The Refugee Drama of Calais: Death and Freedom in the Channel Tunnel

[unhappycamper]

http://www.spiegel.de/international/world/migrants-in-calais-risk-everything-to-reach-england-a-1047803.html



Thousands of refugees are living in squalor in Calais, France as they seek to illegally make their way to Britain through the Channel Tunnel. They are looking for what they believe will be better prospects, but 10 people have died trying since June.

The Refugee Drama of Calais: Death and Freedom in the Channel Tunnel
By Nicola Abé, Sven Becker, Christoph Scheuermann and Petra Truckendanner
August 13, 2015 – 05:20 PM

Can this be Europe? Abud squints against the sunlight. A tent city sprawls in front of him, the makeshift shelters askew, dark and dirty. Or could it all just be a nightmare?

He stumbles past wooden huts wrapped in gray tarps. Empty plastic bottles litter the ground to his right. To his left, there are beer cans, a torn sweater, flip-flops, an oil barrel and garbage bags. It's a hot day in August. In the air, the smell of burning wood mixes with the stench of feces and rotting food scraps. Abud spots a woman squatting next to a leaky water pipe to do her laundry.

The tents and huts could be in any refugee camp in the world. But 24-year-old Abdurrahman Kurdi, nickname Abud, didn't wind up in Jordan or Sudan, but in Calais, in northern France, in a slum on the edge of the English Channel, the body of water that separates continental Europe from Great Britain.

Abud is a quiet, somewhat melancholy young man from Damascus. Five weeks ago, he fled his country because he didn't want to fight and serve in the army. His flight took him through Lebanon, Turkey and Greece. As he arrives in Calais on this particular morning, he has nothing with him other than a small backpack. He's no longer a boy, but not yet a man.