Author: STEFAN SCHMID
Serious police abuses have taken place in the French port city of Dunkirk this week, aid organisations have claimed. The accusations follow the mass eviction of people, mostly Kurdish-Iraqi refugees, from a camp on the outskirts of the city.
Aid groups in northern France say police are using non-lethal weapons such as pepper spray and tasers to clear people from the area.
Dunkirk sits just across the channel from south-east England. It has been home to refugees and migrants hoping to reach the UK for many years. Aid groups told The Canary that police evicted around 800 individuals from the camp on 6 September. There are now said to be around 600 people in the port city with no settled place to sleep.
The UK government has spent more than £150m on security around border ports in north-west France since the Calais “Jungle” camp was cleared in 2016.
Evictions
Around 200 officers were involved in the clearing of the estimated 800 people on the site at Grande-Synthe. Officials rounded up 400 people, including almost 100 children and 60 families, onto buses destined for alternative accommodation. But by midnight, two buses had returned, as there was allegedly no space in the accommodation centres.
Aid organisation Help Refugees told The Canary that some people on the buses had no food or water for the entire day. Upon the return of the buses, it says over 400 people were then “left on the streets to fend for themselves”. According to the charity, police surrounded the former campsite in a perimeter, leaving no access to water.
