Latest news with #Karwan
Sydney Morning Herald
4 days ago
- Politics
- Sydney Morning Herald
‘The migrants are everywhere': People smugglers are winning the battle of the beach
Karwan and Sara watch as smugglers hoist Mohammed, their six-year-old son, and Alina, their four-year-old daughter, onto their shoulders, wade out to sea, and bundle them onto an overloaded dinghy. Behind them, a crowd of 200 or so migrants are herded like cattle, waist-deep in the water, waiting their turn. The people smugglers shout and shove them into position. More than 70 passengers are eventually squeezed on board the barely seaworthy vessel, their feet dangling over the side, ready to motor towards Dover. A French police patrol boat lazily circles the inflatable dinghy, watching the chaos unfold. It is 6am on Gravelines beach, and all in a day's work for the smugglers who increasingly control this sweeping stretch of coastline. All they have to do now is wade through the surf and head back unhindered towards the dunes 300 metres away to regroup and plan tomorrow's crossings. The scenes are painfully familiar to any of the 1200 gendarmes deployed along France's northern beaches. Some told London's Telegraph they are outmanoeuvred and outnumbered by the smugglers, who adapt their tactics at pace. 'We are helpless ... there is a French expression 'donner de la tête', we are overwhelmed and don't know where to start, we don't know where to go, there are so many boats leaving,' says Marc Musiol, a French border police officer in Pas-de-Calais. One well-placed international policing source labelled the situation a 'failure'. Since the beginning of this year, there have been 22,360 arrivals via small boats into the UK – an almost 60 per cent increase on last year. The numbers are rising as British Prime Minister Keir Starmer promises to 'smash the gangs' and hails a new deal with French President Emmanuel Macron to stem the tide. But authorities here suggest the 'one-in, one-out' pledge is not worth the paper it is written on. Some also pour scorn on Macron for talking tough without following through with concrete changes. The scene on the beaches of Gravelines this week is one replicated along the coast of northern France day in, day out, when the weather permits. In the early hours, police patrol cars scour the 200 kilometres of coastline between the border of Belgium and the Bay de Somme estuary. Police use drones fitted with night-vision technology to scan the dunes where the migrants, mostly young adult men, will camp for the night before they attempt to cross the Channel. But the distances make it easy for smugglers and migrants to hide from stretched authorities. Gendarmes drive beige 4x4s in teams of three, moving down the shoreline and surveying the waters for inflatable dinghies. 'We are here every night, it is always the same, it never changes,' one officer said as he patrolled a beach car park. 'The migrants are everywhere.' The London Telegraph encountered six patrols in the space of two hours during a 3am drive from Calais towards Wimereux, a seaside commune south of Boulogne and another known hotspot for Channel crossings. Interceptions remain scarce. Smugglers launch simultaneous crossings from up to 10 beaches to divide police attention and resources. Pre-inflated dinghies are launched from waterways and canals dozens of kilometres from the pick-up point and sail down the coast. The smugglers use weather apps, such as Windy, on their phones to help them plan their crossings. The apps provide up-to-the-second information on wind speed, direction and the swell. Sentries linked to the smuggling gangs are posted in the dunes and near the camps to watch for the boats. They alert over the phone that the dinghy is arriving and that it is time for its passengers to get on board. Musiol, the border police officer, said: 'There are always small groups of smugglers who know our beaches very, very well.' Often carrying nothing other than orange life jackets around their necks, the migrants sprint across the beach, hoping to do so before the police have time to react. Sometimes officers do, and fire a salvo of tear gas from grenade launchers. But this is often not enough. 'You have smugglers and their friends who throw stones at the police officers to distract them and to get the migrants onto the boat as quickly as possible,' one officer said. He estimated there are only three to six police for every 50 migrants trying to enter the sea. 'We have a lack of officers and you have a huge, huge amount of the coast to monitor,' he said. 'It is not possible with the number of personnel the border police have, the gendarmerie, to monitor this entire stretch of coastline and beach.' The camps where migrants live are even more lawless. Inside the main camp at Loon Plage, 12 kilometres south-west of Dunkirk, shootings and stabbings between warring gangs for control of the best beaches are commonplace. On July 8, a 44-year-old Kurd from Iraq was shot five times in the legs at the camp. About two dozen armed police were deployed that day to quell the violence. The month before, two migrants were shot dead and another five injured. Balkan crime groups have established themselves as the dominant players in orchestrating the operations, but police sources say East African gangs out of Eritrea, especially, are rivalling them. One police source with knowledge of the people-smuggling gangs said efforts to stop the migrants were futile without a strategy to break up the wider smuggling networks. 'If you are dealing with it in Calais, you have failed, you are never going to succeed,' they said. 'You have got to look at it earlier on and deal with the cause of all of these problems. 'They are going to keep trying. A week later, they are going to give it another go. What else are they going to do, camp in Calais for the rest of their life? It's just not realistic.' Locals along the coast, meanwhile, are fed up with seeing their coastline dominated by years of crisis and inaction. Alain Boonefaes, the deputy mayor of Gravelines, whose remit includes the town's safety and security, admitted the problem is endemic and there is little to be done. The seaside resort town, 30 kilometres south-east of Dunkirk, relies on tourism for survival but can experience up to 350 migrant departures in a single evening. The mayor and many others in the town are deeply sceptical about Macron's one-in-one-out policy, agreed with Starmer during the French president's three-day visit to London last week. The trial would allow the UK to return selected numbers of small boat arrivals to France. In exchange, the UK will admit an equal number of asylum seekers with legitimate ties, such as family. Even the police are sceptical. 