The Border Takes Another Life
Yesterday afternoon, a 16 year old Sudanese boy was killed on the A16 motorway, near the entrance to the Euro tunnel. He was hit by a van at around 5.50pm. He was in cardiac arrest when the paramedics found him on the hard shoulder, and they were unable to revive him.
Later that evening, a group of mostly Sudanese refugees marched to the hospital. There they were met with masked police with flash ball guns, who intimidated and filmed the people as they grieved and tried to come to terms with what had happened. Eventually, after saying a prayer for the deceased, the people left the hospital and returned to the jungle.
This is the 22nd death in Calais this year that we are aware of. (The full list is here)
links to media⁚
Police Violence at the Jungle / November 2015
This video is a montage of some of the numerous tear gas attacks by the CRS into the jungle. The clips have been recorded on 25th and 26th of November. They show police firing gas directly at people and into people’s homes, things that are forbidden in regulations on its use in crowd control (these rules are also broken when it comes to rubber bullets and stun grenades).
For sure these scenes are only part of the story. The montage does not show some of the people in the camp trying to make traffic jams (the action that often brings the police to the jungle in the first place), or returning police fire with stones. Leaving these details out can paint a picture of the people living in the jungle as passive victims.
This is not the case. People defend themselves by throwing stones. They create opportunities to cross by making a traffic jam. They take their freedom of movement even when it is denied to them.
But we chose not to include footage of people throwing stones for several reasons:
Firstly, when the police fire tear gas, we are also there, getting gassed. Like the rest of the crowd, our attention is very much in the direction of the threat. This montage reflects our focus, on police violence.
Secondly, we don’t want to put anyone on film doing things that might jeopardise their safety, or be used against them. We always try to avoid filming people in the camp anyway (unless they specifically request to be filmed), because most people don’t like that intrusion. We try to avoid filming people in situations like the ones in this footage specifically because we also don’t want cameras facing the crowd to inhibit people taking action.
This video is not the whole story, but then, a lot of what makes up the struggle for the freedom of movement is invisible and remains powerful by being that way.
To those who say that the behaviour of the police in such situations is self defence, we say this is a backward logic. The idea that people throwing stones is equal to the violence backed up by the weight of the state is ridiculous. Just in the last week, several people we know of have ended up in the hospital with injuries either directly or indirectly caused by tear gas or rubber bullets. Throwing stones in these situations is self-defence.
And sometimes such actions are just a straight up attack.
To those who say that the people living in the camp only make the situation worse for themselves when they use violence, we say that when you have been forced back into a wasteland outside of the city, denied access to mainstream society at every step, denied every dignity within that society, we ask, why should people be well behaved? Too many times we hear people say that they came to Europe to find some rights for themselves and cannot believe what they discover in its place. Why should people respond respectfully when faced with the barbarism of this society, even if that barbarism is dressed up in the respectability of the law? What, exactly, is their motivation to do so?
We shot these images and this is just our analysis from them. Some might say that we don’t have a right to offer our analysis of other people’s actions, that we speak on their behalf.
But this analysis is also how we feel when we are gassed, and how we feel when we step outside a system that denies equality. With them, we seek out our own ways of dignity and equality together, outside of this diseased system. This is our struggle too, and this is how we see it for those that we stand next to during events like these. What else can we say? When we say nothing, this is a statement in of itself.