The beaches of southern France and Italy are dotted with sun-bathing tourists this week, and for a moment Mostafa Ali talks like he’s one of them.
“Do you like my kitchen?” asks the 20-year-old Sudanese refugee as he shows a passerby around his new seaside home on Italy’s western-most beachfront. “Do you like my bedroom?” It’s a cruel joke, made by Mr. Ali at his own expense: his holiday-home is in fact a khaki tarpaulin, his bedroom a slab of rock shared with two other refugees.
On the opposite side of the bay, many of the beachcombers would have arrived on cheap flights. But Mr. Ali arrived in the hold of a packed fishing boat, one of more than 100,000 migrants to be smuggled across the Mediterranean so far this year. From time to time, he and his friends lower themselves into the sea again, but not to swim; they just want to wash.
Around 100 migrants have slept on this rocky strip for the last five days, and the scene has quickly become an emblem of Europe’s worsening migration crisis. The location helps explain why: the beach lies immediately east of the border with France so this is where the French police dump the migrants they catch trying to enter their country by train.
“We try everything — hiding under the seats, in the toilets,” says Mr. Ali, who learnt colourful, colloquial English by watching films such as the Italian Job and Ocean’s Twelve . “The only thing I didn’t try was sitting next to the driver.” Mr. Ali has been dumped here countless times, trapped in an Escherian loop of aborted train journeys and subsequent arrests. After arriving in Italy in late May, he wanted to move quickly through France to Germany and then Sweden. But every time he reached Menton, the first station inside France, he was caught and taken here instead. One day he was caught four times, walking back each time to Ventimiglia, the last Italian station before the border, and trying again. It was an exhausting series of back-to-back hikes that took him almost a day in total.
“I already survived the dangerous desert, the war in Libya, the sea,” Mr. Ali says, alluding to the journey from his war-torn village in Sudan to the shores of Europe. “Walking for 20 hours on foot is nothing. But now I’m out of money and that’s why I’m still here.” But there is more than refugees’ individual hopes being dashed on the rocks in Ventimiglia. For some, the scene is a symptom of the failure of the European dream. The reason this makeshift campsite has sprouted in recent days is, the argument goes, because Italy and France have stopped acting like members of the same European Union.
“It’s a test of the values of the EU, of bigger countries helping smaller countries,” says Claude Moraes, a British MEP who has long focused on migration. “It’s a very deep test of what the EU means.” To understand why is to delve into a Europe-wide debate about where migrants should live after they land on Italian and Greek shores. According to regulations, migrants arriving in Italy and Greece are supposed to stay there. But neither country wants to become home to thousands of newcomers it can’t afford to look after, and who themselves want to move on. So their governments have asked wealthier European countries to take responsibility for 40,000 of the migrants currently in Italy and Greece.
So far most other EU states won’t agree to the plan, and as a result Italy turns a blind eye to migrants leaving for France. In some cases, officials even drive them closer to Italy’s northern borders. It’s a situation that infuriates the French government, which faces a strong far-right movement, and doesn’t want the problem either. So the French increased border patrols last week, arresting many more migrants, and leading to the growing camp on the beach in Ventimiglia.
On Tuesday, Italian police dispersed 50 of them, forcing the remainder further on to the beachfront. But it is France’s actions that have caused most anger. “J’ai honte (I am ashamed),” reads a sign dangling from the neck of Georges Faye. A retired French diplomat who says he was a cultural attaché to several countries in Africa, Mr. Faye has come to the roadside next to the beach to show solidarity with the migrants.
“I am ashamed to be French,” Mr. Faye elaborates, a cigarillo hanging from his mouth, and a wiry goatee stretching around it. “This isn’t human. All these people are from places like Eritrea and Darfur. Eritrea is a jail, and we all know what happened in Darfur.” Mr. Faye gestures at the beach. “These people should be given political asylum. We are 740 million in Europe, and even if we let in 200,000 - it’s nothing.”
© Guardian News & Media Ltd, 2015
