(C) OpenDemocracy This story was originally published by OpenDemocracy and is unaltered. . . . . . . . . . . The path to the ‘small boats’ crisis is littered with death [1] [] Date: 2024-02 It’s a summer night on a beach just east of Calais, and Abdulfatah Hamdallah, a 22-year-old from Sudan, and his friend are about to cross the English Channel. They enter the water, climb aboard, and push off. Their inflatable raft is one metre long and 80 centimetres wide. They use garden shovels as oars. It was the sort of thing they “perhaps found in a beach hut, and in which the two of them could barely kneel,” Mélissa, an activist in Calais, later said. They don’t get far. An errant stroke with one of the shovels pierces the boat shortly after departure, capsizing it. The friend manages to swim to shore, but emergency services, alerted by a fisherman, are unable to locate Hamdallah. At around 7am his body is found washed up on the beach. The date is 19 August 2020. Hamdallah is one of 391 migrants who died on the border between the UK, France and Belgium between 1 January 1999 and 1 January 2024, and whose lives and deaths are recounted in this series. Hope or desperation? The Strait of Dover is about 30 kilometres across at its narrowest points. It’s one of the busiest maritime straits in the world, with some 400 merchant ships passing through it daily. Winds, strong currents and shifting sandbars beneath the water add to the complications of navigating it. Hamdallah and his comrade attempted to cross this major maritime route on what was effectively an pool toy. “Crossing the strait is dangerous, of course, but so is surviving in Calais while being harassed by the police every day”, Mélissa said (see Part 5). Mélissa said stories of successful crossings coupled with a precarious and prospect-less life in France propel such risky attempts. Hamdallah’s application for asylum in France had been rejected, and “he and his friend made this crossing as an escape, a way out,” she said. “Many media outlets saw this attempt as a desperate act. But it was the hope of reaching England that served as the driving force.” And, she added, “If Abdulfatah [Hamdallah] and his comrade had been able to take a ferry to Dover, they would never have got on that inflatable boat.” When the risk of drowning is the best option Twenty-five years of fortification around Calais have made any attempt to cross the English Channel hard, risky, and expensive. The Port of Calais is bunkered and its ring road walled (Part 2). The Eurotunnel site is highly protected and its trains lethal (Part 3). Smugglers control access to coveted staging areas and charge high prices for access (Part 4). Police target migrants when they group together, and too often play a factor in migrant deaths (Part 5). And trailers are nearly impossible to escape when things go wrong (Part 6). All of this goes a long way to explaining why migrants have, in recent years, turned to ‘small boats’. From 2018 onwards, crossing the English Channel by small boat gradually became the preferred mode of passage. According to the Home Office, the number of recorded Channel crossings rose from 299 in 2018 to a high of 45,755 in 2022. This number dropped in 2023 to 29,437. Over roughly the same period, the number of migrants stopped in lorries at the port and Eurotunnel sites fell significantly. According to data provided by the Pas-de-Calais prefecture, 50,395 people were stopped in 2016, a number which dropped to 6,078 in 2022. [END] --- [1] Url: https://www.opendemocracy.net/en/beyond-trafficking-and-slavery/the-path-to-the-small-boats-crisis-is-littered-with-death-uk-france-migrants/ Published and (C) by OpenDemocracy Content appears here under this condition or license: Creative Commons CC BY-ND 4.0. via Magical.Fish Gopher News Feeds: gopher://magical.fish/1/feeds/news/opendemocracy/