France’s Calais migrant camp, home to around 7,000 refugees and a hotbed of unrest and violence, will completely shut down “as quickly as possible,” French Interior Minister Bernard Cazeneuve announced Friday.
This comes months after about half of the camp was already shut down.
That effort was marked with clashes between police and migrants. When Calais Mayor Natacha Bouchart announced her intention to fully close the camp in June, migrants reacted by throwing Molotov cocktails onto the highways.
The camp consists mostly of men from the Middle East and Africa who are trying to make it into the United Kingdom. It has become notoriously controversial, gaining the nickname “jungle.”
Truckers and drivers in Calais, which sits on the northern coast of France, have been consistently harassed by migrants — a driver was even ambushed in August when a tree was pushed in front of his car.
The camp is reportedly crime-ridden, with multiple children allegedly being being raped and fights breaking out, resulting in one death.
“It’s an explosive situation. There are fights all the time in the camp,” one French policeman said, according to the Telegraph.
The camp’s closure, however, may not have much effect on the presence of migrants and refugees in France. One survey of migrants in the Calais camp, done after the earlier eviction effort, revealed that 80 percent would either stay in Calais or go to another refugee camp in Dunkirk, France.
Cazeneuve stated France’s plans to construct thousands of residences and homes for migrants, Al-Jazeera reported Friday.
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