Wearing a clean dress and pink socks as she waits patiently to be smuggled across the Channel to England, Kidan Tedros is the youngest child at the Calais camp where African migrants armed with guns, flick-knives and iron bars rioted this week.
The four-year-old is sitting on a wall
by the refugee camp which is spread over sand dunes and the base for 1,300
Eritrean and Sudanese who try, night after night, to jump on lorries where they
can hide and be taken illegally on ferries sailing to Dover.
The little girl arrived in Calais three
weeks ago with her mother, Laula, 40, after travelling at least 3,200 miles
from Eritrea, a country in north-east Africa which is run by a ruthless
dictator. Terrified, they watched when this week’s riot broke out and French police
moved in to quell the violence and fired rubber bullets.
This mass exodus of desperate peoples
from war-ravaged, religiously divided and impoverished countries on the giant
continent — as well as Iran, Iraq, Syria and Egypt — poses a disturbing
immigration problem for Britain.
Of course, this isn’t a new issue. Twelve
years ago, our government agreed a deal with France to close the Sangatte
refugee camp in Calais because it had become a magnet for illegal immigrants.
Labour politicians promised the days of ‘soft touch’ Britain were over.
Yet as today’s Biblical scenes of human
suffering show, the problem is getting worse. Indeed, it has been compounded by
this week’s mischievous call by Calais’s deputy mayor for the refugees to be
given ferry tickets to Britain and for the scrapping of the arrangement under
which the UK’s border controls officially begin at Calais, rather than Dover.
This, he suggested, could happen for an
experimental month so that the UK Government might comprehend the pressure
Calais is under.
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