Calais, The End of the Jungle This World

GULLS CRY, WAVES CRASH

FERRY HORN HONKS

CALL TO PRAYER

This programme contains some strong language and some scenes which some viewers may find upsetting.

So, this is essentially the main access road

into the centre of the camp.

It leads straight into the very centre

where the Sudan tent is

and where the medic caravans used to be situated.

This whole area here is New Eritrea.

This is where a large majority of the Eritrean community live.

And that's a real mixture,

whereas the Afghan community here is predominantly men.

I mean, obviously, the whole camp is predominantly male,

however, within the Eritrean community,

you do have a far larger proportion of women

than in any of the other communities.

Area on the left -

the majority of the Kuwaiti and Iraqi community live.

I mean, at one point, it was entirely Kuwaiti and Iraqi,

and this was the Kuwaiti Bedouin mosque.

I mean, the Iraqi and Kuwaiti community now

are very small, just like the Syrian community.

It might not be wise for us all to pass through here.

So, this is a nightly thing.

This is a bazaar, essentially, a market,

where clothes,

often donations, are sold on.

I mean, I won't lie, there are some damn good deals in there.

You'll find yourself a nice T-shirt for a euro.

HE CHUCKLES But probably,

for the safety of the camera crew...

You walk through there, you might get mobbed.

-ON RADIO:

-We've got a fire. It looks like it's in the shelter.

I'm just trying to find my way round there.

Copy that.

Well, we always joke and say that the criteria

for long-term volunteers is lost or broken.

A series of unfortunate events maybe led to me feeling like

I needed a purpose,

and my job in England wasn't fulfilling that.

And I came here to try and just form an opinion....

..try and have a bit more understanding of it

cos, if I'm honest,

I didn't have any understanding of it before I came here.

And I came here for a week and never left.

But before this, I worked as a landscape gardener and tree surgeon.

Before that, I used to work in London and wear a suit.

-Really?

-Yeah.

Art valuations for a big, wealthy Iraqi family.

So, you've got the A16 that runs down here,

which actually ends in the port,

and here you have a multi-million-pound fence

funded by British taxpayers.

What do you feel about this place?

-This place?

-Yeah.

-HE CHUCKLES

Yeah, it's got to be one of the most contradicting feelings

that you could ever feel.

I detest the conditions that people are forced to live in.

However, yeah, of course, I love it. I helped build it.

I find a purpose here. That's the most important thing.

So, even when I'm unhappy, I still have a purpose.

SMALL EXPLOSIONS

It was very much a smuggler's camp.

This was sort of the main traffic route

of people trying to get to England.

Prices ran from £500 to £10,000,

depending on your nationality and depending on the service you got.

As it got more and more difficult to succeed into the UK,

because of tightening of security at the border and so forth,

it became more expensive.

It's completely...

It's business.

The people who did not have any money

became more and more desperate to climb into those lorries,

and they invented ways,

and one of the ways was to create a traffic jam.

People go off and risk everything for this dream of UK.

The alternative is for them to be deported back to Sudan

or Ethiopia or Afghanistan.

This is something that they are just not going to allow to happen,

so they must go forwards, they must try.

I knew people that tried every night.

You'd see them get their coat on, you know,

or you'd see them have this kind of look in their eye,

and I'd be like, "Are you trying tonight?"

And they'd be like, "Yeah."

Ah, c'est ecrit en anglais. THEY LAUGH

C'est util.

We had 12 deliveries two days ago.

I don't understand where it all comes from.

Like, it's never-ending.

We've got a welcome caravan in camp.

That's where all the newcomers who arrive come to.

They'll give them a tent and a welcome pack,

and the welcome pack will contain a hygiene kit, a lamp,

sleeping bag, roll mat, a little emergency food pack,

gloves, scarf, hat and maybe socks. Sort of depends on what we've got.

Hygiene section - fresh toothbrush, toothpaste,

a razor so they can have a nice wet shave.

