President François Hollande made what can only be described as a rash promise on Monday to demolish the entire camp known as the Calais “Jungle” before the end of this year.
Hollande made the promise during his first visit to the blighted town, a year after Prime Minister Manuel Valls visited the Jungle, five days after his rival Nicolas Sarkozy travelled to Calais, and seven months before the presidential election.
Neither Sarkozy nor Hollande went to the Jungle, whose population has swollen to some 10,000. It has become a lawless zone deemed too dangerous for senior politicians.
Instead, Hollande visited a safe migrant centre in Tours, inhabited by 48 former inhabitants of the jungle, on September 24.
“We must completely, definitively dismantle the camp of la Lande (the official name for the jungle).” Hollande said at the gendarmerie barracks in Calais. “It’s an impasse for migrants. Traffickers work there and delude people that it’s possible to cross the Channel.”
A government plan to transfer some 9,000 inhabitants of the jungle to "welcome and orientation centres" (CAOs) elsewhere in France was recently leaked to the press. The existing 164 centres are full, and it will be a challenge to create 9,000 places quickly.
The plan is opposed by the conservative Les Républicains party, which launched a petition titled “No creation of jungles throughout the country”.
Steve Briois, a mayor and MEP from the Front national (FN), founded an association called "My Town Without Migrants" in the hope of "forcing local governments to take a position on the reception of migrants."
Last February, the Hollande administration promised to limit the population of the jungle to a maximum 2,000 people. French police bulldozed the southern part of the camp while television cameras filmed burning shacks, weeping and screaming migrants.
The government wants to avoid a similar public relations disaster this autumn. It says 80 per cent of the inhabitants of the Jungle may have a valid claim to asylum in France.
Since the first CAOs were built 11 months ago, 5,638 migrants have been transferred from Calais, while 1,500 have been deported.
To prove his seriousness, Hollande vowed to return to Calais with his government once the camp is destroyed: “It will all be done by the end of the year. I’ll come back with the government after the complete demolition of Calais so there is no doubt about our intentions or our determination.”
Hollande said he was “determined” that “British authorities participate in the humanitarian effort that France is making here. . . Just because the UK took a sovereign decision [to leave the EU] doesn’t mean that it is freed from its obligations towards France.”
Britain is financing a euro 3.2 mn, four-metre high concrete wall along the RN216 highway skirting the jungle. Construction began one week ago, and is scheduled to finish by the end of the year. The town side of the wall is to be covered with plants.
Natacha Bouchart, the mayor of Calais, now opposes the wall on the grounds that it is pointless if the camp is to be demolished.
Mr Sarkozy’s supporters mocked Mr Hollande for what they described as his tardy visit to Calais. Mr Sarkozy has repeatedly denounced “the impotence and the resignation of the state” in the migrant crisis.
If he is elected president of France next May, Sarkozy promised, “by the end of the summer of 2017, the problem of ‘the jungle’ will be solved.”
Sarkozy claims “legitimacy” regarding Calais because he closed the nearby Sangatte camp in 2002. He now says he would rewrite the 2003 Le Touquet accord that gave France responsibility for preventing migrants from reaching Britain.
In a jibe at Sarkozy, Hollande noted that “camps were dismantled and then reconstituted”.
Sarkozy has made “identity” the main focus of his presidential campaign. On September 19th, he told intending immigrants, “As soon as you become French, your ancestors are the Gauls.” Commentators have taken to calling him “Sarkozix,” after Asterix, the hero of the comic book series on ancient Gaul.
Sarkozy said that France “cannot keep 29 per cent of a community that is tempted by sharia”.
