CALAIS: Workers escorted by scores of French police officers moved into the “Jungle” in Calais on Tuesday, demolishing shacks and tents emptied of migrants being bussed to shelters around France.
The workers used electric saws to take down wooden shelters and earth-moving equipment to carry debris away from the sprawling camp that people have used for years as a launchpad for attempts to reach Britain.
The demolition work comes on the second day of a massive operation to clear the squalid settlement in northern France, where an estimated 6,000-8,000 migrants, mostly Afghans, Sudanese and Eritreans, have been living.
Around 2,700 people have already been bussed away to shelters around France and around 600 unaccompanied minors have been taken into a part of the camp where families had been living, Interior Minister Bernard Cazeneuve said.
The clean-up workers piled discarded mattresses, blankets, clothes, pots and suitcases on top of the wood and plastic sheeting used to build the tents and huts that hours previously had been home to migrants hoping to sneak into Britain.
Before the demolition work began aid workers and government officials went tent-to-tent to ensure the area had been emptied.
Riot police carrying shields sealed off the area.
Some migrants holding off their departure to Wednesday are still living in other parts of the camp.
The sprawling shantytown, one of Europe’s biggest slums, was rapidly becoming a ghost town.
“It makes me sad to see the camp in this state,” said Marie Paule, a charity worker who started volunteering at the Jungle last year.
“I have a heavy heart... but it’s the best solution for them.”
Earlier Tuesday, scores of minors were awaiting their turn to be interviewed by French and British officials.
Cazeneuve said all unaccompanied minors “with proven family links in Great Britain” would eventually be transferred across the Channel.
Britain has taken in nearly 200 teenagers over the past week, but the transfers were put on hold Monday.
The head of France’s refugee agency, Pascal Brice, had harsh words for Britain’s role.
“We’re doing their work for them,” he said on French radio, reiterating calls for Britain to take in the Jungle’s minors.
Sudanese migrant Ali Othman, 18, smoking a cigarette outside his tent, was among those who vowed he would not leave voluntarily.
“Whatever the French police do to me I will not apply for asylum here,” he said. “They can detain me, jail me, throw me out on the street. I still want to go to Britain.”
Officials fear that new camps will sprout up around Calais unless police remain vigilant.
Located on wasteland next to the port of Calais, the four-square-kilometer (1.5-square-mile) Jungle has become a symbol of Europe’s failure to resolve its worst migration crisis since World War II.
More than one million people fleeing war and poverty in the Middle East, Asia and Africa poured into Europe last year, sowing divisions across the 28-nation bloc and fueling the rise of far-right parties.
Over the past year, police have battled near-nightly attempts by migrants to climb onto trucks heading across the Channel.
Dozens have been killed on the road or while trying to jump onto passing trains.
Some have opposed plans to resettle asylum-seekers in their communities. In the eastern wine village of Chardonnay two dozen young Sudanese asylum seekers received a chilly reception on Monday.
“This massive arrival of migrants, it’s inappropriate,” said resident Joelle Chevaux.
But elsewhere people turned out in solidarity for the migrants, with rallies attracting some 200 people in Paris and 250 in the western city of Nantes.
Back at the Jungle, 25-year-old Sudanese migrant Arbat said he was ready to move on.
“I know my future is no longer here. I will see how I do elsewhere,” he said.
Speaking in good French, he added that he wants to marry a French woman. “They tell me they are all beautiful. Is it true?” he joked.
France begins demolition of ‘Jungle’ migrant camp
France begins demolition of ‘Jungle’ migrant camp
After nearly 7 weeks and many rumors, Bolivia’s ex-leader reappears in his stronghold
- Morales was Bolivia’s first Indigenous president who served from 2006 until his fraught 2019 ouster and subsequent self-exile
- He dismissed rumors fueled by local politicians and fanned by social media that he would try to flee the country
LA PAZ: Bolivia’s long-serving socialist former leader, Evo Morales, reappeared Thursday in his political stronghold of the tropics after almost seven weeks of unexplained absence, endorsing candidates for upcoming regional elections and quieting rumors he had fled the country in the wake of the US seizure of his ally, Venezuela’s ex-President Nicolás Maduro.
The weeks of hand-wringing over Morales’ fate showed how little the Andean country knows about what’s happening in the remote Chapare region, where the former president has spent the past year evading an arrest warrant on human trafficking charges, and how vulnerable it is to fears about US President Donald Trump’s potential future foreign escapades.
The media outlet of Morales’ coca-growing union, Radio Kawsachun Coca, released footage of Morales smiling in dark sunglasses as he arrived via tractor at a stadium in the central Bolivian town of Chimoré to address his supporters.
Morales, Bolivia’s first Indigenous president who served from 2006 until his fraught 2019 ouster and subsequent self-exile, explained that he had come down with chikungunya, a mosquito-borne ailment with no treatment that causes fever and severe joint pain, and suffered complications that “caught me by surprise.”
“Take care of yourselves against chikungunya — it is serious,” the 66-year-old Morales said, appearing markedly more frail than in past appearances.
He dismissed rumors fueled by local politicians and fanned by social media that he would try to flee the country, vowing to remain in Bolivia despite the threat of arrest under conservative President Rodrigo Paz, whose election last October ended nearly two decades of rule by Morales’ Movement Toward Socialism party.
“Some media said, ‘Evo is going to leave, Evo is going to flee.’ I said clearly: I am not going to leave. I will stay with the people to defend the homeland,” he said.
Paz’s revival of diplomatic ties with the US and recent efforts to bring back the Drug Enforcement Administration — some 17 years after Morales expelled American anti-drug agents from the Andean country while cozying up to China, Russia, Cuba and Iran — have rattled the coca-growing region that serves as Morales’ bastion of support.
Paz on Thursday confirmed that he would meet Trump in Miami on March 7 for a summit convening politically aligned Latin American leaders as the Trump administration seeks to counter Chinese influence and assert US dominance in the region.
Before proclaiming the candidates he would endorse in Bolivia’s municipal and regional elections next month, Morales launched into a lengthy speech reminiscent of his once-frequent diatribes against US imperialism.
“This is geopolitical propaganda on an international scale,” he said of Trump’s bid to revive the Monroe Doctrine from 1823 in order to reassert American dominance in the Western Hemisphere. “They want to eliminate every left-wing party in Latin America.”
