A French Underground Railroad, Moving African Migrants

http://www.nytimes.com/2016/10/05/world/europe/france-italy-migrants-smuggling.html?ref=europe


A French Underground Railroad, Moving African Migrants

By ADAM NOSSITEROCT. 4, 2016

BREIL-SUR-ROYA, France — On a recent sunny Sunday, about a dozen young
men, women and children sat around a wooden table belonging to Cédric
Herrou, a 37-year-old farmer, laughing about who would cook that night.
It could have been any family-like gathering in the pastoral setting
high in the French Alps, just above the border with Italy. But it was not.

A local hero to some, a scofflaw to others, Mr. Herrou, who was arrested
in August, had helped his guests — all migrants from Africa — to cross
the border into France illegally. He planned to sneak them to a train
station so they could continue their journey. Some might stay in France,
but most wanted to get to Britain or Germany.

Early the next morning, cool and foggy in the mountains, Mr. Herrou and
some volunteers in his underground railroad traded tips on which Riviera
train station would be best to slip through.
Antibes? Cannes? “Have you ever seen the cops at that one?” he asked an
assistant. “There are cops at all the tollgates,” another piped up.
Still, they had to try.
“O.K., we go,” Mr. Herrou said finally. Off they went.

For all the ways Europe has tried to keep migrants out — whether
intercepting them at sea, tightening asylum rules or suspending its
system of open borders — they keep coming. The frontier between Italy
and France, where the police now intermittently patrol key tollgates and
train stations, demonstrates in many ways how those policies keep failing.

Despite a rancorous debate over migration as presidential elections
approach next year, France has not settled on a policy: Should it keep
the migrants who trickle across the border from Italy, expel them, deal
with them humanely or treat them harshly?

The ambiguity of that muddled response is playing out in the unlikely
setting of one of the world’s most glittering playgrounds for the rich,
the Riviera, and in its craggy Alpine hinterland.

Just miles below Mr. Herrou’s self-styled safe haven, citizen
collaborators tip off the French police, who have rounded up thousands
of migrants over the last year.

Young African men, some little more than boys, are routinely pulled off
trains, in scenes with ugly echoes of the French persecution of Jews
during World War II.

On the other hand, people like Mr. Herrou, who has become the de facto
leader of a low-key network of citizen smugglers, are countering police
efforts in a quasi-clandestine resistance, angered by what they see as
the French government’s inhumane response to the crisis.

“They are rounding up blacks in the train stations,” Mr. Herrou said in
an interview, sitting on the remains of a packing crate in his mountain
refuge. “They are taking children, and they are sending them back.”

“Either I close my eyes, or I don’t,” he said. “These are people with no
papers at all. That means they have no protection. I don’t see how we
can be inert.”

Flouting the law, Mr. Herrou, who lives in an old olive grower’s shack,
makes regular swoops down the winding mountain road, across the unmanned
border to Ventimiglia, the last Italian city before France. There, the
authorities have herded some 800 migrant men into a Red Cross camp in a
bleak no man’s land by the railroad tracks outside town.

Women, children and families are kept at Ventimiglia’s starkly modernist
church of Sant’Antonio da Padova, in the shadow of a highway overpass.

To fetch them, Mr. Herrou often uses the same dilapidated sky-blue van
from which he delivers eggs, laid by his flock of cacophonous chickens,
to the sinuous streets of the valley’s medieval villages.

He takes the migrants to his property, where he has set up two small
campers at the back so they can sleep and hide among the silvery olive
trees of the Roya Valley. They wander his property with a rare sense of
security.

Mr. Herrou estimates that he has helped more than 200 migrants this way.
His accomplices in the loose network he informally leads have helped
dozens more, sometimes picking up migrants as they straggle up the steep
mountain railroad tracks from Italy to France, flattening themselves
against the walls of the dark tunnels as the trains pass.

Heaps of clothing and discarded flip-flops testify to their transient
presence in these forbidding spots. They have no maps or guides, can
speak no European language and often wander inadvertently back across
the border into Italy.

On this day, after hugs for Mr. Herrou’s Sudanese translator, who stayed
behind, Mr. Herrou’s group of 14 trudged down the mountain for the next
leg of their journey.

