Shadows still haunt entry port to Dover

Night is falling on the port of Calais. Shadows walk wearily in twos and threes. The shadows meet other shadows, wearing cheap anoraks and woolly hats and trainers.

Even on the brightest, sunniest day, this is one of the most unforgiving places in Europe: a maze of oil refineries, cranes, rusting railway tracks, oblong mountains of containers, scrub-infested waste-ground and ferry terminals defended by razor wire and chain-link fences.

From every dark, freezing corner of the port, the shadows converge silently on the unlit platform of an old freight terminal, beside a tall lighthouse.

Five minutes down the street is the Holiday Inn, full of British holidaymakers paying €145 ($256) a night. They have crossed the Channel to buy heaps of cheap booze.

The "shadows" live in a different world. They form a long and well-behaved queue, waiting for their only warm meal of the day, a chicken and potato stew served by four elderly women.

The shadows materialise into a line of 250 young men, and four young women, from an unlikely collection of nationalities: Afghans, Iranians, Iraqis, Somalis, Eritreans, Sudanese and Pakistanis.

Most nights, 400 people come to eat here. There are fewer tonight because the French police have just held one of their periodic purges of the sans papiers (people without papers). Tonight is also one of the busiest nights for freight in the port of Calais. Many young men have chosen to skip the warm meal in the hope of stowing away aboard one of the Dover-bound trucks queueing to enter the freight terminal.

Three years after the closure of the Red Cross refugee camp at Sangatte, just south of Calais, asylum-seekers are piling up once again on the Channel coast. Paris and London say the closure of Sangatte ended the problem. It did not.

The number of asylum-seekers crossing the water to Kent has slowed to a trickle: an average of three a day, according to the French Government. This compares with up to 200 a day at the worst of the Sangatte crisis in 1999-2001. Entrance to the tunnel or ferry freight yards is now fiercely guarded. Each truck is, in theory, scanned electronically for signs of human presence.

The few who do get through are mostly those who can raise the cash demanded by the professional "people smuggling" networks. An elaborate gang, charging €7000 ($12,300) a head, was dismantled this month by police in Britain, France, Italy, Greece and Turkey. The shadows haunting Calais do not play in that league.

The six French local charities who help the refugees say that the number of impoverished, would-be illegal emigrants to Britain straggling through to the French coast fell substantially in 2003-2004. Now the numbers are rising again. They may not be reaching Dover in any great quantities but that merely increases the desperate, shivering numbers in the port of Calais.

"There are 400 to 500 people here at any one time, compared to 200 last year," said Jean-Claude Lenoir, one of the chief organisers of the Salam support group, which provides the nightly warm meal beside the lighthouse. "They are living in the most indescribable and inhuman conditions. They come mostly from hot countries. We fear that some of them will die of hypothermia unless the authorities allow some kind of shelter. We don't mean a Sangatte II, but just an emergency place where they can go when it freezes."

The refugees are courteous and willing to tell their stories but long conversations are difficult. With a few exceptions, their English is fragmentary. It is bitterly cold. They are anxious to eat quickly and return to their largely hopeless quest for a truck with an unlocked back door and an unobservant driver.

Mohammed Ali Husseini is 17. He has come to Calais from a village in northern Pakistan. "Here, police very bad. France, very bad country. They beat me today, look." He shows his arm, which has no sign of injury. "I go to England. England good. Job in England."

"In Pakistan, many bad people. Shia. Sunni. Fight. Must go away. I come by foot and by truck. I pay. No more money now. In England maybe job."

A police van passes menacingly. It does not stop. The multiracial queue, placid until now, steps forward like a chorus line to jeer and gesticulate. Different cultures express derision in different ways. The van departs amid a discordant symphony of 10 different types of abuse.

The French authorities have periodic swoops in which scores of refugees are arrested and placed in hostels hundreds of kilometres away from Calais. Most leave the hostels the next day and make their way back to the Channel coast.

The French Interior Minister, Nicolas Sarkozy, has spoken of organising, jointly with the British, charter flights to take the Calais asylum-seekers back to their home countries. Nothing has happened.

The legalities of the situation are complicated. The refugees are in Europe illegally and refuse to seek asylum in France. Under the courts' usual interpretation of French law, they cannot be sent home to a country where there is civil conflict. Hence the cat and mouse game with the police.

Abde, a 20-year-old Somalian says: "I was soldier, not by my choice. I walk from Somalia to Ethiopia. I get truck to Libya. I pay to get small boat to Italy. In Italy people very bad. No job. I pay rest of my money to get truck to France. Everyone say go to Britain, in Britain there are jobs. No questions. I here a month. People say you can jump truck to Britain but I think it is not so possible. It is very cold here. I never know cold like it is cold here. I live on street or in broken houses. Maybe, I go back Italy. In Italy it is warm."

For nearly a decade there has been an intractable problem in Calais, in which all sides are partly right and partly wrong. The first refugees arriving in large numbers in 1995-1996 were Bosnians, Albanians, Kurds and Romanian Gypsies. Each year since then a different dramatis personae has washed up, flotsam from political or economic storms on the European-Asian-African landmass.

In 1999 the Sangatte Red Cross camp was set up in an unused hangar to deal with the kind of humanitarian crisis which is building again in Calais. Sangatte rapidly became part of the problem. The camp attracted thousands more refugees and gave them a secure base camp from which to mount daily assaults on the freight yard and docks.

The closure of Sangatte in December 2002 has reduced and displaced the problem but has not ended it. Britain cannot reasonably accept all migrants who wish to cross the Channel. France, which has other illegal migration problems, cannot easily absorb or send home the Calais "shadows".

The morning after the feeding of the 250, the Calais docks are cold and drizzly. No one is around. Where have all the refugees gone? Close to the freight terminal, on the north side between a factory and an oil refinery, there is a patch of scrubby woodland. From the outside, you see little. Pushing through the trees, you find a series of huts, little more than heaps of sticks. This, if anywhere, is Sangatte II.

- INDEPENDENT