'Macron has made political announcements and not concrete ones,' Musiol said. 'We have the impression that nothing will change in terms of the police officers' work itself. 'You can put a police officer on every beach on the Opal Coast. The migrants will continue to come. We must stop this problem at the source – that is, in the country of origin.' He said there was 'no lasting solution that could stop the problem' along the coast here and in Britain, where migrants arrived and were ushered into camps and hotels. On Thursday morning, the London Telegraph saw first-hand the limits of the policing operation. Gendarmes fired a salvo of tear gas into the dunes 300 metres from the shore, where hundreds of migrants had camped overnight. Coughing and spluttering, they were led out onto the beach by the smugglers, away from the haze of white smoke and towards the shore. There they sat and waited for about 10 minutes for the 'taxi boat', launched from the west on River Aa, which runs through the centre of Gravelines and leads out into the sea, to arrive. The majority of the migrants were young men from the Middle East or Vietnam. An Iranian family of four – mother and father, Karwan and Sara, and son and daughter, Alina and Mohammed – were a rare sight. Sara, one of only three women in the crowd, spoke in broken English of how her family had travelled nearly 9000 kilometres from Tehran and had journeyed through Turkey and Germany to reach Calais. She indicated they had spent 10 days at one of the camps near Dunkirk. This was their first attempt at a crossing. Sara dabbed tears from her eyes with her headscarf, watching Alina, her pink trousers pulled up to her knees, splash and dance joyfully in the water, oblivious to the perils around her. Karwan gave no answer when asked what had made the family leave Tehran. He waded through the water as a 'taxi boat', already filled with 50 or so passengers, drew near to the shore. Sara and Karwan walked through the surf holding each other's hands, also clutching life jackets. Around them, smugglers bullied their human cargo into place. Alina and Mohammed were carried on the shoulders of smugglers and handed over to migrants already on board the boats, who hauled them in. They were followed by their mother and father, who sat in the centre of the flimsy dinghy. The passengers cheered and waved to those left behind on the beach and sailed, under a police escort, towards the UK. One of those left on the shore was Leo, a 25-year-old aspiring engineering student from Ghazni, in eastern Afghanistan, who had paid smugglers €1500 ($2700) to ferry him across the Channel. Loading He had hoped to join his sister, who had made it to the UK last week via a small boat and is living in Manchester. 'I left because of the Taliban,' he said. 'This was my first go. I will go again. I will go to London. My sister is married. The rest of my family, my papa, my mother, are still in Afghanistan.' Leo had fled his home country at the age of 13, making his way through Iran, Turkey, Germany, Sweden, and now Calais over the course of more than a decade. He followed the others up the hill towards the dune and back to the ramshackle, gang-ridden camp he calls home in Dunkirk.
The Age
4 days ago
- Politics
- The Age
‘The migrants are everywhere': People smugglers are winning the battle of the beach
Karwan and Sara watch as smugglers hoist Mohammed, their six-year-old son, and Alina, their four-year-old daughter, onto their shoulders, wade out to sea, and bundle them onto an overloaded dinghy. Behind them, a crowd of 200 or so migrants are herded like cattle, waist-deep in the water, waiting their turn. The people smugglers shout and shove them into position. More than 70 passengers are eventually squeezed on board the barely seaworthy vessel, their feet dangling over the side, ready to motor towards Dover. A French police patrol boat lazily circles the inflatable dinghy, watching the chaos unfold. It is 6am on Gravelines beach, and all in a day's work for the smugglers who increasingly control this sweeping stretch of coastline. All they have to do now is wade through the surf and head back unhindered towards the dunes 300 metres away to regroup and plan tomorrow's crossings. The scenes are painfully familiar to any of the 1200 gendarmes deployed along France's northern beaches. Some told London's Telegraph they are outmanoeuvred and outnumbered by the smugglers, who adapt their tactics at pace. 'We are helpless ... there is a French expression 'donner de la tête', we are overwhelmed and don't know where to start, we don't know where to go, there are so many boats leaving,' says Marc Musiol, a French border police officer in Pas-de-Calais. One well-placed international policing source labelled the situation a 'failure'. Since the beginning of this year, there have been 22,360 arrivals via small boats into the UK – an almost 60 per cent increase on last year. The numbers are rising as British Prime Minister Keir Starmer promises to 'smash the gangs' and hails a new deal with French President Emmanuel Macron to stem the tide. But authorities here suggest the 'one-in, one-out' pledge is not worth the paper it is written on. Some also pour scorn on Macron for talking tough without following through with concrete changes. The scene on the beaches of Gravelines this week is one replicated along the coast of northern France day in, day out, when the weather permits. In the early hours, police patrol cars scour the 200 kilometres of coastline between the border of Belgium and the Bay de Somme estuary. Police use drones fitted with night-vision technology to scan the dunes where the migrants, mostly young adult men, will camp for the night before they attempt to cross the Channel. But the distances make it easy for smugglers and migrants to hide from stretched authorities. Gendarmes drive beige 4x4s in teams of three, moving down the shoreline and surveying the waters for inflatable dinghies. 'We are here every night, it is always the same, it never changes,' one officer said as he patrolled a beach car park. 