His geese cackled loudly. Some of the migrants were laughing. It was
just one more passage for them, and not the most difficult one. Most had
already made the perilous crossing of the Mediterranean, then struggled
up the length of the Italian peninsula.

At the bottom of the hill below Mr. Herrou’s place, the migrants hid
behind his van as cars sped by on the highway, fearing that a passing
motorist might report them to the police. Then they set off on a mad
highway dash down the mountain and across the Riviera, ducking their
heads each time they passed the police on the road.

Mr. Herrou made an intermediate stop at the house of a fellow smuggler,
Hubert Jourdan, who works out of a tiny office behind the train station
in Nice.

“Lots of people have become mobilized. And lots of people call the
police,” Mr. Jourdan said, describing the divisions among the local
population. “It is an astonishing atmosphere.”

One of the migrants, a girl, became ill, and paramedics were called. Mr.
Herrou eventually decided that 14 were too many to put on a train at
once. So he shaved the group to nine, and left.

Later, the five who remained behind, all women, were arrested and sent
back to Italy after the paramedics turned them in.
For those who left with Mr. Herrou, it would take all day to find a
train station they could slip through to continue the journey north.

At Cannes, railway workers called the police. Finally, in the next
administrative region over, the Var, the conductor agreed to look the
other way, allowing three migrants to board at a time, as the trains
went through.

“We negotiated with the conductor,” Mr. Herrou said. “There’s a kind of
laissez-faire,” he explained later. “One day it is yes, the next day no.”

“I don’t have a global solution,” he said at another point. “But the
state is not managing this properly. I think it’s my duty. And I don’t
think it’s normal that children have to go through this.”

But what he does is not without risk. Dozens of smugglers have been
arrested in the region for profiting from the traffic. Mr. Herrou does
not profit, but on Aug. 13 the French police arrested him nonetheless.

They followed him back to his mountain retreat, pointed guns at his head
and at those of the Eritrean migrants he had just picked up, and jailed
him. The migrants were hustled back to Italy.

After 48 hours, the prosecutor in Nice decided not to pursue charges,
having concluded that Mr. Herrou was acting for humanitarian reasons,
his lawyer said.
In another demonstration of France’s jumbled approach to migrants, the
police know exactly where Mr. Herrou is and what he is doing. Yet they
mostly leave him alone.

In Breil-sur-Roya, an old French-Italian village of ocher houses in the
valley by a quiet lake, Mr. Herrou is something of a celebrity. At the
Friday night local council meeting, townspeople clapped him on the back,
greeting him warmly. That afternoon he had shared a beer with the town’s
Socialist mayor in the main square.

“Yes, of course, we know,” the mayor, André Ipert, said in an interview.
“Yes, of course, he is outside the law. This happens in France.”

That very day, three Sudanese migrants had straggled into Breil’s tiny
town hall. The mayor did not turn them over to the police.
Others agreed with the assessment, and have done the same.

“We think we are doing what we should do, as citizens,” said Françoise
Cotta, a well-known Paris lawyer who lives part time in Breil. She is
part of the smugglers’ network. “Down there I am a citizen, and what I
do is illegal,” she said. “And I help them.”

In fact, the migrants’ odds are vastly improved if they have the good
fortune to stumble on Mr. Herrou and his allies.

In the town of Menton, a scene plays out daily that is a counterpoint to
all of the efforts of Mr. Herrou, whose farm is just 20 miles away.

It went like this on a recent Sunday evening: The 6:16 from Ventimiglia
glided into the tidy suburban station of Menton-Garavan, the first on
the French side of the border.

Immediately, French riot police officers took up positions on the
platform They boarded the little suburban train and found what they were
looking for: three African teenagers trying to sneak into France from Italy.

The ragged boys were ordered off, marched down the platform and
commanded to empty their battered backpacks, while smartly dressed
passengers averted their gazes. Soon the return train to Italy arrived,
and the boys were put on it.

The officers say they don’t like rounding up the migrants and pulling
them off trains. “These are just minors, totally helpless,” one said,
grimacing.

Many train conductors don’t like it, either, but neither do they
protest. “There are women and children,” the conductor, watching the
operation, muttered. “It’s horrible.”