Photo by Liam Barrington-Bush.
I haven’t been to Calais since before the brutal state eviction of the ‘Jungle’ in 2016, but in 24 hours here, it became clear that all that had changed was the particular manifestations of police racism.
The violent near-daily attacks on the ten thousand strong migrant village allowed most of the repression to be kept out of the public eye, whereas now the violence and harassment has been distributed across the region, along with the thousands of migrants that have been forced to scatter since the eviction.
Where once the presence in an ‘illegal’ camp provided the pretext for police attacks, now skin colour alone is used to single-out, round-up and at times physically brutalise those passing through town. Racism has of course always been the lynchpin of policing in Calais, but the lack of a shared living space as a focus for state violence has forced the police to show their true colours, stripped away of any other pretexts.
When two of us arrived at the main Calais train station at 6:30pm, four Arab teenagers were getting grilled by French police with machine guns at the ready. One was arrested, three were sent off, papers deemed to be insufficiently out of order as to justify their formal arrests.
Moments later, six young Africans were pulled aside, in three groups of two, as they disembarked from a Dunkirk train. My friend took a photo of the police and was told doing so inside the station was against French law.
The six boys were pulled aside, just as the last ones had been, as their papers were checked, stood against a wall in the cold. At the assembly time, we were approached and asked for identification. They took our ID and lined us up against the wall with the six others, telling us we were ‘under police control’ until further notice.
