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Migrant Clashes in French City Lead to More Police, and Fears of More Violence

PARIS — A day after violent clashes in the northern French city of Calais injured at least 18 people and left four migrants in critical condition on Friday, local organizations and officials faced a lingering question: Could tensions among migrants spin further out of control?

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By
ELIAN PELTIER
, New York Times

PARIS — A day after violent clashes in the northern French city of Calais injured at least 18 people and left four migrants in critical condition on Friday, local organizations and officials faced a lingering question: Could tensions among migrants spin further out of control?

“This is a level of violence never seen before,” Interior Minister Gérard Collomb said Thursday night after arriving in Calais, where three clashes had erupted and migrants were shot. Collomb called the situation “unbearable” both for local residents and the 800 migrants who live there.

He announced that police reinforcements would be sent to Calais, a port city that serves as a gateway to Britain. The clashes appeared to be the worst violence there since fights in July left 16 migrants wounded. Other clashes, in June 2016, injured at least 40 people.

“Migrants have always owned firearms,” said Claire Millot, the secretary-general of the local aid group Salam. “What is new,” she added, “is that four young men are now fighting for their lives because they were shot after getting food.”

An official from the local prefecture said that a fifth migrant who had been shot did not have life-threatening injuries, and that two police officers had also been wounded.

It remained unclear Friday how the brawl started, but police were searching for a 37-year-old Afghan suspected of having fired first at a group of Eritreans, according to news reports.

“We stopped everything, the police came quickly, and everyone got scattered amid tear gas,” said François Guennoc of the Migrants’ Hostel charity, describing how more than 100 migrants from Africa, armed with iron rods and sticks, had tried to beat a group of 20 Afghans during a food distribution.

Human rights workers said that tensions have increased as migrants have seen their chances of reaching Britain from Calais whittled by a tougher stance by the French and British governments.

In mid-January, Prime Minister Theresa May of Britain agreed during a meeting with France’s president, Emmanuel Macron, that the British government would pay an additional $62 million to step up security measures around Calais.

Yet, organizations say, at least 200 more migrants, mostly young men from Eritrea, have reached Calais since that meeting, where Macron and May announced an accord that aimed to reduce the time unaccompanied minors spent there.

“They mistakenly thought that they could reach Britain more easily,” Guennoc said.

But the French government has showed no leniency. “The message I want to get across is that if you want to go to Britain, it’s not here you should come,” Collomb said Thursday while visiting local authorities and security forces in Calais.

France received a record number of asylum claims last year — 100,000 compared with 85,000 in 2016 — but no other town has embodied the challenges posed by immigration more than Calais, where a squalid encampment known as the Jungle was once home to more than 10,000 people before it was dismantled in 2016.

“Under no circumstances will we allow the Jungle to come back,” Macron said in January, when he visited Calais to explain his policies on immigration.

The government plans to present legislation on immigration and asylum in the spring, and Macron has vowed to step up deportations against those who come to France for economic reasons and speed up the process for those who are fleeing conflicts and persecution. This approach, he argued, would mix “humanity” with “efficiency.”

Collomb, the interior minister, has become the face of the latter. In Calais, he has expressed support for the police, whose treatment of migrants was criticized by a Human Rights Watch report that denounced their systematic use of pepper spray against migrants.

When a report by the Ministry of Interior found “it plausible that there was a breach in security force doctrine and ethics,” Collomb dismissed some of the accusations.

“In Calais, the true violence, it is the one of the traffickers who exploit with cynicism the refugees’ misery and fear,” he said in a post on Twitter on Thursday.

Collomb said that the authorities would take over the distribution of food in Calais within the next two weeks, appearing to criticize local groups when he said the process can’t be “wild.”

Millot, whose organization, Salam, distributed lunches from 2002 to 2015 in Calais and now serves 600 breakfasts every morning, as well as soups at night, said that charities had yet to see how public workers would distribute food.

“On the one hand, the government orders its police forces to dismantle the migrants’ tents, and on the other, it is going to distribute food to those who saw their shelter torn down,” Millot said. “Seriously?”

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