Standing in the back of a pick-up parked in the middle of the Richelieu park esplanade in downtown Calais, M.1, mike in hand, is speaking in a calm, loud voice: “We live in hardship, in the freezing cold, in the jungle camps or in warehouses. Every 24 or 48 hours, the police come and arrest us.”
He is a Sudanese migrant, bundled up in several layers of clothing. He goes on without pausing for breath: “Many people have died on this border in recent months. One day, you see your friend. The next day the same friend is being buried. We need safe ways to get to the United Kingdom.” Around his temporary podium on the pick-up, over 500 people have responded to the call to demonstrate issued by a collective composed of associations helping exiles, political parties and trades unions.
Despite the persistent cold, exiles, solidarity volunteers and people who live on the coast march through the port city for several hours on this Saturday 11 January to denounce “the deadly policies imposed on the Franco-British border”.
In 2024, at least 89 exiles died trying to get to the United Kingdom. The largest number of deaths in the last 25 years. The actual number of persons missing is uncertain for the moment. The dramatic toll of human life is all the more grim because, in Calais and its environs, exiles have been dying for years now in their attempts to reach the shores of Britain. Since 1999, at least 487 migrants have lost their lives on this marine border, Les jours,27 January 2025.]].
The Channel is a cemetery
Several demonstrators in the procession are waving placards reading : “The Channel is a cemetery”, “Governments are guilty” or “Your borders kill”. One reads: “People are dying on your beaches”, referring to the 13 corpses found ² on France’s northern shore last November and December alone. On the English side, a body was also recovered off Dover on 5 November 2024.
Amira and Nour, mother and younger sister of Dina al-Shammari, who died on a crossing to England in July 2024, were keen to participate in the march. Members of the “Bedouin minority”, stigmatised and stateless, Dina and her family fled Kuwait , then Iraq and found refuge in Germany in 2021 as asylum-seekers. “Germany refused to recognise us as refugees,” 19-year-old Nour explains. “Yet we’d been living in the country for three years. We began to fear being deported by the police.” The al-Shammari family left Germany before the summer of 2024. They came to Calais in hope of getting to England. Since Brexit, the country is no longer a party to the Dublin Regulation2and thus appeared to offer a second chance.
On the night of 27-28 July 2024, after several weeks in the insecure camps around Calais, Dina, her relatives and several dozen others attempted to cross the Channel in a Zodiac. “Dina and I were among the first to board the craft”, Nour explains. But their rubber boat was “hijacked” by other exiles who weren’t supposed be on board. This created a moment of chaos when the craft took to the sea. The young Dina was smothered, crushed to death beneath the mass of too many passengers on the flimsy craft.
Ahmed and Nour al-Ashimi, a couple from Basra in Iraq, were also in the Calais procession. Their two children, Rahaf and Hussam, 13 and 8, walk ahead of them. They are carrying a picture of Sarra, their little sister of 6, who died during an attempted crossing on 23 April 2024, off the coast at Winnereux. Like Dina al-Shammari, the little Iraqi girl was smothered to death when some migrants who weren’t supposed to be there climbed forcefully on board the raft.
The al-Ashimi family fled Iraq in the early 2010s, hoping to find refuge in Europe. In vain. Their asylum applications, lodged successively in Belgium, Sweden and Finland were rejected each time. There again, facing the threat of deportation, the United Kingdom seem the ultimate solution, and it had cost Sarra her life. Besides Sarra, that fatal attempted crossing also claimed four more victims: Hama Amin Zhilan Mohammed, an Iraqi woman of 25, Abdul Noor Zachariah, a Sudanese of 25, Semet Cagritekin, a Turk of 22, and Rakesh Kumar, an Indian exile of 44.
Hunted on land, blocked from the sea
From the 14 January sinking off Winnereux, in which five Syrian exiles from Daraa, birthplace of the Syrian revolution, lost their lives, to the 29 December incident on the beach at Sangatte which claimed four more victims, the year 2024 was peppered with tragedies on the Channel border. The list of victims seems endless. Trapped between the logic of the “drive against fixed structures”, targeting even the smallest campsites, and other police operations aimed at preventing boats from being launched at all3, including attempts to intercept them in mid-crossing , the exiles are well and truly stuck.
