In Memory of the Jungle: What Could Have Been A Home

When one thinks of a refugee camp, one might envision a dilapidated, temporary location, almost like a rundown version of camping. However, the average time that a refugee spends in a refugee camp in the world is said to be over ten years. Refugee camps become homes.

Ever since 1999, Calais, France has been a growing hub for refugees hoping to pass into the UK. With 31 miles of sea separating France from the UK, Calais, a seemingly small and unimportant city,  is strategically located on the French Western coast, and now hosts thousands of refugees from a myriad of nations around the world, notably from the Middle East and Northern and Central Africa.

Calais is deemed  the “unofficial” passageway to the UK. Calais was supposed to be a temporary solution where people would eventually get the opportunity to risk their lives hiding themselves in containers and commercial trucks and hoping to get smuggled across the 31 miles of water. Throughout the early 2000’s, most refugees would squat in abandoned buildings and construction sites there.

With time, this temporary solution became more and more popular by word of mouth; communicating through the social media Whatsapp, refugees passing through France would hear about Calais and the community that was beginning to grow. Tents would gather up together in areas surrounding the city as people from the same countries would rally into their own little diasporas.

From very early on, French authorities and international humanitarian authorities refused to acknowledge that Calais was a somewhat official refugee camp. Concrete hostile action towards the camp began in 2009, when the French police force was sent with bulldozers to run over tents and arrest people. They then arrested 700-800 people and detained 278.

Despite this history of hostility, Calais began to boom around 2014-2015, becoming one of the largest slums of Europe. With the massive influx of newer Middle Eastern refugees, notably from Iran and Syria, Calais grew to have over 6 thousand migrants. The Calais camp, nicknamed the “Jungle,” grew to have running water, streets, restaurants, churches, mosques, and wifi. The Jungle began to look more and more like a home.

Both French and British authorities still refused to acknowledge that it was an official area for refugees to take asylum. This meant that no official NGOs or organizations were on the ground helping people who often arrived to the camp from warm climates wearing nothing but flip flops in the middle of winter. Any organization there was created with the sole purpose of helping Calais refugees. Given that these organizations were so new, they were not well funded and the refugees had to live off of donations, meaning one warm meal a day cooked by volunteers.

Despite these complications, the Jungle was growing, groups were raising awareness, and there was hope. The Jungle became known in popular culture. Popular street artist Banksy designed a representation of Steve Jobs as a Syrian refugee for the decoration of the camp. They began running out of room for all the donations from European civilians who were eager to help. However, this hope ended when French authorities began evacuating the camp in 2016, coming with tear gas to force evacuation in order to be able to light people’s houses on fire.

A Syrian mother watched her and her children’s home burn to the ground. When asked how she was doing by a volunteer on the ground, she said “The day that your country is in war, you will come to our country and we will treat you like people. Not like this.”

The official evacuation began on October 24th, 2016, when 6,400 refugees were driven out of Calais on busses to be “relocated” in France. Sometimes this meant dropping them off in a random rural area of France with nowhere to go in a country they felt hated them and where they did not speak the language. The evacuation was quick, violent, and chaotic. On October 26th, French authorities released the statement that the camp had been officially cleared.

Jasmin O’Hara, the creator of Worldwide Tribe, an NGO created initially to provide for the Jungle, told us that many refugees stayed behind in Calais and are now either living in small woods or in run down camps in the surrounding areas, “But it’s nothing like the Jungle”, she said. Uncertainty and fear lays thick in the air.

Walking amongst the ruins of the Jungle, there may be no more people, but that does not mean that they are gone.There is no information or statistics on what has concretely happened to the thousands of refugees that were forced to relocate because no one is keeping track and statistics are untrustworthy. The only information is from word of mouth. Some are now in Paris, notably in a refugee diaspora near the Gare Saint Lazare. Others stayed around the Calais area and some children were forced into child prostitution.

The destruction of the camp is but a symbol for the growing hatred towards foreigners in the West. There are still dozens of other camps in countries around Europe, mostly growing in Greece. Destroying the camp did not destroy the initial problem that is the refugee crisis. Moving forward, what lacks now is awareness and interest. By caring and by talking about this issue, more people will have their stories heard, and there will be a push for change.