The French rescue workers packed up their gear with well-practised efficiency. The medical tents. The stretchers. The security cordons.
Shortly after the last bodies had been driven away from the quayside in Boulogne, the remaining ambulances and red emergency vehicles drove off too, leaving only a handful of officials standing in the fading light beside a few frayed fishing nets near the harbour wall.
“It’s so upsetting,” said Frederic Cuvillier, Boulogne’s mayor, reflecting on the way this long, constantly evolving migrant crisis has reshaped – and traumatised – France’s northern coastline.
On Tuesday six children and a pregnant woman were among 12 people who died after a boat carrying dozens of migrants sank off the coast here, in the English Channel.
“These people flee death and end up dying here. Mothers, children… convinced they will find a better life across the Channel,” said Cuvillier, gesturing west, towards a grey sea.
In the immediate aftermath of such incidents there is – I have noticed, after witnessing several already this year – a widening gap between the way the French and British react.
In the UK, officials have been quick to focus on – and to condemn – the smuggling gangs. Each incident, each death, is seen as the result of cynical criminal activity. Which, of course, it is.
Once again, the smugglers crammed far too many of their paying clients into what appear to be increasingly flimsy boats, with nowhere near enough life jackets.
Here in northern France, the police have a similar focus. They are preoccupied with the task of trying to patrol ever larger stretches of their increasingly militarised coastline. They now have more manpower, buggies, night-vision equipment, and special drones that can detect groups of migrants hiding in the dunes.
But the police are aware that, as they expand their operations – much of it now funded by British taxpayers – the smuggling gangs are responding, finding new ways to cross, and often putting the migrants themselves at ever greater risk as a result.
Credit: bbc.com
