In Ouistreham, near Caen, in Normandy, migrant aid NGOs deplore that “nothing has changed” around a camp housing around a hundred exiles. According to them, eleven days after the Council of State’s injunction to the municipality, nothing has been done to facilitate access to hygiene.
“During the summer the prefecture installed these sanitary cabins, but the budget was not voted by the municipality to connect them to sanitation, so it is overflowing,” laments Philippine Bouvier, field coordinator for the NGO Solidarités International . Behind her, the camp’s only point of access to drinking water, “two four-second push buttons”.
” No reaction “
This camp, located a few hundred meters from the ferry terminal which connects Caen to England, only had around thirty people last winter. Today, around a hundred men, aged 14 to 40, occupy the land and have to deal with the spartan sanitary facilities.
On December 1, the commune was ordered by the Council of State to “create water points and latrines, as well as a system providing access to showers” for these men, most of whom came from Darfur. , a Sudanese territory at war where the UN suspects a “genocide”.
The town hall had eight days to “take the measures essential for the operation of sanitary equipment” under penalty of a fine of 1,000 euros per day. Since then, nothing. Asked by AFP, the LR mayor of Ouistreham, Romain Bail responded with a laconic SMS: “no reaction”. Around 90 tents are spread out along a narrow corridor for almost 200 meters, their occupants most often live in pairs. “The water is cold for showering, there is no electricity to charge our phones and keep in touch with our families, the toilets are overflowing,” laments a young man, “but the hardest part is the lack clothes and shoes.
Christine Lannéval, a 61-year-old nurse volunteering at the Camo association (a collective helping migrants from Ouistreham), assists a doctor in medical consultations twice a week. “There are lung infections, scabies, digestive problems mainly linked to stress even if they don’t say it like that,” she says, “and we had a case of tuberculosis.”