Suzanne Harrington: Dehumanizing migrants won't solve anything

Watching the state funeral of Samuel Paty on French TV as I fill out the track and trace form to re-enter the UK, where I will hide in my house for two weeks in line with current UK government requirements, the words ‘liberté, egalité, fraternité’ is beamed onto the wall of the Sorbonne. 

The funeral of M Paty, the teacher murdered in Paris by a deranged teenager for the imagined disrespect of an imagined deity, is being held in the courtyard of the country’s most eminent place of learning. 

President Macron makes a moving speech, and the murdered teacher’s friend speaks emotionally of his passion for teaching, learning, how he loved his work. There is a poem written especially for M Paty, a small orchestra, and the U2 track One is played as six uniformed men carry the teacher’s coffin. It is a dignified and fitting response to such an act of senseless savagery.

Three hundred kms northwest in Calais, on Rue Pasteur Martin Luther King, police armed with guns, truncheons, tear gas and pepper spray have halted the distribution of warm food to the hundreds of migrants and asylum seekers living rough on the edge of town. 

The town had tried to ban the food distribution throughout its entire area, but Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch got involved, so now the town bans the distributions on a street by street basis, which changes so regularly that nobody can keep up. 

The distributions – the only food the destitute migrants get – have become increasingly stressful, with police fining the distributors. 

The distributors, who prep and cook the donated food in a dilapidated warehouse and transport it in knackered vans, are unpaid volunteers, mostly in their twenties, from all over the EU. 

Unfunded, overwhelmed, doing the work of NGOs. (And now Covid – they carry on, with masks and gloves). The migrants and asylum seekers have fled war, famine, climate change. They are destitute in Calais because they want to reach the UK, where they have family connections. 

None of this is news – Calais has always been where it is – but what is new is the heightened action of the state.

People look-on in the Calais migrant camp, known as the Jungle, as demolition of the camp continues in Calais, France

Since the Jungle camp was demolished in October 2016, migrants have been living in scrubland, on roadsides, under bridges. The state response has been to cut down all vegetation in areas that could provide shelter, confiscate tents and blankets, disrupt the distribution of food and water, refuse the provision of showers and loos.

Police violence has been normalised. It is everyday. Driving through the town centre, I see six heavily armed officers pepper spray a lone skinny young migrant outside a shopping centre, in the middle of a busy street. 

Calais is indifferent; the migrants have successfully been dehumanized. The irony is these men, at the end of unimaginable journeys from homes they never wanted to leave in the first place, tend to be educated professionals themselves. Like teachers.