'The migrants are everywhere.' The London Telegraph encountered six patrols in the space of two hours during a 3am drive from Calais towards Wimereux, a seaside commune south of Boulogne and another known hotspot for Channel crossings. Interceptions remain scarce. Smugglers launch simultaneous crossings from up to 10 beaches to divide police attention and resources. Pre-inflated dinghies are launched from waterways and canals dozens of kilometres from the pick-up point and sail down the coast. The smugglers use weather apps, such as Windy, on their phones to help them plan their crossings. The apps provide up-to-the-second information on wind speed, direction and the swell. Sentries linked to the smuggling gangs are posted in the dunes and near the camps to watch for the boats. They alert over the phone that the dinghy is arriving and that it is time for its passengers to get on board. Musiol, the border police officer, said: 'There are always small groups of smugglers who know our beaches very, very well.' Often carrying nothing other than orange life jackets around their necks, the migrants sprint across the beach, hoping to do so before the police have time to react. Sometimes officers do, and fire a salvo of tear gas from grenade launchers. But this is often not enough. 'You have smugglers and their friends who throw stones at the police officers to distract them and to get the migrants onto the boat as quickly as possible,' one officer said. He estimated there are only three to six police for every 50 migrants trying to enter the sea. 'We have a lack of officers and you have a huge, huge amount of the coast to monitor,' he said. 'It is not possible with the number of personnel the border police have, the gendarmerie, to monitor this entire stretch of coastline and beach.' The camps where migrants live are even more lawless. Inside the main camp at Loon Plage, 12 kilometres south-west of Dunkirk, shootings and stabbings between warring gangs for control of the best beaches are commonplace. On July 8, a 44-year-old Kurd from Iraq was shot five times in the legs at the camp. About two dozen armed police were deployed that day to quell the violence. The month before, two migrants were shot dead and another five injured. Balkan crime groups have established themselves as the dominant players in orchestrating the operations, but police sources say East African gangs out of Eritrea, especially, are rivalling them. One police source with knowledge of the people-smuggling gangs said efforts to stop the migrants were futile without a strategy to break up the wider smuggling networks. 'If you are dealing with it in Calais, you have failed, you are never going to succeed,' they said. 'You have got to look at it earlier on and deal with the cause of all of these problems. 'They are going to keep trying. A week later, they are going to give it another go. What else are they going to do, camp in Calais for the rest of their life? It's just not realistic.' Locals along the coast, meanwhile, are fed up with seeing their coastline dominated by years of crisis and inaction. Alain Boonefaes, the deputy mayor of Gravelines, whose remit includes the town's safety and security, admitted the problem is endemic and there is little to be done. The seaside resort town, 30 kilometres south-east of Dunkirk, relies on tourism for survival but can experience up to 350 migrant departures in a single evening. The mayor and many others in the town are deeply sceptical about Macron's one-in-one-out policy, agreed with Starmer during the French president's three-day visit to London last week. The trial would allow the UK to return selected numbers of small boat arrivals to France. In exchange, the UK will admit an equal number of asylum seekers with legitimate ties, such as family. Even the police are sceptical. 'Macron has made political announcements and not concrete ones,' Musiol said. 'We have the impression that nothing will change in terms of the police officers' work itself. 'You can put a police officer on every beach on the Opal Coast. The migrants will continue to come. We must stop this problem at the source – that is, in the country of origin.' He said there was 'no lasting solution that could stop the problem' along the coast here and in Britain, where migrants arrived and were ushered into camps and hotels. On Thursday morning, the London Telegraph saw first-hand the limits of the policing operation. Gendarmes fired a salvo of tear gas into the dunes 300 metres from the shore, where hundreds of migrants had camped overnight. Coughing and spluttering, they were led out onto the beach by the smugglers, away from the haze of white smoke and towards the shore. There they sat and waited for about 10 minutes for the 'taxi boat', launched from the west on River Aa, which runs through the centre of Gravelines and leads out into the sea, to arrive. The majority of the migrants were young men from the Middle East or Vietnam. An Iranian family of four – mother and father, Karwan and Sara, and son and daughter, Alina and Mohammed – were a rare sight. Sara, one of only three women in the crowd, spoke in broken English of how her family had travelled nearly 9000 kilometres from Tehran and had journeyed through Turkey and Germany to reach Calais. She indicated they had spent 10 days at one of the camps near Dunkirk. This was their first attempt at a crossing. Sara dabbed tears from her eyes with her headscarf, watching Alina, her pink trousers pulled up to her knees, splash and dance joyfully in the water, oblivious to the perils around her. Karwan gave no answer when asked what had made the family leave Tehran. He waded through the water as a 'taxi boat', already filled with 50 or so passengers, drew near to the shore. Sara and Karwan walked through the surf holding each other's hands, also clutching life jackets. Around them, smugglers bullied their human cargo into place. Alina and Mohammed were carried on the shoulders of smugglers and handed over to migrants already on board the boats, who hauled them in. They were followed by their mother and father, who sat in the centre of the flimsy dinghy. The passengers cheered and waved to those left behind on the beach and sailed, under a police escort, towards the UK. One of those left on the shore was Leo, a 25-year-old aspiring engineering student from Ghazni, in eastern Afghanistan, who had paid smugglers €1500 ($2700) to ferry him across the Channel. Loading He had hoped to join his sister, who had made it to the UK last week via a small boat and is living in Manchester. 'I left because of the Taliban,' he said. 'This was my first go. I will go again. I will go to London. My sister is married. The rest of my family, my papa, my mother, are still in Afghanistan.' Leo had fled his home country at the age of 13, making his way through Iran, Turkey, Germany, Sweden, and now Calais over the course of more than a decade. He followed the others up the hill towards the dune and back to the ramshackle, gang-ridden camp he calls home in Dunkirk.
