Calais, France: In the far corner of a cemetery on the outskirts of Calais, a couple of gravediggers chat quietly as they wait beside a small, freshly dug hole.
The conversation stops as they are joined by two officials. Moments later a tiny coffin is lifted from a nearby car and lowered into the ground. The whole scene is over in a few minutes.
Samir Khedija, a stillborn baby boy, died when his mother, an Eritrean woman in her 20s, miscarried 22 weeks into her pregnancy after falling from the back of a lorry as she attempted to cross the Channel to the UK.
Buried two weeks ago, he is one of the latest victims of the humanitarian crisis that is engulfing the French port, exacerbated by a ferry workers’ strike that started six weeks ago.
Calais increasingly resembles a fortress. Hundreds of metres of high fences topped with razor wire are being erected along the motorways, while more fences and a new secure parking zone have been promised. And at the port’s northern fringes a sprawling shanty town, now home to more than 3,000 people, is becoming more permanent by the day.
“The situation is getting worse and worse, as the migrants have to find ever more dangerous routes to try and get … to Great Britain,” says Cécile Bossy, a medical volunteer who works with migrants in Calais.
Images of burning barricades and hundreds of people trying to break into the back of lorries at the peak of the holiday season have sparked fierce political debate on both sides of the Channel, once again focusing attention on Europe’s simmering migrant crisis.
Lorry drivers complain they have been threatened by those trying to board their vehicles, and officials say more than 1,000 people a night have been trying to get on to lorries or trains bound for the UK. Some haulage firms now bypass Calais altogether.
The French authorities do not keep a record of how many migrants are killed or seriously injured attempting to cross the Channel but an investigation by the Guardian last year found at least 15 people had died in the preceding 12 months. In the past six weeks, the Guardian understands, at least six more have died.
Among the warren of tents, plastic shelters and piles of rubbish that dominate the new “Jungle” camp near Calais, migrants told of terrible journeys.
Sitting on a piece of scrubland, Teddy, from Eritrea, watched as groups of young men tried to dodge French police guarding the motorway above the camp. He was forced to leave his homeland after his father was killed by the Eritrean regime two years ago. He survived the Sahara and spent a “terrible year” in a Libyan prison. “My girlfriend is still there I think,” he said. “This is not good but compared to what I have seen it is OK.”
Bahad, 16, left his home in Ethiopia a year ago. He said his parents were killed by the regime there. Sitting in a child’s car seat outside the two-man tent that he shared with six other teenagers he spoke quietly, explaining how 10 of the 40 people who crossed the Sahara with him fell from the back of the smuggler’s pickup truck they were travelling in due to exhaustion.
The new Jungle opened earlier this year and is already one of the biggest migrant camps in western Europe. It is part of the wider crisis that has seen more than 185,000 people crossing the Mediterranean into southern Europe since January. Most will try to claim asylum in other EU countries — Germany and Sweden top the list, with the UK more than halfway down. But some will end up in the Jungle risking their lives to get to the UK.
Those who stay in the camp more than a few days are near the bottom of the migration food chain. People trying to get to the UK who have more money, and better contacts, often avoid the port altogether, paying between £1,000 (Dh5,745) and £4,000 to gangs to be put on to lorries bound for the UK hundreds of kilometres before they reach the coast.
The rest are reduced to a potentially deadly game of cat and mouse, trying to outwit the French police and private security firms to jump on to lorries — and, increasingly, trains — bound for the UK.
Calais has had some sort of migrant camp for more than 15 years. Since 2002 they have followed a pattern: a makeshift “jungle” or squat appears, providing shelter for a few hundred people for a few months before being bulldozed by the authorities.
But the new Jungle, nestled beside a motorway that leads to the port, feels different. It is bigger and increasingly better organised than most of its predecessors. And, amid the daily chaos and squalor, there are unmistakable signs that it is becoming more permanent.
Adil, from Sudan, arrived six months ago. The former mechanic said he had made it to the UK once but had been deported to Italy because he did not have the right paperwork.
He made his way to Calais to try to get back to the UK where the people “are so friendly”. He soon noticed migrants using bikes to get around, and saw an opportunity. He managed to get hold of thrown out parts, and started a fledgling business buying, fixing and selling second-hand bikes.
“It’s a good business,” Adil said with a broad smile as he tried to fix the brakes on a rickety blue bike in a makeshift workshop outside his tent. “People buy a bike to get to where they try and get on the lorries or trains. If they are lucky, then they are gone and don’t need the bike any more. Then I go and pick them up and sell them again!”
There are more than a dozen shops at the camp selling everything from hair weaves to energy drinks, a couple of cafés and even a communal tent with an old stereo, playing mainly Ethiopian music, that serves as a rudimentary nightclub.
There is also a 30ft high church built out of wooden pallets and plastic sheeting, at least two mosques and — as of two weeks ago — a school.
But despite the signs of a burgeoning community, there have been fights between rival groups and a few months ago a fire wiped out a large area of tents. And the living conditions for many of those living there are leading to widespread health problems.
Bossy, the volunteer, argues that conditions are worse than in refugee camps in war-torn countries — because no one will step up. “We can’t even call it a refugee camp — because it doesn’t have globally agreed humanitarian standards,” she says.
The French authorities appear to be giving tacit, unpublicised, support. In the past few weeks street lighting has gone up, a few wooden toilet blocks have been built and another water point has been installed. A former children’s hospital at one end of the site provides shelter for 100 women with children, has a few showers and distributes one hot meal a day.
But while the structures seem more permanent, life for those living in the camp remains chaotic and transient.