It's like a very small thing that you can do,

but, again, it's one of those things where it's like a little normality.

And for the women, obviously, this is a really big thing, as well,

because there are so many of the kind of creature comforts

that are very, very difficult to get when you're here in the camp -

shampoo, hair conditioner, hair oils and things like that.

Basically, these food packs,

one goes to every single tent and shelter every single week.

It's all culturally appropriate food.

So, before we were here, when it was just the government

providing some meals for people in camp,

a lot of what they were providing would be very heavily meat-based -

not halal meat -

or kind of very bland, sort of quite European-style food

that just wasn't something that anyone was used to eating.

They're doing tinned fish, as well, at the minute.

Because things are difficult at the moment,

we thought we'd do a push to give something nice and wholesome

and fortifying.

And then oil to cook with, onions,

chickpeas or kidney...

Oh, kidney beans. Chickpeas.

Flour, so people can make breads.

And tea bags and sugar.

The Refugee Community Kitchen are currently serving

2,500 meals a day in camp.

We've got absolutely loads of bags.

This is one of the things we put a request out for on social media,

and they just flooded in.

The idea of being able to give people a bag

that they can put all their stuff in, so it's not, like,

trying to scramble around for a bin bag,

or having to leave things that you want to keep.

And when that's kind of all you've got,

which, you know, it will be for many of the people leaving,

being able to keep it dry

and kind of walk out in a dignified way with your bag,

we feel like it's a small thing that we can try and offer people.

We've ordered 10,000 rain ponchos

so we can make sure we put that in every bag.

If only we had 10,000 pairs of socks

and 10,000 gloves, it would be great.

2015 - 1 million people arrived on the shores of Europe.

The images that we were seeing in the news were upsetting.

I was really sick of just, like, putting something on Facebook

to say that I was outraged

and felt like I needed to do something a bit more,

so myself and some other friends

decided to raise £1,000

and we started a hashtag, which was #helpcalais.

It totally went viral.

We ended up raising almost £56,000 in a week.

There were originally four of us, and we worked from this table.

We were desperate to help and to get some aid

to people who really needed it,

and we were fortunate enough to be able to do that.

We started an Amazon wish list of all the most wanted items.

They phoned us and said,

"You're going to receive 7,000 packages tomorrow,"

and we had absolutely no idea who we were going to give it to.

We'd never even been to Calais.

Living conditions were horrific.

Men, women, children were living in mud.

There was no point giving somebody a sleeping bag

and some fresh clothes and some food if they had no shelter.

Using the internet and social media, calls were put out for builders

and carpenters and build teams, and people just came.

We were basically the driving force behind building the camp.

There were times when we were knocking out over 20 houses a day.

In six or seven months,

it got turned from a tent city...

..to an entire shantytown with 1,500 shelters in total.

You know, God, we built a town.

Was that the right thing to do?

The whole time, it was like, "We shouldn't be doing this.

"Please someone come that knows how to do it.

"But if no-one will, then we'll try and do the very best that we can."

Help Refugees spent almost £2 million

in Calais over the two years,

but probably there's double in kind if you take into account

all the donated goods and the donated volunteer hours.

Everyone here is so focused on helping the people

and so dedicated to giving all of their energy

and all of their time to these people,

and you think, "The world's changing."

Like, "Oh, my God." Like, "People actually care."

And then you go on Facebook and it just knocks you.

"Why are we letting these cockroaches into our country?

"They don't deserve to be here. They're scum."

Like, and...you think, "Fuck."

Our government is going to show this week

that he has muscles, you know? They are going to...

They want to show that they are really...

They really want to destroy,

and probably they also want to push people out of the camp.

The police are giving the legal notice for the eviction of the shops

and so they're nailing the formal notice to the doors of the shops.

Essentially, it's going to just be more of this every day

and then, probably next week,

they're going to start a full eviction.

I think when the French envisioned...