Yahoo
4 days ago
- Politics
- Yahoo
On the beaches of northern France, exhausted police admit they've lost control
Karwan and Sara watch as smugglers hoist Mohammed, their six-year-old son, and Alina, their four-year-old daughter, onto their shoulders, wade out to sea, and bundle them onto an overloaded dinghy. Behind them, a crowd of 200 or so migrants are herded like cattle, waist-deep in the water, waiting their turn. The people-smugglers shout and shove them into position. More than 70 passengers are eventually squeezed on board the barely seaworthy vessel, their feet dangling over the side, ready to motor towards Dover. A French police patrol boat lazily circles the inflatable dinghy, watching the chaos unfold. It is 6am on Gravelines beach, and all in a day's work for the smugglers that increasingly control this sweeping stretch of coastline. All they have to do now is wade through the surf and head back unhindered towards the dunes 300 metres away to regroup and plan tomorrow's crossings. The scenes are painfully familiar to any of the 1,200 gendarmes deployed along France's northern beaches. Some told The Telegraph they are outmanoeuvred and outnumbered by the smugglers, who who adapt their tactics at pace. 'We are helpless... there is a French expression 'donner de la tête', we are overwhelmed and don't know where to start, we don't know where to go, there are so many boats leaving,' says Marc Musiol, a French border police officer in Pas-de-Calais. One well-placed international policing source labelled the situation a 'failure'. Since the beginning of this year, there have been 22,360 arrivals via small boats into the UK – an almost 60 per cent increase on last year. The numbers are rising as Sir Keir Starmer promised to 'smash the gangs' and hailed a new deal with Emmanuel Macron to stem the tide. But authorities here suggest the 'one-in, one-out' pledge is not worth the paper it is written on. Some also pour scorn on Mr Macron for talking tough without following through with 'concrete' changes. The scene on the beaches of Gravelines on Thursday morning is one replicated along the coast of northern France day in, day out, when the weather permits. In the early hours, police patrol cars scour the 200km of coastline between the border of Belgium and the Bay de Somme estuary. Police use drones fitted with night vision technology to scan the dunes where the migrants, mostly young adult men, will camp for the night before they attempt to cross the Channel. But the distances make it easy for smugglers and migrants to hide from stretched authorities. Gendarmes drive beige 4x4s in teams of three, drive down the shoreline, and survey the waters for inflatable dinghies. 'We are here every night, it is always the same, it never changes,' one officer said as he patrolled a beach car park. 'The migrants are everywhere.' The Telegraph encountered six patrols in the space of two hours during a 3am drive from Calais towards Wimereux, a seaside commune south of Boulogne and another known hotspot for Channel crossings. Interceptions remain scarce. Smugglers launch simultaneous crossings from up to 10 different beaches at a time to divide police attention and resources. Pre-inflated dinghies are launched from waterways and canals dozens of kilometres from the pickup point and sail down the coast. The smugglers use weather apps, such as Windy, on their phones to help them plan their crossings. The apps provide up-to-the-second information on wind speed, direction, and the swell. Sentries linked to the smuggling gangs are posted in the dunes and near the camps to watch for the boats. They alert over the phone that the dinghy is arriving and that it is time for its passengers to get on board. Mr Musiol said: 'There are always small groups of smugglers who know our beaches very, very well.' Often carrying nothing other than orange life jackets bought from Decathlon around their necks, the migrants sprint across the beach, hoping to do so before the police have time to react. Sometimes officers do, and fire a salvo of tear gas from grenade launchers. But this is often not enough. 'You have smugglers and their friends who throw stones at the police officers to distract them and to get the migrants onto the boat as quickly as possible,' one officer said. He estimated that there are roughly only three to six police officers for every 50 migrants trying to enter the sea. 'We have a lack of officers and you have a huge, huge amount of the coast to monitor,' he said. 'It is not possible with the number of the personnel the border police have, the gendarmerie, to monitor this entire stretch of coastline and beach.' The camps where migrants live are even more lawless. Inside the main camp at Loon Plage, 12 kilometres south-west of Dunkirk, shootings and stabbings between warring gangs for control of the best beaches are commonplace. On July 8, a 44-year-old Kurd from Iraq was shot five times in the legs at the camp. Around two dozen armed police were deployed that day to quell the violence. The month before, two other migrants were shot dead and another five injured. Balkan crime groups have established themselves as the dominant players in orchestrating the operations, but police sources say East African gangs out of Eritrea, especially, are rivalling them. One police source with knowledge of the people-smuggling gangs said efforts to stop the migrants were futile without a strategy to break up the wider smuggling networks. 'If you are dealing with it in Calais, you have failed, you are never going to succeed,' they said. 'You have got to look at it earlier on and deal with the cause of all of these problems. 'They are going to keep trying, a week later, they are going to give it another go. What else are they going to do, camp in Calais for the rest of their life? It's just not realistic.' Locals along the coast here, meanwhile, are fed up with seeing their coastline dominated by years of crisis and inaction. Alain Boonefaes, the deputy mayor of Gravelines, whose remit includes the town's safety and security, admitted the problem is endemic and there is little to be done. The seaside resort town, 30km south-east of Dunkirk, relies on tourism for survival but can see up to 350 migrant departures in a single evening. The mayor and many others in the town are deeply sceptical about Mr Macron's one-in-one-out policy, agreed with Sir Keir during the French president's three-day visit to London last week. The trial would allow the UK to return selected numbers of small boat arrivals to France. In exchange, the UK will admit an equal number of asylum seekers with legitimate ties, such as family. Even the police are sceptical. 