Afghan migrant built his raft at Calais encampment, vows to build another one!
A young man who will surely need some mental health counseling in whatever country eventually gets to keep him, was rescued by the Coast Guard after his bed-sheet raft drifted off course earlier this week.
The story from the UK Daily Mail begins with this (Hat tip: ‘pungentpeppers’):
Coastguards told him he could have drowned and his friends think he is crazy.
But even though his attempt to cross the Channel on a flimsy raft ended in disaster, Afghan migrant Asif Hussainkhil is determined to try again.
After recovering from hypothermia brought on by his failed bid to reach Britain, he told the Mail: ‘I will keep trying because it is my destiny to get to England.’
The 33-year-old tried to cross the Channel on Monday with a raft made of six nailed-together bits of plank, with a bedsheet as a sail.
Later we learn that he left Afghanistan at age 19 and has lived in many countries since:
Since then he has travelled through nine countries, including Iran, Serbia and Switzerland, before moving to France to try and get to Britain. He is now living in a tent in Calais.
Be sure to go to The Mail and see the amazing photos of the mess these migrants have made of Calais.
Frankly I don’t get it! The European Union has a law that says legitimate asylum seekers must ask for asylum in the first safe country they reach in Europe. If they end up somewhere else, they are to be returned to that first country and have their claim processed there. Our sailor-wannabe surely passed through other EU countries before Switzerland.
So, why is France, the European Union or the UN even tolerating this slum camp at Calais?
Each of the migrants should be interviewed and returned to where they entered Europe or DEPORTED to the Middle East or Africa if they haven’t a legitimate asylum claim.
If you have been putting off a vacation trip to Europe, go now, before it’s gone!
Go here for all of our previous posts on the ‘invasion of Europe.’
Editors note: When we receive a comment to a post that we don’t want to lose buried in the comments section, we highlight it as a special post. Here, reader ‘pungentpeppers’ responds to yesterday’s post in our ‘Invasion of Europe’ series about Syrians camping (occupying!) in a Paris park.
From ‘pungentpeppers:’
About that “Syrian Occupy Movement” in France… French news reports give more insight as to what is happening.
The French are no stranger to squatter camps. In the past Roma Gypsy families arriving from Eastern Europe have set up camp for themselves on public and private land. There is just not enough available housing. Where to put these many newcomers has become a major headache for France. This latest group of park squatters in Saint-Ouen, in the Paris suburbs, are Syrian Muslims, and practically all are Sunni (like the Syrian rebels).
Local Muslims living in the area are bringing the Syrians food, raising money for hotel rooms, and allowing them to sleep at a local mosque. One Syrian at the park, Lamia al-Nassan, was interviewed by TV’s France24. She praised the local Muslims: “Fortunately the Muslims are here to feed us – otherwise, we’d be dead!”
Lamia (24) with youngest of her four children: I sold all my jewelry to get to France, to live in a park?
Unrealistic Expectations: Per the L’Express newspaper, these Syrians falsely believed that, as soon as they arrived in France, the “State of Human Rights” (as they call France) would immediately provide each family with suitable lodging and preferably asylum.
A news report by France24 features at the top a photo of Lamia, age 24. Dressed in black Islamic attire, she holds an infant – the youngest of her four children. She does not mince her words in expressing her disappointment with the French: “I thought France would protect us, that we could put the children in school. I sold all my jewelry – spent everything. Now we have nothing and have to stay here.” She laments further, “How could I have imagined that in France, they would leave us to sleep in a park?”
Costly Problem:These families, if allowed to settle, will cost the French taxpayer dearly. Their culture values huge families; their women do not work outside the home. One of the fathers, named “Mohamed” by the newspaper L’Express, looks like he is 60 years old. The father of eight children, he is shown sitting alongside a young girl of preschool age. He will not support himself, let alone a wife and eight kids.
All Those Pregnant Women: Per France24, temporary lodgings were found for the group, and the municipality has locked up the park. However, pregnant Syrian women have returned to sit on the sidewalk alongside the park’s iron fence. One of them, Sonia Ramadan, is six months pregnant and she has not seen a doctor – but she dares not pass through the doors of a French hospital because she does not speak a word of French. Zeyna al-Nasser is two months pregnant. At age 22, this frail-looking young woman already has three other children. One wonders, despite young children and pregnancy, why did these Muslim women travel with their menfolk, across many safe countries to non-Muslim lands where they do not speak the language? Were they merely on a quest for the best, or is it something else that drives them?
Their Motives:Are They Syrian Rebels or Are They Opportunists?The moment these migrants crossed the border from Syria, these migrants had reached safety. However, they kept on traveling. They journeyed through several Sunni Muslim countries to reach Morocco.
In Morocco, they paid smugglers for passage to Spanish Melilla. “Mohammed” told the L’Express reporter that he paid 1200 Euros (about $1,660) to cross the fence separating Melilla from Morocco. Once in Melilla, humanitarian groups gave them plane tickets for Barcelona. From there, they headed for France. Were they, as the L’Express journalist Karim Ben Said, who is Muslim himself, puts it – merely seeking a “normal life” with their wives and their children? Or do they have some other political motive connected to Sunni Islam?
One of the Syrians, “Jamal” told L’Express that he first went to Lebanon, but that the Shia Hezbollah does not want them there. He then moved to Jordan but left, even though most of his family remains there. He then traveled to Algeria, but had to leave because that government supports the Syrian president. Was Jamal a fighter, and therefore could not stay in Jordan or Lebanon or Algeria? (Dare France accept such asylum seekers?) Or, was he merely dissatisfied with life in those particular countries, finding spurious excuses as to why they are unsuitable?