Like, what they envisioned for this place was that,

rather then having the nuisance of having all these people,

like, spread all over the place,

they could just have them in one place

and it'd be easy to control it, and they didn't really ever imagine

that it would get to the size that it is now.

It's the biggest slum in Europe.

CALL TO PRAYER

Tomorrow, 3,000 people are expected to leave.

I don't know how the French authorities

can possibly imagine that they're going to get 3,000 people

out of this place in a calm manner.

I don't know how they're imagining that they're going to herd them out

to be processed in a warehouse.

I really don't understand how they think that's going to work.

Everything in the shop finished tonight, yeah?

Because if you are not finished, the police can come and arrest, OK?

All right.

I think the idea in the government's head is,

"Yeah, they'll just form an orderly line

"and that'll be fine, and then we'll just bulldoze the camp down

"a few weeks later and it'll be gone."

And that's just...

They're not going to go without a protest, without a fight.

They're not going to do that.

And they'll burn the camp down whilst doing that.

It was decided the volunteers weren't going to fight fires.

We were going to leave it to the refugees.

And then a few of us basically said, "Sorry to break it to you, guys,

"but a lot of the refugees will just leave or avoid the fires.

"They're not going to be putting them out.

"These fires will spread really fast.

"Somebody will get caught in them.

"We need to have an active fire response team."

Down towards no man's land on the left-hand side. Over.

"Basically, stop anyone dying from a fire.

"This whole camp is going to go up in flames.

"The entire thing is going to burn down."

Lots of people have been waiting to leave the Jungle for months,

so today is finally the day they get to go,

and they get to stay in France.

You know, people in the UK often ask, like,

"Why do they all want to come to England?"

It's like, "A lot of them want to stay in France.

"They're just not... France isn't coping with the demand of people."

I kind of think that the refugee situation

is pretty much a fact of modern life.

We can kind of try and just destroy the areas where they're living

and try and disperse them and just make it look better

and kind of clean them. They're calling it "nettoyage".

That doesn't actually stop anything, really, but it looks good.

MEN SHOUT, WHISTLE BLOWS

Go back. Please, go back.

-Please, go back.

-Please! Please, go back.

If you push, you don't pass, so sit down now.

One by one, OK?

Hello. How are you?

You have to wait, OK?

Either you have to wait and then you come back in the camp

-and you wait for another time, OK?

-Thank you.

-OK, no problem. No problem.

-Thank you.

MAN GIVES INSTRUCTIONS IN OWN LANGUAGE OVER LOUDSPEAKER

It's been a huge work.

Two years to explain to those people

that there was no future for them there in Calais.

That there was no possibility for them to go to the UK.

There was a solution, which was to seek asylum in France.

I think that many French people did not understand

why we had to go to Calais to convince people

who wanted to go to the UK to stay in France.

I was always telling them,

"If you accept to go to accommodation centres,

"you will see the true face of France."

And they saw it - protection.

-You know where you go?

-In a centre. A better life.

No Jungle life. No animal life. Like a man's life.

They're actually leaving, which is really surprising.

I didn't think that many people would actually go.

But I think it's like herding sheep, isn't it?

One goes and the rest go.

I think a lot of people are still confused.

People are still asking, "Does this mean we go to UK?

"Does this mean we're going to get to UK?"

They're not really sure what the buses are for,

but they know that it'll be a better life than this,

so I think people are more willing to leave.

If it's not this Jungle, it'll be another Jungle.

The Jungle's been going on for 20 years

and I don't see it stopping any time soon.

There's too many refugees in the world that need a better life.

It's just not possible for it to end.

They can try and control it all they want,

but I think in about five, six months,

it'll be the same thing.

Don't know. It's got to end at some point, doesn't it?

DRUMS PLAY, MAN SINGS

Be advised, the legal centre has a large generator in it. Over.

-That is going to be big.

-Copy that.

There's a few things that seem to be popping on the fire. Over.

We'll keep our eyes on it.

Gas.