'Macron has made political announcements and not concrete ones,' said Mr Musiol. 'We have the impression that nothing will change in terms of the police officer's work itself. 'You can put a police officer on every beach on the Opal Coast. The migrants will continue to come. We must stop this problem at the source – that is, in the country of origin.' He said 'there is no lasting solution that could stop the problem' along the coast here and in Britain, where migrants arrive and are ushered into camps and hotels. On Thursday morning, The Telegraph saw first-hand the limits of the policing operation. Gendarmes fired a salvo of tear gas into the sand dunes 300 metres from the shore, where hundreds of migrants had camped overnight. Coughing and spluttering, they were led out onto the beach by the smugglers, away from the haze of white smoke and towards the shore. Here they sat and waited for around 10 minutes for the 'taxi boat', launched from the west on River Aa, which runs through the centre of Gravelines and leads out into the sea, to arrive. The majority of the migrants were young men from the Middle East or Vietnam. An Iranian family of four – mother and father Karwan and Sara, and son and daughter, Alina and Mohammed – were a rare sight. Sara, one of only three women in the crowd, spoke in broken English of how her family had travelled nearly 9,000 kilometres from Tehran and had journeyed through Turkey and Germany to reach Calais. She indicated that they had spent 10 days at one of the camps near Dunkirk. This was their first attempt at a crossing. Sara dabbed tears from her eyes with her headscarf, watching Alina, her pink trousers pulled up to her knees, splash and dance joyfully in the water, oblivious to the perils around her. Karwan, gave no answer when asked what had made the family leave Tehran. He waded through the water as a 'taxi boat', already filled with 50 or so passengers, drew near to the shore. Sara and Karwan walked through the surf holding each other's hands, also clutching life jackets. Around them, smugglers bullied their human cargo into place. Alina and Mohammad were carried on the shoulders of smugglers and handed over to migrants already on board the boats, who hauled them in. They were followed by their mother and father, who sat in the centre of the flimsy dinghy. The passengers cheered and waved to those left behind on the beach and sailed, under a police escort, towards the UK. One of those left on the shore was Leo, a 25-year-old aspiring engineering student from Ghazni, in eastern Afghanistan, who had paid smugglers €1,500 (£1,296) to ferry him across the Channel. He had hoped to join his sister, who had made it to the UK last week via a small boat and is living in Manchester. He said: 'I left because of the Taliban. This was my first go, I will go again, I will go to London. My sister is married. The rest of my family, my papa, my mother, are still in Afghanistan.' Leo had fled his home country at the age of 13, making his way through Iran, Turkey, Germany, Sweden, and now Calais over the course of more than a decade. He followed the others up the hill towards the dune and back to the ramshackle, gang-ridden camp he calls home in Dunkirk. Broaden your horizons with award-winning British journalism. Try The Telegraph free for 1 month with unlimited access to our award-winning website, exclusive app, money-saving offers and more. Solve the daily Crossword
Telegraph
5 days ago
- Politics
- Telegraph
Watching children bundled into dinghies, French police admit they've lost control
Karwan and Sara watch as smugglers hoist their six-year-old son Mohammed and four-year-old daughter Alina onto their shoulders, wade out to sea, and bundle them onto an overloaded dinghy. Behind them, a crowd of 200 or so migrants are herded like cattle, waist-deep in the water, waiting their turn. The smugglers shout and shove them into position. More than 70 passengers are eventually squeezed on board the barely seaworthy vessel, their feet dangling over the side, ready to motor towards Dover. A French police patrol boat lazily circles the inflatable dinghy, watching the chaos unfold. It is 6am on Gravesline beach, and all in a day's work for the smugglers that increasingly control this stretch of sweeping coastline. All they have to do now is wade through the surf and head back unhindered towards the dunes 300 metres away to regroup and plan tomorrow's crossings. The scenes are painfully familiar to any of the 1,200 gendarmes deployed along France's northern beaches. Some of them told The Telegraph they are outmaneuvered and outnumbered by smugglers who adapt their tactics at pace. 'We are helpless… there is a French expression 'donner de la tête', we are overwhelmed and don't know where to start, we don't know where to go, there are so many boats leaving,' says Marc Musiol, a French border police officer in Pas-de-Calais. One well-placed international policing source labelled the situation a 'failure'. Since the beginning of 2025, there have been 22,360 arrivals via small boats into the UK - an almost 60 per cent increase on last year. The numbers are rising as Sir Keir Starmer promised to 'smash the gangs' and hailed a new deal with Emmanuel Macron to stem the tide. Authorities here suggest the 'one-in-one out' pledge is not worth the paper it is written on. Some also pour scorn on Mr Macron for talking tough without following through with 'concrete' changes. The scene on the beaches of Gravesline on Thursday morning is one replicated along the coast of northern France day in day out, when the weather permits. In the early hours, police patrol cars scour the 200km of coastline between the border of Belgium and the Bay de Somme estuary. Police use drones fitted with night vision technology to scan the undulating dunes where the migrants, mostly young adult men, will camp the night before they attempt to cross the Channel. But the distances make it easy for smugglers and migrants to hide from stretched authorities. Gendarmes drive beige 4x4s in teams of three, drive down the shoreline, and survey the waters for inflatable dinghies. 'We are here every night, it is always the same, it never changes,' one officer said as he patrolled a beach car park. 