Africa and France by Dominic Thomas

Author:Dominic Thomas
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Indiana University Press
Published: 2013-09-22T04:00:00+00:00

Besson in the Jungle

These mental and imaginative arrangements are rendered additionally complex by the physical nature of the borders and boundaries in question, located at the perimeters of the E.U. (such as the coastlines of France, Italy, Spain, Malta, and Greece), the exit points of the global south (such as Manilla, the Spanish enclave in Morocco24), or sites such as Sangatte along the northeast coastal perimeter of France, the sea border with Britain, and the Schengen free circulation area. In the case of Sangatte, the situation is all the more complex because France was effectively merely a transit country for third-country nationals seeking entry to the United Kingdom, which lies outside of the Schengen Agreement. As Violaine Carrère has shown,

In the case of Sangatte, the problem arises on the way out of the Schengen space where the border is blocked. However, this is in fact only an illusion since those who are prevented from passing are only faced with this obstacle because they were not welcomed earlier onto the Union’s territory even though they were permitted to cross the country. The creation of “pockets” in which migrants find themselves blocked thus highlights both a closure and an opening: the camp certainly points to a border yet it is filled with people that have been allowed in, all the while pretending not to notice them.25

As a consequence of a broad range of economic, social, and political factors that triggered large-scale migration initially in the late 1990s, individuals and groups of Afghans, Iranians, Iraqis, Kurds, and Kosovans (among other nationality groups) found themselves unable to cross the Channel and (therefore legally) enter the U.K.26 An emergency humanitarian center (Centre d’hébergement et d’accueil d’urgence humanitaire, CHAUH)27 was opened in December 1998 and administered by the Red Cross,28 but then officially closed down in November 2002 by then–British Home Secretary David Blunkett and French Minister of the Interior Nicolas Sarkozy. Seeking an expedient solution to what became a visible political problem, procedures were followed in order to render the broader humanitarian problem invisible. However, these efforts proved futile, and although Sarkozy encouraged a “toughening of immigration policy”29 (“Après Sangatte” 2009, 199) all the way through to 2007, evidence showed that some 28 percent (roughly 17,377) of all undocumented foreigners taken in for police questioning in France were in the Pas-de-Calais area (“Après Sangatte,” 198). New migrants kept arriving, and a group of Afghan Pashtuns eventually sought refuge in a wooded area that became known as the “jungle.” “In Pashto and Persian,” Jérôme Equer has explained, “the word for forest is djangal,”30 and was soon transformed into “jungle,” thereby adopting a metonymic quality that revealed pejorative concepts and disparaging associations to savagery and animalistic qualities (the poor living conditions also served to reinforce these perceptions), while also of course encouraging public disidentification with the plight of the migrants.

Migration patterns and changes in E.U. law have yielded new challenges and responses. Migrants have literally found themselves welcomed (we shall return to this term) in camps, a

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