The Edge of the Plain: How Borders Make and Break Our World by James Crawford

Author:James Crawford [Crawford, James]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781838852023
Google: XaHnzgEACAAJ
Publisher: Canongate Books
Published: 2022-08-04T20:36:49+00:00

7

BORDER BURNING

Dusk settles over a forest on a mountainside. Lights glimmer a mile or so down below. A semi-circle of brightness: a tiny coastal city. Beyond the city, a wide expanse of sea fades into the horizon. Among the trees, preparations are underway. Men and adolescent boys – there are almost no women, no infants – take off their shoes and sandals and wrap the soles of their feet and the palms of their hands in duct tape.

Their beds are blankets on the ground, laid out beneath sheets of tarpaulin strung between tree branches and tied off with strips of fabric from torn T-shirts. They have to be ready to move at any time. Police hunt for them in the forests, raid their camps, and set fire to any shelters and belongings that they find.

Each camp – for there are many strung all over the mountains that curve around this coastal city – has a chairman, a leader. He (it is always a ‘he’) runs the operation, apportioning tasks like finding food, carrying water, hunting for plastic for new shelters, cooking. And making ladders – fashioning them from strips of wood bound together with whatever material can be scavenged, topping them with makeshift hooks formed out of bent carpenters’ nails.

It has all been building up to this moment. Weeks or months in the forests for some. Years for others. This night the group will leave the camp – in their hundreds, maybe even a thousand or more. Each prays that they will not return, that this time they will make it. It is why they are here, why they have come – some travelling thousands of miles northwards to reach this point.

Now they move as silently as possible down through the forest, towards the lights. Their ladders are already waiting for them, stashed in bushes at the foot of the mountain, just metres from the edge of the city.

On the chairman’s order the first wave breaks cover. Ahead of them are four huge fences. The first is a double fence, three metres tall and topped with rolls of razor wire. Directly below it, on the other side, is a two-metre-deep ditch. Next is a second fence, twice the height of the first, fitted with an overhanging flexible lip. Behind it are two more six-metre-tall fences, the spaces between them filled with ‘nets’ of barbed wire.

They throw their ladders at the first fence, hooking them into the dense clusters of razor wire. Once they have made it to the top, the second wave runs out and begins the climb. Then the third and final wave comes. There are hundreds of bodies on the fence now. And it is only once all three waves have made the summit of the first fence that the ladders are pulled free and the process begins all over again – with the next fence, and the one after that, and the one after that.

It is easier to climb the chain link in bare feet. The wraps of duct tape offer some protection from the razor and barbed wire, but not much.

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