'The migrants are everywhere,' he added, sweeping his arms out. The Telegraph encountered six patrols in the space of two hours during a 3am drive from Calais towards Wimereux, a seaside commune south of Boulogne and another known hotspot for Channel crossings. Interceptions remain scarce. Smugglers launch simultaneous crossings from up to ten different beaches at a time to divide police attention and resources. Pre-inflated dinghies are launched from waterways and canals dozens of kilometres from the pickup point and sail down the coast. The smugglers use weather apps, such as Windy, on their phones to help them plan their crossings. The apps provide up-to-the-second information on wind speed, direction, and the swell. Sentries linked to the smuggling gangs are posted in the dunes and near the camps to watch for the boats. They alert over the phone that the dinghy is arriving and that it is time for its passengers to get on board. Mr Musiol said: 'There are always small groups of smugglers who know our beaches very, very well.' Often carrying nothing other than orange life jackets bought from Decathlon around their necks, the migrants sprint across the beach, hopefully before the police have time to react. Sometimes officers do and fire a salvo of tear gas from grenade launchers. But this is often not enough. 'You have smugglers and their friends who throw stones at the police officers to distract them and to get the migrants onto the boat as quickly as possible,' one officer said. He estimated that there are roughly only three to six police officers for every 50 migrants trying to enter the sea. 'We have a lack of officers and you have a huge, huge amount of the coast to monitor,' he said. 'It is not possible with the number of the personnel the border police have, the gendarmerie, to monitor this entire stretch of coastline and beach.' The camps where migrants live are even more lawless. Inside the main camp at Loon Plage, 12 kilometres south-west of Dunkirk, shootings and stabbings between warring gangs for control of the best beaches is commonplace. On July 8, a 44-year-old Kurd from Iraq was shot five times in the legs at the camp. Around two dozen armed police were deployed that day to quell the violence. The month before, two other migrants were shot dead and another five injured. Balkan crime groups have established themselves as the dominant players in orchestrating the operations, but police sources say East African gangs out of Eritrea, especially, are rivalling them. One police source with knowledge of the people smuggling gangs said efforts to stop the migrants were futile without a strategy to break up the wider smuggling networks. 'If you are dealing with it in Calais, you have failed, you are never going to succeed,' they said. 'You have got to look at it earlier on and deal with the cause of all of these problems. 'They are going to keep trying, a week later, they are going to give it another go. What else are they going to do, camp in Calais for the rest of their life, it's just not realistic.' Locals along the coast here, meanwhile, are fed up with seeing their coastline dominated by years of crisis and inaction. Alain Boonefaes, the deputy mayor of Graveslines, whose remit includes the town's safety and security, admitted the problem is endemic and there is little to be done. Gravelines, a seaside resort town 30km southeast of Dunkirk, relies on tourism for survival but can see up to 350 migrant departures in a single evening. The mayor and many others in the town are deeply sceptical about Mr Macron's one-in-one-out policy agreed with Sir Keir Starmer during the French president's three-day visit to London last week. The trial would allow the UK to return selected numbers of small boat arrivals to France. In exchange, the UK will admit an equal number of asylum seekers with legitimate ties, such as family. Even the police are sceptical. 'Macron has made political announcements and not concrete ones,' Mr Musiol said. 'We have the impression that nothing will change in terms of the police officer's work itself. 'You can put a police officer on every beach on the Opal Coast. The migrants will continue to come. We must stop this problem at the source, that is, in the country of origin.' He said 'there is no lasting solution that could stop the problem' along the coast here and in Britain, where migrants arrive and are ushered into camps and hotels. On Thursday morning, the Telegraph saw first-hand the limits of the policing operation. Gendarmes fired a salvo of tear gas into the sand dunes 300 metres from the shore where hundreds of migrants had camped overnight. Audibly coughing and spluttering, they were led out onto the beach by the smugglers, away from the haze of irritating white smoke and towards the shore. Here they sat and waited for around 10 minutes for the so-called 'taxi boat' to arrive that had been launched from the west on River Aa, which runs through the centre of Gravelines and leads out into the sea. The majority of the migrants were young men from the Middle East or Vietnam. An Iranian family of four - mother and father Karwan and Sara, and son and daughter, Alina and Mohammed - were a rare sight. Sara, one of only three women in the crowd, spoke in broken English of how her family had travelled nearly 9,000 kilometres from Tehran and had journeyed through Turkey and Germany to reach Calais. She held up ten fingers in explanation for the number of days they had spent at one of the camps near Dunkirk. This was their first attempt at a crossing. Sara dabbed tears from her eyes with her headscarf, watching Alina, her pink trousers pulled up to her knees, splash and dance joyfully in the water, oblivious to the perils around her. Her husband, Karwan, gave no answer when asked what had made the family leave Tehran. He waded through the water as a taxi boat, already filled with 50 or so passengers, drew near to the shore. Sara and Karwan walked through the surf holding each other's hands for balance, clutching life jackets in their free hands. Around them, panicked smugglers bullied their human cargo into place. Alina and Mohammad, meanwhile, were carried on the shoulders of smugglers and handed over to migrants already on board the boats, who hauled them in. They were shortly followed by their mother and father, who sat in the centre of the flimsy dinghy. The passengers cheered and waved to those left behind on the beach and sailed, under a police escort, towards the UK. One of those left on the shore was Leo, a 25-year-old aspiring engineering student from Ghazni in eastern Afghanistan, who had paid smugglers €1,500 to ferry him across the Channel. Leo had hoped to join his sister, who had made it into the UK last week via a small boat and is living in Manchester. He said: 'I left because of the Taliban. This was my first go, I will go again, I will go to London. My sister is married. The rest of my family, my papa, my mother, are still in Afghanistan.' Leo had fled his home country at the age of 13, making his way through Iran, Turkey, Germany, Sweden, and now Calais over the course of more than a decade. He followed the others up the hill towards the dune and back to the ramshackle, gang-ridden camp he calls home in Dunkirk.