Puzzlingly, Jamal denies that Europe was his goal: “We did not necessarily aim to reach Europe, it is the circumstances that led us here.” The stories of these many Syrians, however, discredit Jamal’s tale of accidental arrival in France. It appears they were in pursuit of their personal goal – life in the rich European country named France.
Contrary to their expectations, these Syrians might not get what they wish for. France has already disappointed them – and the rule of law states that a refugee does not have the automatic right to live in the country of his own choosing. The Syrians might not be able to force the French to settle them. If so, per L’Express, some of them have their eyes set on another target: Sweden!
To see photos and French language reporting about these Syrian better life seekers, see:
Update April 28th: Be sure to see what a reader is reporting about what the French media is saying about this, click here.
The article tells us they have been moving around Africa and Europe indicating that they are asylum shoppers. International asylum protocol says that “refugees” must apply for asylum in the first safe country in which they find themselves, and the European Union has that principle codified in law. Yet, clearly, this Paris group is roaming around looking for a better deal.
Syrians in Edouard Vaillant park in Saint-Ouen, north of Paris. https://uk.news.yahoo.com/small-french-park-becomes-home-desperate-syrian-families-052739094.html#GTCtNww
Around 150 Syria refugees are living a desperate existence in a small park to the north of Paris. NGOs and France’s Green party are urging authorities to do more to help the families while they wait for their asylum requests to be processed.
They ended up there penniless after wandering from country to country for months.
Yahya, Aziz and 150 other Syrians swapped the brutality and death of a war zone for hand-to-mouth survival in a small park in a working-class suburb of Paris, squeezed in behind a hotel just a few metres away from a busy ring road.
[….]
The 44-year-old, who refuses to give his surname, “abandoned everything” along with his wife and children after Syria erupted into violence in 2011, leaving behind a pretty villa and relinquishing any hope of returning.
Lebanon, Algeria, Egypt, back to Algeria, Morocco, Spain and finally France: “We knocked on every door,” he says, grey hair cut short, black jumper worn out.
It’s a similar story for Aziz, 54, who left Syria at the end of 2012 with his six children and wife.
The family criss-crossed Europe before ending up in the park, which has become his “headquarters.”
Not satisfied with Muslim countries they passed through—“Fortress Europe” is the goal.
Amnesty International said late last year that just 55,000 Syrian refugees had managed to get to what it called “Fortress Europe” and claim asylum in the EU, many heading for Germany or Sweden.
For its part, France has taken in around 3,000 Syrian refugees since the beginning of the conflict.
Meanwhile, security is shaky in Jordan’s largest Syrian camp, here. And, the presence of so many refugees in Lebanon is bringing terrorists into the country where the Lebanese Sunnis and Shiites are taking sides in the neighboring civil war, here.
Marine Le Pen’s National Front party shocked French socialists yesterday with wins in local elections.
The indefatigable Marine Le Pen. http://www.economist.com/news/leaders/21599773-marine-le-pens-success-should-serve-warning-political-elite-france-and-across
French voters have dealt a severe blow to Francois Hollande’s Socialist government in local elections.
The anti-immigration far right, which claims that France’s large Muslim population is “Islamicising” the nation, made solid advances, fulfilling National Front promises to begin building a grass-roots base.
Socialist leaders conceded defeat in the final round of the voting seen as a referendum on unpopular President Hollande, who was expected to reshuffle the cabinet in an effort to give his government a boost.
Thanks again to ‘pungentpeppers’ here is an update from the stalemate in Calais where hundreds of Middle Easterners and Africans have congregated for months demanding they be let into the UK. (See our previous Calais posts here).
Camping in Calais where camps are divided by ethnic groups (by their own choosing!)
In a clear ploy to tug at heartstrings,The Independentbegins and ends with sob-stories about the poor men who scratched together thousands of dollars to get this far in order to break into what they call “The House” (the UK).
But the British government again lays out the cold hard truth—in the European Union, legitimate asylum seekers are to ask for asylum in the first safe country in which they land. For these men was it Italy, Malta, Greece, Bulgaria—any of the border countries? And, indeed if they were legit, they could ask for asylum in France.
Going one step further, the UK says the condition of French “camps” is France’s problem! Yup!
The French government has asked Britain to consider a renegotiation of the agreement which led to the closure of Sangatte and share more of the financial and policing “burden” caused by the migrants. The French interior minister, Manuel Valls, said last month that the situation in Calais had reached an “impasse”. The response from his British opposite, Home Secretary Theresa May, has been a polite restatement of the status quo.
A Home Office spokeswoman said tonight: “The conditions of any camps in France and the policing of them is the responsibility of the French authorities. If individuals have a genuine need of protection they should claim asylum in the first safe country they reach.”
Indeed, the real passion and anger is among those with the least power and the most to lose.
For two consecutive weeks, the streets of Calais have been the scene of demonstrations by angry migrants waving placards proclaiming “Freedom to move”, “Liberté” and “No border, no nation – stop deportation”
The list of grievances of the marchers – Afghans, Kurds, Sudanese, Eritreans, Egyptians, Syrians – is long and multifarious, from an unrealistic demand for Britain to open its border to a plea for the “basic dignity” afforded by washing facilities and an end to what they say is harassment by French police.
