Ecco l’inferno dei rifugiati alle porte di Dunkerque, nella Francia del 13 novembre. Il reportage dal “limbo”, come lo chiama la giornalista, è uscito oggi sul grande quotidiano inglese The Guardian:
Life in a refugee camp: ‘the cold and fear get in your bones’
Suzanne Moore witnesses the sheer will to survive of people living in a lawless and disease-ridden camp near Dunkirk
Donate to the Guardian and Observer charity appeal 2015
“I was not born to live here like this,” says Ali. “I have three languages but I really want to learn Japanese. I love Japanese movies.” Ali is from Iran. He says he is not alone, but he seems very alone. We are in a refugee camp at Grande–Synthe, a Dunkirk suburb, sitting under a tarpaulin while people wait to see a doctor.
But to describe this as a camp is wrong. This is a swamp. There are no basic facilities. None. It’s a field of mud and tattered tents. I am surrounded by people waiting to see a doctor holding little tickets, eyeing each other with suspicion. This, at least, is better than where I have just been, where I found Afghans sleeping in a ditch.
Ali babbles to me non-stop about how he is all right, really. But no one here is. In June, there were maybe 150 people camped out. Now there are more than 10 times as many, predominantly Kurds. Families are arriving all the time. The average refugee is a young man, it’s true, but there are more and more women and children. A boy of seven pulls out his prize possession to show us – a tiny fire truck.
Women sit in tents frying potatoes. They smile and chat, but everyone is cold. Everything is wet. Everyone has a story of how they got here. Some show me on their phones images of them getting out of flimsy dinghies – their witnesses to trauma. As they have journeyed from Syria or Eritrea, fleeing Islamic State, torture, unimaginable darkness, the phones are their lifelines. They connect them back to where they have come from and to a world they are now locked out of.
Women sit in tents frying potatoes. They smile and chat, but everyone is cold. Everything is wet. Everyone has a story of how they got here. Some show me on their phones images of them getting out of flimsy dinghies – their witnesses to trauma. As they have journeyed from Syria or Eritrea, fleeing Islamic State, torture, unimaginable darkness, the phones are their lifelines. They connect them back to where they have come from and to a world they are now locked out of.
This is limbo. Limbo comes from limbus meaning the edge, the border of hell, and this is as close as I have ever been. Thankfully I am here with Doctors of the World (part of the Médecins du Monde Network), one of the Guardian’s refugee appeal charities, which has provided medical help on the ground in Calais since 2003. The director of the charity, Leigh Daynes, is shocked by what he is seeing – and he is a veteran of Darfur and Haiti. Every day, the charity runs the gauntlet of racism and aggression to get the most basic of care into the camps.
Political rhetoric has successfully dehumanised these people as someone else’s problem. We don’t want them, the French don’t want them. Money has been spent on building higher, flesh-ripping fences. So here they fester. Human detritus.
Ali regards getting to England as “like an exam. A challenge. I have failed five times. But I will do it.” Every night, people try different ways to get over the wire or into the trucks. Cars with British licence plates are around; people smugglers emanating threat.
A grinning young man emerges from the doctors’ tent, his arm in a sling. He has broken his shoulder. “I don’t sleep so good.” At home he was a pharmacist.
Many of the injuries the doctors treat are the direct result of attempts to reach the UK. But the way these people are forced to live is also making them ill. Respiratory and stomach infections are everywhere, as are rats, mice, scabies.
The conditions of these “camps” don’t meet any basic UN humanitarian standards. At the main camp, called the Jungle, the Doctors of the World clinic, which is basically three sheds, has been broken into and looted. Everything here is dangerous. Fires start as candles tip over. Trapped, desperate people do desperate things. The cold and fear get inside your bones.
A doctor chats to me between consultations: “They [the refugees] become weaker and weaker. There is malnutrition. The immune system falls.” He puts his hand to his chest: “I don’t know how to say it in English. I worry for their spirits breaking.”
Some can speak of their trauma and depression, but many can’t. A young medic, Dr Mohammed Bakir, a locum in emergency medicine in London, tells me how refugees turn up at the clinics he runs here twice a week, saying: “‘I have a pain in my heart, or: ‘I can no longer feel anything’. I check them over but they don’t have cardiac problems.”
Doctors of the World tries to help through its mobile psychosocial service. Lou Einhorn, a psychologist, shows me drawings produced by some of her refugee patients. Some draw the violence where they have come from, some their sea journeys. Many pictures are of police brutality.
Amid the squalor in the main camp there is still kindness. A Syrian man makes us chai in his “shelter”. He has sciatica and the cold is making it worse. “Tell the world about Syria,” he asks me.
Bakir explains that one of the things he was least able to cope with was a Syrian shot several times by rubber bullets: the patient told him he wished he’d stayed in Syria because he “would have died in dignity not in this humiliation”.
The Jungle is a shantytown with its own economy. Even a shop. The Eritreans have built a church tent. We talk to a woman from Basra with three small children. One fears for the women and children. There are children entirely alone here.
As more people arrive, tensions build. There are fights to see the doctors, who are rushing through 80 consultations a day. More and more women are coming, some with “surprise pregnancies” as a result of the sex work their “protectors” are forcing them into. A quarter of the patients are now women.
Lawless and disease-ridden these camps may be, but they are still full of people whose sheer will to survive is astonishing, who still dream of a life better than this. Any life is better than this, which is why they take increasing risks. No one who witnesses this could categorise the inhabitants into deserving asylum seekers and undeserving migrants.
All the words of the politicians are meaningless when you see that, beyond sleeping bags and paracetamol, what these people need is a future.
One man hovering around the medical tent beckons me over and asks me to write something down. It is simply his name. He spells it out slowly to me. “Just write it down please.” Is there anything else he wants me to write, I ask? “No,” he says. “Just my name.”
We both know what he fears. He simply wants to be acknowledged as a fellow human being. The rain falls on my notebook until the letters blur. He wanders off, coughing badly. I wonder if he will ever get better or ever be warm again. I get the train home. This humanitarian disaster is just one hour away from us. One hour.