I'd say the situation is way more complicated

than any of us knew or know.

I went out originally with a kind of open mind for being like,

"Is this the right thing to do?"

Like, "Should we be helping people here?

"Should...? You know, is this the best place for them?"

And after going there, it was...

I was blown away by how complicated it was

and the fact that you've got, you know,

thousands of different people there for different reasons.

-ON RADIO:

-We'll get one of us to look at that and one of us can stay here.

And it's trying to find a way to help the people who needed it.

Copy that.

If you didn't have volunteers there,

the people who were looking out for people in that camp

were either the French authorities or the criminal organisations.

-ON RADIO:

-Fire truck heading out.

And I don't think anyone should be put in the hands of

either of those groups.

What's that fire down there?

There's a new one. That looks like it's on the road.

EXPLOSION

SPEECH DROWNED OUT BY FIRE

We noticed that, as we went to one side of the camp

to put out a live structure that was on fire...

..another prominent structure on the far side of the camp would catch.

So, there certainly became an element of cat and mouse

between us as responders and whoever it was who was lighting fires.

What we expected, but less fighting,

which is, I guess, one small bonus.

A lot of fire. A lot of large fires.

You had many residents with nowhere to go

being told that they must leave, and not knowing what was coming.

I think they just wanted to carry on

as normally as they could and get as much sleep as they could

before they faced the homelessness of the following week.

And so, remarkable to me as it seemed

that people would still be sleeping while the camp was burning down,

they WERE still sleeping. We did wake people up.

In eviction times, people set fire to their shelters,

claiming what is theirs.

It was definitely the refugees that were setting the fires

and I was just there to make sure that no-one really was injured.

Instinctively, the point was to get the gas out,

to preserve life as best we can.

Whoa! Fucking hell. Fucking hell.

Fucking hell.

I'd lost count roughly, but it was in the thirties -

30 or 40 gas canisters that I'd removed.

You know, I did what I could to help

and then I just stopped to take a breather.

FIRE CRACKLES OUTSIDE

I was sat in the caravan just trying to catch my breath

and collect my thoughts.

Sure enough, it was definitely time to leave.

Jungle finished, my friend. Pow!

HE HUMS Fire!

Fucking hell.

EXPLOSION

Jungle blaze.

It was this feeling of, "Thank God this place has gone,"

and, "Thank God that people are safe."

But, I guess, in a really strange way,

the Jungle was my home...

..which is kind of bad to say, but it's true.

It was where I lived, I hung out, I ate, I drank chai.

You know, I listened to music, I chatted to friends,

and I built it, as well, with a lot of other people.

And so watching it all burn down was...quite shocking.

You could understand it -

you know, them wanting to get rid of the Jungle,

because it gradually became a cesspit of a lot of dangerous stuff.

I was glad to see the place go.

Particularly towards the end of my time working there

and living there, I felt like it was an awful place.

I mean, it definitely was. No-one should have had to live there.

6,000 people went away from Calais

for the accommodation centres all around France.

Of those 6,000 people,

how many have obtained asylum in France?

Nearly 70%.

70%, which is a very high level.

You know that, on average, for all asylum seekers in France,

it's about 40%.

There was no future in Calais for them,

and I want to say that again,

including for now and for the future.

There is no reason to go to Calais.

It's over. People don't have to go back to Calais.

It's over. Calais is over.

They did a proper job.

It's ridiculous, isn't it? What a fucking waste.

Strange to think how small this piece of land actually looks.

It's incredible how much could actually fit

into such a small space.

These past couple of weeks have been surreal.

It all ended very suddenly,

and it's been my life for the best part of a year.

So...

So, honestly, I don't know how I feel about it, but...

..it's certainly not a nice thing to look at.

The idea is that this whole warehouse gets emptied.

One of the objectives was to downscale,

basically, the whole operation.

Obviously, before, we were set up here

to provide aid to, like, 10,000 people just down the road.