Scroll.in
11-06-2025
- Politics
- Scroll.in
Harsh Mander: The assault of four Muslims and the two sides of India's meat economy
At the end of another harrowing journey of the Karwan e Mohabbat to meet four men lynched by a mob in Aligarh on May 24, I return with only one great solace. That they are alive. Savagely injured, traumatised, terrified. But alive. Except for this outcome, their story is the same as ones I have heard too many times during at least a hundred journeys of the Karwan e Mohabbat to the homes of people lynched. The account of lynching that recurs in a loop is of young men meting out numbing violence on petrified unarmed men. Of their ferocity powered by the visceral hate of those who lead the land. Of cynical extortion. Of a complicit police force. Of the acquiescing onlooker. The four lynched men – Aqil, Arbaaz, Aqeel and Nadeem – were all in their 30s or early 40s. They were of the Qureshi clan, the caste of Indian Muslims whose traditional occupation for centuries has been the slaughter of animals for meat. The killing of cows is of course banned by law, but buffalo meat is licit in Uttar Pradesh. Before the Adityanath-led Bharatiya Janata Party government came to power, butchers were licenced to slaughter buffaloes in their abattoirs. This was an honest trade with no attendant dangers. But it was abruptly halted by the Adityanath government which refused to grant licences to the small slaughter-houses where animals had been lawfully butchered for many generations. This decision overturned the lives of tens of thousands of families in the meat business. The family of Aqil, Arbaaz and Nadeem was one of them. It is mostly big beef factories that this government has licenced to slaughter buffaloes. During his first bid for national power in 2014, Narendra Modi accused the Congress-led government of abandoning the green and white revolutions to expand farm and milk produce and instead favouring what he called the ' pink revolution ' or encouraging the slaughter of animals for their meat. The irony is that despite the hardening of laws prohibiting cow slaughter and a massive rise in cow vigilantism, in the 11 years of Modi's leadership of the country Indian beef exports have steadily grown. Many of India's largest beef exporting companies are owned by Hindus and some even by Jains. Despite the hateful discourse that surrounds this trade, this is by no means a Muslim monopoly. The further irony is that when the names of contributors to the BJP through electoral bonds were revealed, many beef export companies figured in the list. For the family of Aqil, Arbaaz and Nadeem, the cancellation of licenses of their slaughter house posed a crisis of survival. Butchery was the only profession they knew. But fortunately, they still had licences to sell meat. The family owns seven meat shops in Aligarh. They would buy legal buffalo meat from a beef factory in Atrauli, about 40 kilometres from Aligarh. Each time they would buy around 900 kg of buffalo beef from the factory, pack this into a pick-up van and drive past a checkpoint on to the highway to Aligarh. The profit margins were small, they told us. They would buy the meat for Rs 230 a kilo, and sell it for Rs 260. The volume of sale, from seven meat retail shops, ensured a modest income for the extended family. For Aqeel, the 35-year-old driver from a working-class family, livelihood options were even fewer. He would hire a pick-up van and transport a variety of goods. Among these was also, from time to time, the dangerous cargo of meat. With the proliferation of violent 'cow protection' groups – claiming allegiance with the Bajrang Dal, and having close links with the police, the local administration and the ruling BJP – the 40-kilometre journey from Atrauli to Aligarh was always fraught. However, there was no way to avoid it. The militant groups often extorted money from the meat transporters. The men who were lynched spoke of being waylaid some months earlier by a group of Bajrang Dal men who demanded their exaction money. When they refused, the Bajrang Dal members took them to the police station. There the police allegedly brokered a deal of Rs 2.9 lakh, and retained a portion of this for themselves. I have no way of confirming the veracity of this claim. On the hot summer morning of May 24, the three men in the meat trade and the driver drove out of the beef factory in Atrauli at 8 am with their usual load of 900 kg of buffalo meat. Hum sirf ek number ka kaam karte hain (we only do legal work), they kept repeating when we met the badly injured men in the hospital. Their paper work was complete, including the bills of purchase and the licence of the veterinary doctor that the meat was buffalo meat. Some four kilometres into the highway, eight men on four motorcycles blocked their way and forced them to park the pick-up van on the side of the road. 'These were the usual Bajrang Dal men,' they told me. I asked how they were sure that they were from the Bajrang Dal. The saffron scarves, or gamchas, that they wrapped around their necks was the marker, they said. It is like a uniform. The meat transporters showed the young men all their papers, pleading that the meat was not of a slaughtered cow, and everything complied with the law. The men who had blocked their path sneered and tore up the papers. The men in the pick-up begged to be allowed to continue their travel, but the vigilantes said other 'brothers' were on their way. Within a short while, around a dozen more motorcycles converged on the spot, the crowd of young men swelling ominously. They dragged the four men from the van where they were cowering, snatched their mobile phones and money, stripped down many to their underwear and began thrashing them viciously, with iron and wooden rods, bricks and stones. Some minutes later, a police Gypsy jeep arrived. The beleaguered men ran desperately to the vehicle and crawled into it, begging the policemen to protect them. The policemen brushed aside their pleas brusquely, reportedly with communal slurs. After that it was open season for the mob. The crowd of attackers and onlookers continued to inflate. Some onlookers began to record videos, which are widely circulating. It is hard to watch these videos without your stomach lurching. The incessant pitiless beating, the men's desperate screams of pain, their bodies soaked in blood, their begging vainly for mercy. Some men even drove motorcycles over the legs of their quarry. You can spot the police in some of the videos, doing little to restrain the bloodthirsty mob. Chilling also is the fact that not one from the crowd intervenes to help the victims. The lynch mob set aflame the pick-up van with the meat. When the survivors evaluated their financial losses later, it was Rs 13 lakh for the pick-up van and Rs 2 lakh the cost of the meat. The men began to lose consciousness. If matters had followed the course that I have observed in too many cow-lynchings around the country, the next step would have been their bleeding to death. That this did not happen was the result of the intervention of one man. A police officer of conscience. Yes, they do exist. I have worked long enough within the government system to affirm that there are good officials even in the worst of regimes. I will not name this police officer, because