at The New York Times. In this piece, Adam Nossiter, a Times Paris correspondent, looks back on the week when the French government finally demolished the “Jungle” camp, the “vast, frigid no-man’s land” where thousands of African and Afghan refugees had slept in filth for months.

Three images stand out for me from the week when France’s migrant crisis came to a head: images of hope, hate and happiness.

Monday was D-Day for the giant “Jungle” migrant camp outside Calais, a grim warren of tents, mud, trash and misery. The French government had finally decided to demolish it after months of inertia.

When I went back to the “Jungle” for Monday’s endgame, it was my fifth visit there over the last year. Life in the Jungle, if you can call it that, was a continuous assault on human dignity: thousands of Africans and Afghans, packed into small tents, sleeping in filth on a vast, frigid no-man’s land outside town. The migrants would tell me it was so terrible that, had they known, they never would have left Sudan, Eritrea or Afghanistan.

Europe, in short, was not what they had imagined. And these are people — young men mostly, but some teenagers and children — who had taken the most arduous, death-defying journey imaginable to get there. The youngsters I interviewed were suffering in the Jungle too, but they didn’t complain. They were tough beyond their years.

When I got to the camp early Monday morning, before daybreak, a long line of hundreds of migrants had already filled the industrial road leading from the camp. They were waiting in darkness and cold to get on the buses the French government had sent in to disperse them all over the country. That told me something about how eager the migrants were to get out of there.

I was to see more of that. When I walked up the road and into the rapidly emptying Jungle, young men were almost literally running to leave, pushing or pulling donated suitcases, moving at such a clip it was hard to keep up. “Jungle is finished!” some of the young Eritreans shouted — joyfully, it seemed to me.

Later that day I was in one of the dozens of French towns the migrants — in this case 31 young Sudanese men — were being sent to: the village of Croisilles, lost in the countryside 80 miles south of Calais, in the fields of French Flanders.

When I walked into the former retirement home that was to temporarily house these migrants, I saw what I had never seen in the Jungle: Their faces were lit up with smiles. They were laughing, and the volunteers — generous people from the village who had come out to help — were interacting happily with them. You could see that as much as the radically transformed physical circumstances, these first acts of kindness from ordinary French people, after months of the cold shoulder and worse from French authorities and police, had overwhelmed the young men.

Outside the home, it was a different story: Angry demonstrators had gathered, shouting “Migrants out!” and declaiming about the supposed threat the new arrivals posed. There were about 100 of them, and they were afraid. I began questioning a demonstrator and he replied, “I never talk to the media because it is all controlled by Israel!” That gives you an idea of the tone. People muttered about rapists and pickpockets. The mayor insisted the demonstrators were not representative, but other townspeople said they were.

Inside and outside, two different pictures. By the next morning, though, everything was quiet in the little town. And I have a feeling that Croisilles, like the many other places in France that have suddenly come face-to-face with Europe’s migrant crisis, will get used to it.