UNHCR Opens Office in Calais

Tightening of security between Dover and Calais has caused a "jungle like atmosphere in Calais." So much so that UNHCR has opened an office there. The Telegraph reports:

Security has been tightened at the port and far fewer illegal migrants get through to Britain now, according to the UK's Border Control Agency. It told The Sunday Telegraph that effective control of Calais port and the routes across the Channel was a success story.

But the fact that it is harder to reach Britain merely means that the migrants - almost all of them men and boys - hang around in Calais for even longer, months instead of weeks, as they attempt to stow away on lorries or in cars.

Meanwhile they [asylum seekers] live in conditions which are so appalling that the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees opened an office in the town [Calais], only the second in Europe for an agency which is more typically found in troublespots like Congo or Pakistan.

UN officials feel they must do something for the inhabitants of the stinking "jungles" where desperate men and boys fight each other with knives and suffer diseases like scabies and TB, as the filth, frustration and violence take their toll.

The UNHCR works with hard-pressed charities that try to help the migrants and encourages them to apply for asylum in France. But only 120 enquiries have been made in the past month.

Marie-Ange Lascure, UNHCR's spokeswoman, said migrants were arriving in bigger numbers than a few years ago. "They want to go to England because the people smugglers tell them it is a beautiful place, where they can easily earn money to send home to their families," she said.

French police frequently raid the camps, and sometimes destroy them. Sixteen vanloads of CRS riot police arrived on Thursday as bulldozers levelled a derelict warehouse which 30 Sudanese from the war-torn province of Darfur had been using as a temporary home.

Many of the Afghans, who are now the majority of migrants at Calais, said they had fled the Taliban. Samim Siddique, 24, from Khost, rolled up his trouser leg to show a bayonet scar where he had been tortured by terrorists who wanted him to carry a bomb into the university where he was studying.