we live in such a twisted age that I don't know if he will be rewarded as the hero that he is, or be punished. He arrived, dispersed the mob, rescued the four men and rushed them for medical attention to the nearest district hospital, and from there to the medical college hospital in the Aligarh Muslim University. It is a grim commentary on the times that we occupy that these acts, which should be nothing more significant than the elementary fulfilment of his official duties, glow instead as rare acts of heroism. The families of the injured men we met said that their men would not have lived if the police officer had not intervened on time. They bless him and believe that it was Allah who sent him. Aligarh meat traders assault: FSL report finds the meat being transported was NOT beef Aligarh DIG Prabhakar Chaudhary has confirmed that the meat being transported by the traders who were ambushed and brutally assaulted was NOT beef as against the accusations of members of… — Piyush Rai (@Benarasiyaa) May 27, 2025 Rashid, the driver Aqeel's brother, recalled to us, 'He was unconscious when his wife first saw him. She called us on the phone and told us he was dead. When we saw him, there was not a part of his body that was not injured. Even the region around his eyes. It is the grace of Allah that he is alive. There were so many stitches on his head. They had beaten him with steel rods on his head and legs and back. They had also beaten him with bricks and stones. Their experience in the district hospital was discouraging. Not only was it ill-equipped to deal with this kind of medical emergency. They spoke of a doctor who abused them and declared that since they were inveterate cow-killers, they deserved worse. The university medical college was better. The staff, they said, were diligent and caring. But they seemed to be under pressure, because they kept trying to discharge them while their myriad wounds were still unhealed. Perhaps the authorities did not want their presence in the hospital to speak with the line of political leaders of various opposition parties who lined up to meet the injured men. The public statements of these leaders were damaging and embarrassing for the ruling party. Ramji Lal Suman, Rajya Sabha MP from the Samajwadi Party, for instance declared, 'These people [the attackers] have nothing to do with cow welfare. Several beef companies had paid huge amounts to the BJP in the Electoral Bonds Scheme. Several beef factory owners are Hindu. All this is done to divide society on religious lines and go after the minorities.' Congress MP from Saharanpur Imran Masood said: 'A joke was made of law and order, and they were beaten up. This was tragic, and the way the SHO saved the lives of those men. If he were not there, they wouldn't have survived. But, the way they were beaten up and this behaviour of acting like goons. Is this how the rule of law will be established, that people are beaten and robbed on the road?' The driver Aqeel was the most severely injured of the four and even at the time I write, he still hovers between life and death. His early discharge was the most unfortunate. His family quickly admitted him to a private hospital, where he was in the intensive care unit when we visited. Concerned people are paying the hospital bills. The remaining three men were in the general ward of the medical college. Their bodies still bore raw signs of their brutal lynching. Dozens of stitches on their heads, many broken bones, the flesh still torn from their bodies. As we spoke with them, the injured men were remarkably stoic. Their pain was still visceral, their rage quiet. They wanted justice, they repeated, not revenge. But the police had registered crimes of cow slaughter against them, which fortunately had to be dropped when the laboratory certified the meat was of a buffalo. The police were unwilling to apply the crime of lynching and were slow in arrests. But the greatest dilemma of the victim survivors was about what they would do to feed their families after their wounds healed. They saw no option except to go back to the same work, despite the manifest threats to their lives. They knew no other work. The seized meat is being sent for sampling. Meanwhile, based on the complaint, FIR is being registered against the four people who were brutally assaulted by the mob. — Piyush Rai (@Benarasiyaa) May 24, 2025 Days after my visit to Aligarh, I am both haunted and edified by the words of driver Aqeel's elder brother Rashid. Incidentally, his trade is running a cycle puncture repair shop. This is the stereotype of the Muslim loser that Prime Minister Modi recently purveyed. But Rashid spoke with wisdom, sadness and grace. 'It is because of Allah's mercy and the support of so many good people that our Ateeq is alive,' he said. 'Had people not reacted so quickly, our boy would have died, the police would have claimed the meat was cow meat, the other men would been have thrown into prison and bulldozers would have razed down our homes'. 'We cannot tell you who were those who attacked our boys,' he went on. 'But this is clear, that behind them, backing them are powerful forces. Neither Hindus are bad nor Muslims are bad. It is these Bajrang Dal people who are goondas. The Bajrang Dal should be banned. If anyone among us does wrong, it should be the government, the constitution, the law which should act. If the constitution and law say killing cows is wrong, then it is wrong. Let the wrongdoers be punished. Let the courts even send them to the gallows. Imagine if there was cow meat in the van. Even then the Bajrang Dal goondas had no right to thrash them. They should have simply handed them to the police and let them punish the wrongdoers. What right do these Bajrang Dal people have to take the law into their own hands? If they are going to act in this way, then are we not just throwing away the Constitution? He is mindful of the injustice to his community. 'The big factory owners have the right to slaughter buffaloes, but we do not. Never mind. Yeh bhi sabar kar lenge [this also we will endure]. But we demand justice from the government for the lynching. Think what would happen if we had committed this lynching? We and our families would have been hounded; bulldozers would have demolished our homes. The videos clearly reveal who were the men who attacked our boys. They should be arrested and punished. Why are the police treating the attackers so lightly?' He went on to affirm his love for his country. 'I was born in India. This India belongs to us all, to Hindus, Muslims, Sikhs and Christians. But now hatred has entered the hearts of every child. No one, of any religion, should be free to cause harm to others. And the media should tell the truth. 'I have only this appeal to Modi Saheb and Yogi Saheb. Our Bharat was of brotherhood and love. Where has that love disappeared? I want back my Bharat, the Bharat that we had before 2014. Bring that back.' I am grateful for support from Zayed Mansoor Khan, Sumit Gupta and Imaad ul Hasan Harsh Mander, justice and peace worker and writer, leads Karwan e Mohabbat, a people's campaign to counter hate violence with love and solidarity. He teaches at FAU University of Erlangen-Nuremberg, and Heidelberg University, Germany; Vrije University, Amsterdam; and IIM, Ahmedabad.
