The story of Mustafa is only one of the hundreds of stories that could be told. He is only one of the hundreds of young men and women, of mothers and their children who are living in the refugee camp in Calais that is called the Jungle. I did not take a picture of him to not put him into danger. But I will tell his story hoping you will understand what it means when we say “that’s just the way it works in our world”.
Mustafa approaches me on a summer evening in
July 2016 in that place just outside the Jungle where volunteers and refugees
from all over the world gather to play cards, play music and engage into
conversations. He is looking for somebody to talk in English, “to practise”, he
says.
We do the usual Q&A: “How old are you?”
“22” “Where are you from?” “Sudan.” “From Khartoum?” “No, a small village,
originally. In 2003, it was burned to the ground by troops from Omar al-Bashir,
so we moved to another village.”
The International Criminal Court (ICC) has long
issued a warrant against Sudanese president al-Bashir for directing attacks
against civilians including torture, rape and murder. Mustafa knows all about
this, even though he could not go to school after 2003 because checkpoints of
paramilitary groups were blocking the way. “Why aren’t the United Nations doing
anything against al-Bashir?”, he asks. “He is terrorising us, committing
international war crimes…, everybody knows this. Why isn’t Europe doing
anything?”
Mustafa and his family were living in constant
fear of being attacked, robbed and shot. “Simply because we are black”, he
explains. “We share the same culture, the same religion with the Arabs, we
speak their language – but they would shoot us because we are black.”
He left his village to find work in Libya, only
to be confronted with the same hate and racism there: “Black people are put
into prison. They check your phone and call your friends or family. They say:
If you don’t send us money, we will shoot him. And if no money comes, they kill
you.” One prisoner after the other was taken out of Mustafa’s cell. He never
saw them again. Others told him how they had to watch fellow prisoners being
shot. Mustafa’s family doesn’t have any cell phone, nor internet. “I had a
friend in Libya, he was from Niger. We were working together. When I got into prison,
he worked for one month and send the money, so I was… escaped. I was really
lucky.”
Sometimes Mustafa is searching for words. He started learning English only three months ago, when he arrived in the Jungle. When we walk around the camp, he proudly shows me the building, painted colourful by volunteer teachers. “I try to go every day”, Mustafa says. Sometimes he is tired during classes: From spending the night at the railway lines, waiting for a train to jump on to for the journey to England; from being beaten up and shot at with tear gas by French riot police; or simply from waking up from nightmares again and again. “When the teacher comes and asks: ‘Mustafa, are you okay?’, then I am really happy. That’s like being with my family.”
He did not speak to his parents and siblings
ever since he left Sudan. When he got out of prison, he turned to a smuggler
for the journey to Europe. “I was not afraid”, he says. “I had only two
choices: Staying in Libya, facing prison again. Or going on a boat, maybe die –
or be free.”
He was lucky to survive the journey, to make it
to France without being caught. Nobody took his fingerprints yet. Nothing is
keeping him from applying for asylum in Great Britain – nothing but a 20
Million Euro border regime of fences and barbed wire and French riot police.
“Still, I am not free”, he says. “When I went
to the city the other day, people were throwing stones at me. They do this
because I am black. It’s like in Sudan, like Libya.” But Mustafa, this tall
young guy of 22, continues to dream: “I want to go to England to study. I want
to become a lawyer.” When I tell him that asylum and immigration law in Britain
is really strict, that he cannot do much as a lawyer in this field, he looks at
me with big eyes. “I don’t want to become a refugee lawyer. I want to study
international law. I want to bring Omar al-Bashir to the ICC for what he is
doing to my family. The UN don’t care, but somebody has to take care of this.”
Mustafa has to go now to que for dinner, which
is handed out by charity organisations at 9 pm strictly. He must not be late.
With an empty stomach, he cannot go to the railway lines at night, will not be
able to run fast enough and jump high enough to maybe make it this time.
I did not tell Mustafa
that he will never be able to study law at an English university, that he will
never be able to become a lawyer and that he will never be able to bring
justice to his family in Sudan, because this is just not the way it works in
our world.
And this is the French way of dealing with the colonial past and responsibilities deriving from that:
I pass by the statue on my way back into the city centre of Calais. "A nos camerades morts pour la France", sais the golden engraving on the marble column , "en Indochine 1945-54" and "en Afrique du Nord 1952-1962". They do not even bother to name the countries that suffered and fought and died to finally shake off the colonial oppressor called France.
The book I took with me to France appears even more relevant now.
