BY SARAH STEPHEN
British Home Secretary David Blunkett and his French counterpart Nicolas Sarkozy agreed on July 12 to a timetable for the closure of the Sangatte Red Cross Centre. Sangatte has become a gathering point for asylum seekers attempting to make the journey from France to England.
The camp will be closed by March at the latest. The deal is part of a package of measures to curb unauthorised immigration from northern France, including the stationing of British immigration officers at Calais.
Before the camp is closed, the French and British governments will work with the UN High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) to provide advice and assistance to people at camp to enable them to return to their countries of origin.
An article in the May 26 Observer, "Sangatte: France's Woomera", described the refugee camp: "The size of about four football pitches, [it] lies beneath an immense corrugated steel roof. A long queue forms for the showers. Washbasins, blackened with streaks of human bristle, overflow with used water. The toilets are collective, with no taps or paper. children play with disposable razors as if with toy cars or planes. A smell of dead dog pervades the camp. From the canteen a queue stretches to the end of the camp. Refugees are allocated to makeshift tents according to their country of origin. More than 1300 refugees live here, cut off from the rest of the world. They have only one ambition — to get aboard a lorry on the Calais-Dover ferry."
The British Refugee Council expressed concern at the camp's planned closure. Chief executive Nick Hardwick urged the British government not to "prejudge" the cases of the mostly Afghan and Iraqi asylum seekers in the camp. "What is shameful is that these people — who are often recognised by our own government as being in need of protection — are being branded as economic migrants and are forced into the hands of traffickers in order to claim their legal right to asylum in the European Union. What is needed is safe routes for those fleeing persecution to make an asylum application in Europe."
The British government's overhaul of its asylum system, which involves a massive crackdown on undocumented asylum seekers, comes at a time when the number of people seeking asylum in Europe is dropping. Statistics issued by the UNHCR in May challenged the "somewhat frenzied" political debate on refugees and migration in a number of European countries. The total number of asylum seekers arriving in the EU last year was a little over half of what it had been a decade earlier, the UNHCR pointed out.
From Green Left Weekly, August 7, 2002.
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