How I walked into squalid asylum camp

Burhan Wazir is the first journalist to gain access to France's Sangatte refugee camp. This is his exclusive report

Special report: refugees

guardian.co.uk, Sunday September 9 2001 23.32 BST

The wind is blowing off the English Channel, whipping rain into my face. It is a little after 7pm, and the light is fading over the French coast. I have travelled from London to Calais by train through the Chunnel. The ticket cost £270. My mission is straightforward: to gain access as a refugee to the camp at the centre of worldwide controversy amid claims that it is a staging post for asylum-seekers to make the final jump from France to Britain in search of a new life.

I have been dropped off a mile or so from Sangatte, which is visible through the gloom. Some 15 minutes later I walk up the rubbish-strewn drive. After television footage last week showing asylum-seekers trying to storm the Chunnel and walk under the waves to Britain, the place is surrounded by news media: camera crews, photographers and reporters are stationed strategically around the camp in the hope of witnessing new freedom bids. The papers and television cannot get enough of the so-called 'tide' of people trying to reach Britain.

I trudge past Her Majesty's media, and am about to experience what it is like to live inside the most controversial refugee centre in Europe. It proves to be a deadening experience.

Sangatte Camp is home to about 1,600 refugees and is run by the French Red Cross. The organisation boasts an 'open door' policy, giving help to anyone who walks in through the front door. But British politicians claim the camp's existence -strategically close to Britain - is tantamount to encouraging the passage of asylum-seekers into the UK.

My entry into Sangatte is simply executed. Wearing an anorak, jeans and a shirt, I casually walk through the front door and make my way towards the groups of refugees, many of whom have been living there for nearly a year. Most stand chatting under weak strip lighting. Inside, the daily tedium of queues for food, bedding and water dominates everyday life. No attempts are made to register me. 'I'm a new man,' I tell a Red Cross worker later that evening. 'I need a blanket.' He says the centre has run out, but 15 minutes later he returns, thrusting a heavy wool blanket into my hands.

The Red Cross camp is set on an unsightly, flat strip of farmland five miles from Calais town centre. For those who trek into town daily - to make phone calls to relatives or buy food - the walk can take up to an hour, past rows of neat, almost identical cottages. A dual carriageway, served only by the occasional garage, leads into Calais itself: it is a depressing hike through windswept, unfriendly territory where shop-owners and locals stand at windows, glaring at the passing refugee traffic.

The former Eurotunnel building, now leased to the French Government, offers a bare recreation area near the entrance. A row of overflowing toilets (their walls smeared with human waste), filthy sinks and showers stands amid pools of muddy water. The rest of the hangar holds 20 double-sized portable buildings, segregated into men-only, women-only and family spaces. To the right of the camp, 20 brightly coloured tents each provide stretchers for about 15 men; overcrowding is such that the centre's most recent arrivals have been forced to find sleeping space on the concrete floor between crowded tents.

The sleeping areas, naturally, have long been claimed by the asylum-seekers on the basis of their ethnicity. Kurds and Afghans - outnumbering all the other residents and linguistically linked by Arabic - live near the camp entrance. To the rear live Pakistanis, Indians and a small group of Russians. The polite segregation - it almost never explodes into violence - neatly organises the residents into groups that share cultural experiences and history. I witness a few arguments over queue-jumping attempts at breakfast, but all are quickly resolved with apologies, handshakes and hugs.

I start talking to a group of Indian asylum-seekers who animatedly debate the differences between Urdu, a language unique to Pakistan, and Hindi, the similar-sounding Indian equivalent. As the conversation ends in insults about their mothers, I am introduced to a man called 'Doctor'. Slightly overweight and very self-satisfied, the Sikh claims to have helped refugees cross the English Channel. Visibly well fed, his chest puffed up with arrogance, he finds me a spare bed in his tent. 'And we'll have a chat later,' he promises in coarse Punjabi. 'For £1,000 I'll help you across to England. I sent a couple of boys over yesterday. And I'm organising for more people to go later next week. There's no problem.' He smiles and walks off. I later see him in deep conversation with two other refugees.

Their evening meal over, groups of men stand talking throughout the camp: many will walk outside, either to finish a cigarette or use one of two payphones near the front door. All ignore the women, who attend to children near the sinks. Close to the camp entrance, just behind four Red Cross offices, a small TV set shows a grainy image of Michelle Pfeiffer playing a schoolteacher in Dangerous Minds . About 30 refugees, all men, sit watching Pfeiffer rehabilitate a group of unruly Hispanics and African-Americans in the 1995 classroom drama set in South-Central, Los Angeles.

The film ends at around midnight and the men slowly walk back to their sleeping quarters. Many of the latest arrivals will walk around for a few hours yet, hoping to find themselves an empty bed instead of the concrete floor. I lower myself on to a stretcher in a tent full of Iraqi Kurds. Minutes later, I am woken by one of their friends: 'This is my bed,' he says. 'I sleep here.'

Throughout the night, the deafening chatter from the 1,600 residents spoils any chance of a quiet sleep. Men pace back and forth. In several tents groups of men can be heard beating on plastic buckets, singing the lost spirituals of their homelands. Lying on the ground near the opening of a tent in the middle of the camp, I can hear the tent's inhabitants, all wrapped in large blankets, talking among themselves. They crowd together to share much-needed body heat as the temperature plummets. The chatter goes on until 5am, as the camp's guests relate old jokes from a shared experience in another country.

