had left Afghanistan when he was ten. His parents had been killed when the Taliban bombed his village. He ran away to avoid recruitment by them. After nine years of wandering in Europe, including 14 months in a camp in Italy, an arrival in the UK closely followed by deportation, and spending three months in a French detention centre, he has asked the French government to help him go back to Afghanistan.
– I want to go back and help my country, I don’t care about money, I don’t care about Europe. I did not see any human rights here. And when I get home, I will ask for ten minutes on Afghan TV, and I will tell them what I experienced here. And I will say yes, there are some good people, but when Americans and British come to our country, without passports and with guns, we should kill them.
He sees the shock on my face.
– You don’t know human rights, but you teach them in Afghanistan! Why do you think I left Afghanistan? Because if I had not, they would have forced me to join a group—it was the only way to survive. There are no human rights there, the government fucks people up. It’s impossible to be a normal person in Afghanistan, the Taliban is everywhere and now we have ISIL. In Italy, I was in a camp for fourteen months, but what can I do with Asylum in Italy when there is no work, no housing, no benefits, and yes, I know it’s the same in the UK, I know that now, that is why I am going back…
And tell me this? How can you come and work in my country, when I cannot work in yours? How can you come with a Kalashnikov and no passport when I am not allowed in yours? Your soldier, he is born in England, he comes to my country, he walks my roads and mountains and villages with his Kalashnikov, and we give him tea, we give him everything. I don’t have a Kalashnikov. I am not like you. I am just a donkey—Afghan, Iraqi, Syrian, we are all kicked. You see me as a dog, but I am a human being and all humans are the same. We understand the law, just like you, we don’t break laws.
So now, when I get home I will go on TV and tell people: when you get to Europe, they fuck you up, they beat you and put you in prison, they hate you, so if they come here, you have to kill them…
I cannot think of anything to say to make it better.
2016
Calais, Dunkirk
France, February 2016
The Jungle, Saturday 6 February
It is not what I expected. After all the news reports about the erasure of part of the Jungle, I pictured something shattered and flattened. Instead, I walk straight into the opening ceremony for ‘the secular school of Chemin des Dunes.’ In an open space between four makeshift classrooms sits a play castle with a crocodile painted on it. Here, a cluster of French educators stand beside Zimako the refugee founder, while he makes a speech.
He rejects the word Jungle because of its associations with inhumanity and chaos:
– This place is the land of heroes who have crossed thousands of miles to find peace and escape the terror or the militias and terrorists. Change will come when we will all be together… our public space is open to all. It is a place of meeting, exchange, fraternity among people where everyone has the right to speak, a space of freedom.
Beyond the school, where the family camp was, there is now a wide, muddy Cordon Sanitaire between the Camp and the fenced motorway to the port. Inside banks of heaped earth, the squalid tent city has morphed into a shanty town. Huts of wood and plastic are closely packed along cobbled streets. Cafés, restaurants and shops jostle in the Afghan area. St. Michaels is still standing. Jungle Books has transformed from a small library into a network of rooms, where language classes in French and English go on all day long, next door to a new radio station.
The information centre now has comfortable chairs, a kettle, and racks of leaflets in every language: how to seek asylum in every European Country, what are your rights in detention, how to apply to join family in the UK. A first aid post stands opposite, opening when the MSF clinic outside the Camp is closed at weekends. I follow the cobbled road around a loop between yet more wooden and plastic shelters to an area of close packed caravans and discover a legal support centre in a beautiful wooden hut besides the Dome, where volunteer lawyers give free advice.
Coming back, I stumble across the new container camp. It is in the middle, next to Chemin du Dunes. There is a large fenced area with a ditch around it. Inside there is a grid of white containers stacked two stories high, currently completely empty and completely alienating. It’s as if someone dropped a space station in the middle of a medieval marketplace. I hear my name being shouted. I turn and there is Adam from Darfur, in a white Peruvian woolly hat with earflaps running after me.
– Lynne! Lynne! Do you remember me?
– Of course I do! I am so pleased to see you and glad you are not injured or arrested. Where are you staying? I could not find your tent…
He takes me to the small new hut he shares with a friend. He has stopped trying the train. A British lawyer is helping him get to his uncle in the UK. As he is an unaccompanied 16-year-old, there is some possibility.7 Meanwhile, he just sits in his hut and waits. He curls up on his bed and looks at me. The energy that was there three months ago has gone—this is not the young man who sang pop songs for us in the Dome.
– Do you do anything with your days?
He shakes his head.
– What about the Jungle Books where I took you?
He shrugs.
– And there is a new school, and a Darfuri school and English classes.
Again, a sad shrug.
– What do you dream of doing when you get to England?
– I want to study, I want to learn.
– Well, why not start here? It’s free, there are teachers and books. If you don’t like the idea of class, we could go to the library together and get some. What sort do you like?
– Ones that give me wisdom…
– OK … I think we can manage that. Let’s meet and go together.
We make an appointment for Monday morning. A friend has arrived.
– He is already French—Adam tells me.
The friend has asylum in France. He came when he was 13 and went to the accommodation centre in St. Omer. I just want to go to my uncle—Adam says again.
Riyad has acquired a caravan. He invites me in. He is doing an interview with a visiting barrister, so I get to hear in forensic detail what’s actually been happening in the last few months. He’s been assaulted without provocation three times since I last saw him, most recently, two weeks ago when he was just walking into Calais. A policeman parked a car, jumped out, and came over spraying tear gas from a cannister into his eyes, and then started beating him until he fell to the ground. Then he yelled—go back to the Jungle—got in his car, and drove off. The other two occasions happened near the train station.
– They just set on you with sticks, kicking you once you are down. I was kicked in the head and stomach and left vomiting. He shows us a scar on his hand where he protected his head. Two months ago, we were just walking to the camp when five of them jumped out and attacked us with sticks. We just ran.
And now there are the attacks on the camp. The most recent one was a few days ago. A right-wing group started throwing gas cannisters into the Kurdish area. The enraged Kurds responded by throwing stones with slingshots. Then the police let loose with tear gas and rubber bullets. My friend Rowan’s car was getting hit