And now we feel like it's still important that we're here

because we're providing aid to Dunkirk

and other small camps and to people that are returning to Calais.

But it doesn't need to be as big as it was.

It's quieter here, as well.

The number of volunteers has really reduced.

So, we've got a really dedicated team here,

who are working really hard to make this space make sense

and make sure that all the things we get in

are turned around very quickly

and got out to the people that need them.

But we're kind of really low on people

and the number of donations has really dropped, as well,

so we're always struggling

for things like sleeping bags to give out to people

that's really desperately needed

in all the places that we're still giving aid to.

On balance, we were all happy to see it go,

but we miss the things that it gave to us.

I can't really believe that maybe a team of, like...

A core team of kind of five or six of us

managed to get food to 10,000 people every week.

It seems like... I mean, it's just crazy, and I'm really...

I'm like, "If it was somebody else that told me that,

"I'd be really impressed with them."

So, I try and be impressed with myself!

Having dismantled the camp

has actually worsened the situation in Paris.

This is really where you see that we did not solve the problem.

We just moved it to another place.

You cannot stop the flow of human beings.

You know, human beings are resilient.

Human beings are courageous.

If they risk their life in their country,

then it doesn't make any difference

if they risk their life trying to reach their dreams.

You cannot stop them.

When you block water in one place, the water goes to another place.

The flow of human beings is the same.

Hi! How are you?

Yeah, I'm good, thank you. A bit more rice?

SHE LAUGHS Happy to see you guys.

Is that enough? Little bit more?

A lot more? You like rice.

There you go.

Merci. Au revoir.

We've been told we have one hour to distribute,

and then it's finished.

In fact, they don't have any legal right to move us on.

We can stay as long as we like.

We'll stay here until everyone's been fed.

I'm not sure how they'll respond exactly, but we'll see.

Here we are in Calais, nine months later.

We're only about two or three minutes down the road from the camp

and we're just repeating it again.

Same story, different scene, different characters.

The kids from the Calais clearance last year are still here.

They had family in the UK. Their case has been rejected.

They didn't get a clear explanation why.

They didn't receive any paper.

They've kind of come back here to the streets

to keep trying to get on lorries.

Britain spends a lot of time trying to discuss with itself

about how it doesn't want an open door policy,

yet what it fails to realise is that there's a back window policy.

People CAN come here and if you're fast, if you're strong,

if you can hold it together long enough,

eventually, you might make it onto a lorry.

I'm not even going to begin to pretend

like I know the answer as to what's needed here,

but I'm just not really sure Europe knows

what the problem is at the minute.

I don't have to feel the bigger questions, but right now,

young people need support, guidance, love, acceptance,

and that's what we can do at the minute.

It's not going to fix everything,

but it just seems the basics that we can start with

while we wait for our leaders to really come together

and decide what it is they expect from this crisis here in Europe.

The situation now is far worse.

Now what we see on the streets is just mass homelessness.

What they've created is a far more complex and...

..more unmanageable problem than what was here before.

WHISTLE BLOWS

I'm really concerned about being a part of facilitating a new camp.

But it's just a complex situation that we are just a tiny part of.

So, you've got a 15-year-old who's sleeping rough.

It's minus five outside.

Is it the right thing to give him a sleeping bag and a tent?

If you don't give them a tent and a sleeping bag,

they might freeze to death in Calais.

If that was a 15-year-old English boy,

that's never what you would do. You would never do that.

I've decided, in the end,

that one of the most important things that we can do here

is show humanity to other human beings

who are being shown no humanity whatsoever

by the system and by individuals.

The more that I understand about this situation,

the more that I feel overwhelmed by how little it is that I can do.

But I'm glad that I can see it now,

and that I'm not someone who's going to look back on it in 20 years' time

and feel ashamed of myself.

I might feel like I wish I'd done more,

but I won't feel ashamed of myself for not doing something.

It's difficult.

What were you escaping from?

-Indefinite?

-Indefinite, yeah.

They didn't find me.