Yesterday the French Interior Minister Bernard Cazeneuve visited Calais and announced plans to ‘definitively’ evict the rest of the self-managed migrant camp known as the ‘jungle‘. This follows the eviction of the southern half of the camp in the Spring.
The news was almost certainly hastened by the announcement earlier this week by an unsavoury assortment of NIMBYs of their intentions to organise an indefinite go-slow blockade of the motorway around Calais - as well as a ‘human chain’ action - from Monday 5th September until a date is set for the destruction of the camp. The NIMBYs are local capitalists and class traitors - truckers, business owners, dockers’ unions, farmers, and are calling on other Good Citizens to join them. The dockers union involved in the action is the treacherous scum of the CGT, who are known to regularly collaborate with the French state.
The demands of the blockaders being entirely in line with government policy, no bans have of course been issued on protests - while labour law and pro-migrant demos have been met with zero tolerance since the state of emergency came into force.
Current estimates by charities on the ground put the camp’s population at 10,000, while the government claims it is providing 8,000 alternative accommodation spaces around France, suggesting the numbers of inhabitants that will be evicted are at least as high as this. Either way, it’s going to be a massive operation causing yet more suffering and injustice to people who have already seen far too much of it.
And to carry out this dirty work, the state is bringing in yet more goons with guns: the number of cops in the small port town will be increased to 2,100. The eviction will likely leave people scattered across the coast, keeping a low profile til the dust settles, or being forced onto buses and dumped in reception centres around France. The last round of evictions was met with some resistance in the camp as well as solidarity actions abroad (see here for a chronology of this and a glimpse into what the next eviction might look like), but if this one is to be held back, the fight is going to have to be a whole lot stronger.