Dans The Guardian : France is bulldozing the Calais jungle, but its replacement looks suspiciously like a jail

You don’t need to have a home to be “evicted”. You can be evicted from a tent in the Jungle, the refugee camp in Calais. You may have seen the pictures: mud, fires, rubbish. A landscape of futility. The French police in riot gear went in before dawn to dismantle this “shanty town” and move 1,500 of its inhabitants into alternative accommodation.

The French authorities flattened and destroyed the scrappy tents. This clearance was said, as always, to be about improving the conditions of the refugees living there. The new accommodation on which the French have spent £20m is shipping containers, each kitted out with 12 bunk beds. There is heating and electricity. This is surely better than where they are now. Why then were these people so reluctant to go? Well, partly because the rows of containers look like a detention centre. They think it’s a jail. And partly because there are few communal facilities. The Jungle has sprigs of communal life everywhere you go. It’s a desperate, dangerous place, but people get together to eat. Or to pray. Or to trade information and whatever else they can. The mistrust of what the French are doing is deep. And understandable.

When I was there in November, one of the many haunting things I saw were pictures that some of the refugees had drawn. You would expect them to draw some of the awful experiences they have burnt on their vision and they do: bombings, murders, executions and boats sinking. But many draw pictures of more recent brutalisation. Of tear gas and rubber bullets used by the French police. The hostility they face in France is but one of the reasons they remain so determined to get to England.

I heard several reports of “forcible relocation” happening in the smaller settlements that have been broken up by the police, with refugees being taken to centres of “welcoming”. There is no question that the French want to close the Jungle. Or drastically reduce its size to 2,000. There are those who would happily go in and demolish the tents with the people inside them. The only thing that is really stopping them is the presence of volunteers who helped move everyone peacefully.

Pour lire la suite : ​http://www.theguardian.com/world/commentisfree/2016/jan/20/france-is-bulldozing-the-calais-jungle-but-its-replacement-looks-suspiciously-like-a-jail