Calais – Police attack migrant camp

In the afternoon of 7 January, police raided a small migrant camp near an old Lidl. Friends who were there wrote about the event from their experience:

Autonomous medics and other allies to migrant communities in the various fractional encampment jungles of Calais rushed to the site of the old Lidl camp on reports of a CRS police raid. Upon arrival, a mass of CRS police had situated in a line facing off against a crowd of migrants and allies, including a man they had injured in the attack
who was found lying on the ground.

CRS antagonized the highly tense situation, laughing and provoking anger from migrant youth who shouted in defiance against them, demanding their dignity and humanity be respected whilst calling out the agents of the state for their harassment.

With a queue of half a dozen CRS vehicles on scene, police hordes moved around the area; some were confronted by the line of migrants and allies who stood separating cops from the circle of comrades who had surrounded the injured man on the ground and stayed with him until the ambulance arrived.

The arrival of the ambulance separated the support circle and the injured man, who’d been wrapped in an emergency blanket due to frigid temperatures. He was transferred by emergency personnel onto a stretcher and loaded into the transport. A friend of the man approached the driver’s side window to request he be allowed to accompany the man to the hospital, was waved away by the driver and completely ignored. The ambulance then began driving away even as two men pleaded with them to allow a companion to go to the hospital with him.

As the ambulance pulled out, police vans followed and allies and friends trudged back through the freezing, wet fields with the crowd of mostly migrant youth to leave the scene. A man who had been hospitalized the prior evening due to serious cardiac complications took allies to his tent to reveal the fresh pepper spray the CRS had doused his tent and blankets with during their attack on the old Lidl camp. A fifteen year old boy shares the tent with his father and numerous others and the pepper spray rendered it uninhabitable on a night where the temperatures plunged below freezing.

Today’s attack on old Lidl follows days of prolific declarations from the numerous jungle encampments of nightly police antagonisms, arrests, pepper spray assaults, seizure and destruction of tents/blankets and other items seen to be ‘providing shelter.’

Comrades to the migrant community returned to old Lidl less than an hour after the attack to replace the tent police destroyed.

Police attack migrant camp // La police attaque un camp de migrant-e-s