“Last year over 4,000 tons of rocks were dumped by the city of Calais to prevent the setting-up of campsites”, was the accusation launched at the start of the march by Angèle Vettorello from the association Utopia 56. “Several municipal by-laws were passed aimed at sending ’outsiders back outside’, hundreds of people who had already been kept in extremely vulnerable conditions”. In 2024, the NGO Human Rights Observer (HRO) which documents police expulsions from living spaces, has recorded 807 evacuations of sites in the regions of Calais and Dunkirk.
The day before the march was to be held, the Mayor of Calais Natacha Bouchart - from the very right-wing Les Républicains - tried unsuccessfully to prevent that collective manifestation of solidarity from taking place by issuing a municipal decree aimed at banning it.
“It would take hours to describe the indignity inflicted by the hyper-repressive policies applied on the sea border with Britain,” fulminates Flore Judet from the Auberge des Migrants association. "Every year thousands of migrants are harassed by the police, prevented from exercising their fundamental rights; and every year, thousands of people risk their lives to cross this border, and many die trying.”
Bruno Retailleau: “Dire Consequences”
Several hours before the march set off, Suleiman, a 19-year-old Syrian migrant, perished attempting to cross the Channel from the beach at Sangatte; he too died in a crush as the Zodiac was setting out. Several days before that, the lifeless body of a man, wearing several layers of clothing, was found near motorway A 16 close to Grande-Synthe, a town near Dunkirk. According to the police, he was a migrant who may have died of exposure. The page has been turned on 2024, but this border goes on killing.
However, in a tweet dated 3 October 2024 hailing “the heroic commitment of the forces of order to prevent crossings to the United Kingdom,” French Minister of In-terior Affairs, Bruno Retailleau, posting at the time of the G7 meeting, wrote that “the efficiency of the forces of order in preventing the crossings has had dire conse-quences, with an increase in fatal accidents and violence both between migrants and against the forces of order”. A strange way of starting to take a share of political re-sponsibility for this disaster while understating the gravity of those deaths, described merely as “dire consequences”. But this is hardly surprising, since this was the same Bruno Retailleau who, when questioned on 26 November 2024 by Communist MP Elsa Focillon on the fatal sinkings due to the “repressive migration policies that have made Europe a fortress surrounded by a sea of blood”, preferred to send the Minister for Fisheries and Maritime Affairs to answer her. André Chassaigne, chair of the group of communist MPs in the National Assembly, was shocked: “We’re not talking about fish, were talking about human beings!” At the end of the column of protestors, several Syrian migrants are marching in silence. Some, with neck-warmers pulled up over their noses, are carrying a mock black coffin with two bouquets of flowers on it. Next to them, a man is waving a banner bearing the Arabic slogan : “It wasn’t Noah’s Ark, but like him they were fleeing the deluge.” Questioned about the message, the Syrian exile replied: “It’s the story of my life. I’m running away from war and death.”
Barbed wire for sole horizon
Since the adoption of the Canterbury Treaty in 1986, more than twenty other treaties, agreements and arrangements have been adopted by France and the United Kingdom aimed at organising the management and control of their sea border.
The implementation of these agreements has resulted in the development of more and more sophisticated control and monitoring devices: long miles of concertina razor-wire fences around Calais harbour and the Channel Tunnel entrance; deployment of drones, thermal cameras and video surveillance; frequent patrols by police and gendarmes riding horses, motorcycles, quads or SUVs on the coastal beaches, etc. At the last Anglo-French summit in March 2023, Paris and London announced the allocation of €543 million over the next three years to “combat irregular immigration” by deploying 500 more police officers and gendarmes, “the funding of new infrastructure and new surveillance equipment,” as well as the use of “drones, helicopters and aircraft”. One more step in the militarisation of this sea border.
Translated by Noël Burch.
1He requested anonymity.
2The Dublin regulation established the principle that only one European country is responsible for the examination of an asylum seeker’s request. It is supposed to guarantee that one of the member countries will take charge of an asylum seeker and thus avoid a multiplication of applications in different countries. In reality, this regulation acts as a blockage for exiles who, contrary to what they had hoped, often find themselves obliged to seek asylum in one of the countries on the edge of Europe (Greece, Italy or the Balkans).
3Julia Pascual and the video investigation team of Le Monde, in collaboration with Tomas Statius, Fahim Abed, May Bulman and Bashar Deeb from the Dutch investigative magazine Lighthouse Reports, «Dans la Manche, les techniques agressives de la police pour empêcher les traversées de migrants », Le Monde, 23 March 2024.