Queueing for breakfast at the terminally cold Sangatte Camp takes nearly two hours. A motley crew of asylum-seekers - all wearing ill-fitting T-shirts and jeans donated by locals - stands between two lines of metal crash barriers, watched by Red Cross workers. As I inch towards a meagre ration of two slices of white bread, a helping of jam and a cup of weak tea, one asylum-seeker tries to jump a place. Carrying a crutch and steering one heavily bandaged leg, the young man tries to clamber his way over a barrier. He drops his stick and has to be disentangled from the fence by a Red Cross worker. 'How do you expect to climb the white cliffs of Dover,' jokes his rescuer, 'when you can't even climb that barrier?'

The following night we notice eight Kurdish refugees hiking past Sangatte and slowly trudging cross-country towards the Channel Tunnel. It has been raining lightly across the bleak landscape for half an hour and the men carefully negotiate an already well-trodden route across mud and damp grass. 'Do you mind if we join you?' I ask Sarfraz, a pleasant-faced teenager. He stops to urinate, gratefully accepts a cigarette and, signalling with one raised thumb, races off to tell his friends.

His cohorts wait for us around the corner; they sit idly on an embankment behind an abandoned barn. After a brief introduction, a feverish debate ensues in which the men agree to us trailing after them. And for the next hour we walk in near-silence, scaling hills and sliding down embankments. We cover four kilometres.

'We need to sit here,' says Shakil, another member of the group, pointing to a set of blankets lain out on the grass. Only an hour-long walk and an eight-lane motorway from here lies freedom - at least that is what the tunnel represents - from the squalid con ditions in the Red Cross camp. Their adrenaline racing, the men break for prayer. The ritual is followed by a Kurdish folk song with Shakil humming the guitar melody.

We manage to lose Shakil and his friends in the inhospitable French countryside over the next hour. The refugees break into a run and elude us in nearby trees. Taking a taxi ahead to the nearby Eurotunnel station, we watch from a field the lines of shuffling, tense migrants slowly trudging a path from Sangatte.

Leaning against the crash barrier that separates the motorway from the fenced field that overlooks the Eurotunnel tracks, I notice an Asian teenager walking up the breakdown lane. Bent down against the wind, his hands stuffed into pockets, he stops and asks: 'Do you know where I'd find a train station around here? I'm trying to get to Paris?'

He nervously announces himself as Raj, 17, on his way from Sangatte to meet friends in Paris. I point up the motorway to a road sign: 'Le Gare TGV,' it reads. 'Why don't you follow that off-ramp?' I suggest. 'That should take you to the train station.'

Raj explodes: 'I've walked a sister-fucking 20 kilometres already on this motorway, following those sister-fucking signs for the TGV. Sister-fucker! That sign means I'll probably have to walk another 20 kilometres to get to a train station.'

He angrily waves goodbye, scowls and trudges off, cursing loudly. I take a walk across the motorway, clambering over the central reservation and beating a path through the overgrown grass towards the fencing. A police car idles nearby, its two inhabitants scouring the area for Sangatte escapees.

These are the only security features near the Eurostar track visible to us all night. And from here the train tracks look tantalisingly close - a quick snip through barbed wire and a slide down a forgiving embankment towards freight trains that slow down to nearly 25 miles per hour.

The fence has been cut in recent days but now the gaping holes have been well repaired by French police. Through the mist a group of Sangatte's temporary guests walk over - five Afghans carrying backpacks. 'Are you going to England?' asks Mehmood. He looks surprised when I tell him I'm a journalist.

'Those people over there,' he says, pointing to a nearby hilltop. 'They told us you were going to England and could help us.' He looks disappointed and momentarily destroyed when I tell him the fences have been repaired. But he could cut through them with a bolt-cutter, I say.

'We don't have any,' he tells me. 'We didn't think.'

Only then do I realise the field is full of asylum-seekers crouching deep into the grass and waiting for their moment. The Observer' s photographer will later trip over one such refugee as he awaits the arrival of a Eurostar freight train.

Around 11pm it starts raining heavily. Mehmood and his friends, visibly depressed by their oversight in failing to bring a wire-cutter with them, have long beaten a path back to Sangatte. They will, I presume, try another day. But as the rain quickens and turns the field into rivulets of mud and water, more and more refugees will crawl sheepishly out of the grass, clamber across the motorway and return across treacherous countryside to the Red Cross centre. That night we fail to see anyone who makes it onto a train.

Sangatte's existence, so close to Calais and the ever-sensitive Eurostar site, is of obvious impor tance to asylum-seekers. The next day at the camp I see several refugees from the night before: they all fail to recognise me. They were heading off to try again to make it to England.

As The Observer started to take pictures, far from the prying eyes of the Red Cross workers, we were herded into several tents by Sangatte's guests. 'Tell people how bad it is here,' one young Kurdish man instructs me. 'You have to tell people. The food is not enough. And this place is very far from the city. That is why we want to come to England. I would rather go back to Iraq than stay here. Even Saddam would not treat us this badly.'

Looking across at the crowds of refugees standing in long queues by the showers - and some of them beat on the doors to hurry the current occupants - it's hard to disagree. Nearby the lunchtime queue stretches more than 150 feet around the camp. Three Red Cross workers keep a silent watch on their every move. But they cannot watch everybody for ever.

That night men and women will trudge out of the camp, heading for the Chunnel. The rain will blow into their faces but they will not care. They will be thinking only of England and the prospects of a new life. Sangatte may be grim. But for now, there is nothing else.

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