The Migrant Diaries. Lynne Jones

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      I leave them to their assessment and head across the camp. The Jungle has changed dramatically in the last four days. The information centre is now a roofed and plastic-covered solid structure. MSF have cobbled the muddiest roads and cleaned some of the toilets. There is a whole batch of new caravans and new structures. Outside the Dome, a truck is distributing long thin pieces of wood, and a large number of refugees of all ethnicities are engaged in building simple shelters. Inside the Dome, another music session is going on. An Afghan sings and drums with astonishing beauty, while another plays guitar. Meanwhile, Sudanese boys sit clapping as one of them walks across shyly, picks up another drum, and joins in. Once again, I am struck by our capacity in extremis to both cooperate and create beauty. Why not build on these virtues?

      On my way back across the camp I meet another young Kurd who asks me to stop and chat. I think one of the most useful things volunteers do is just hang out and listen wherever and whenever. He wants me to see the broken tent in which he lives. I look at the wet soggy tunnel and tell him I am sure we can find something better, but he tells me not to worry about it, as he is out every night trying to get on a train. The words pour out.

      – I was a history student in Mosul until ISIS came. Then I went to Turkey, but I was not a refugee so everything costs money. So, I worked illegally in a factory, but you earn nothing. So, I took a boat. If you agree to be captain it’s free, although of course you risk a seven-year jail sentence— but we made it to Greece. Then Macedonia, then Hungary—they put us on a bus for Austria, and the Austrians are lovely people, wonderful! They gave us money and food and put us on a bus for Germany, where we were in a Camp for three days. But I don’t speak any German, and in England there is work…

      If governments wanted a selection process for identifying the most resilient and able candidates for entry into their countries, one possible way might be to ask refugees to find their own way across either Eurasia and the Middle East, or Sub-Saharan Africa, risk drowning in the Mediterranean, and then place them in a toxic waste dump on minimal hand-outs, before offering further life threatening challenges in the form of avoiding electrocution while jumping onto trains, or freezing or suffocating in the back of a lorry. Indeed, I am amazed these journeys have not yet been franchised as some kind of reality TV show in which the public votes for whom they want to come in.

      As you see, I don’t use the word migrant. In my five days here I have not met anyone who is not fleeing a war we started or failed to stop, a genocide we have failed to end, or human rights abuses to which we have turned a blind eye. Yet, what shines through is intelligence, courage, concern for one another, and a deep admiration for Britain. I would welcome any of the people I have met—Riyad, Raul, Bahirun, Abdul or Hassan—as my neighbours.

      The Jungle confronts us all with a very simple question: will we share the resources of this one world equitably, or will those of us with more firepower build ever higher fences to protect ourselves from those ‘marauding swarms’ trying to escape the poverty, violence and injustice that we are complicit in creating?

      There are consequences to locking ourselves in a fortress. While I was sitting in Bahirun’s restaurant the other day, I got talking to Tawab, one of the boys helping out. He was 19 and had left Afghanistan when he was ten. His parents had been killed when the Taliban bombed his village. He ran away to avoid recruitment by them. After nine years of wandering in Europe, including 14 months in a camp in Italy, an arrival in the UK closely followed by deportation, and spending three months in a French detention centre, he has asked the French government to help him go back to Afghanistan.

      – I want to go back and help my country, I don’t care about money, I don’t care about Europe. I did not see any human rights here. And when I get home, I will ask for ten minutes on Afghan TV, and I will tell them what I experienced here. And I will say yes, there are some good people, but when Americans and British come to our country, without passports and with guns, we should kill them.

      He sees the shock on my face.

      – You don’t know human rights, but you teach them in Afghanistan! Why do you think I left Afghanistan? Because if I had not, they would have forced me to join a group—it was the only way to survive. There are no human rights there, the government fucks people up. It’s impossible to be a normal person in Afghanistan, the Taliban is everywhere and now we have ISIL. In Italy, I was in a camp for fourteen months, but what can I do with Asylum in Italy when there is no work, no housing, no benefits, and yes, I know it’s the same in the UK, I know that now, that is why I am going back…

      And tell me this? How can you come and work in my country, when I cannot work in yours? How can you come with a Kalashnikov and no passport when I am not allowed in yours? Your soldier, he is born in England, he comes to my country, he walks my roads and mountains and villages with his Kalashnikov, and we give him tea, we give him everything. I don’t have a Kalashnikov. I am not like you. I am just a donkey—Afghan, Iraqi, Syrian, we are all kicked. You see me as a dog, but I am a human being and all humans are the same. We understand the law, just like you, we don’t break laws.

      So now, when I get home I will go on TV and tell people: when you get to Europe, they fuck you up, they beat you and put you in prison, they hate you, so if they come here, you have to kill them…

      I cannot think of anything to say to make it better.

      2016

      Calais, Dunkirk

       France, February 2016

       The Jungle, Saturday 6 February

      It is not what I expected. After all the news reports about the erasure of part of the Jungle, I pictured something shattered and flattened. Instead, I walk straight into the opening ceremony for ‘the secular school of Chemin des Dunes.’ In an open space between four makeshift classrooms sits a play castle with a crocodile painted on it. Here, a cluster of French educators stand beside Zimako the refugee founder, while he makes a speech.

      He rejects the word Jungle because of its associations with inhumanity and chaos:

      – This place is the land of heroes who have crossed thousands of miles to find peace and escape the terror or the militias and terrorists. Change will come when we will all be together… our public space is open to all. It is a place of meeting, exchange, fraternity among people where everyone has the right to speak, a space of freedom.

      Beyond the school, where the family camp was, there is now a wide, muddy Cordon Sanitaire between the Camp and the fenced motorway to the port. Inside banks of heaped earth, the squalid tent city has morphed into a shanty town. Huts of wood and plastic are closely packed along cobbled streets. Cafés, restaurants and shops jostle in the Afghan area. St. Michaels is still standing. Jungle Books has transformed from a small library into a network of rooms, where language classes in French and English go on all day long, next door to a new radio station.

      The information centre now has comfortable chairs, a kettle, and racks of leaflets in every language: how to seek asylum in every European Country, what are your rights in detention, how to apply to join family in the UK. A first aid post stands opposite, opening when the MSF clinic outside the Camp is closed at weekends. I follow the cobbled road around a loop between yet more wooden and plastic shelters to an area of close packed caravans and discover a legal support centre in a beautiful wooden hut besides the СКАЧАТЬ