For them, there is no Schengen

By Jeremy Cliffe

In Europe, freedom of movement is suspended — for those who look like migrants.

MENTON, France, and VENTIMIGLIA, Italy —  It is morning in Europe. The sunlight crests the Italian hills, tarpaulins and umbrellas casting shadows onto gray rocks lapped by the Mediterranean Sea. As the water starts to shimmer like tin foil in the morning’s glow, the camp starts to wake up. Coughs and sneezes resonate from under blankets and plastic. Tall, thin, dark men unfold themselves from their ad-hoc beds. They stretch. They flip their blankets onto the canvas suspended above them, the better to shield their seaside dormitory from the sun.

Up on the coastal road, Manuela, an Italian volunteer, is busy readying the canteen (trestle tables under tents on the pavement) for breakfast. She is clearing away old food. “Who left the milk here?” she snaps, grabbing a pack of UHT cartons marinating in a pool of morning light. Migrant men and children dawdle up to the tent, collect toothpaste and shower gel from a cardboard box. One starts sweeping the pavement under the awnings.

Then staff, supplies, and services begin to arrive. Fiamma, from the Italian branch of the Red Cross, barks directions at French volunteers, exiling boxes of dry panatone from the tent. A car with Italian plates pulls up, its driver heaving bottles of mineral water onto the pavement before speeding off. A tanned jogger slows to a halt at the tents, breathing heavily.

“What do you need?” he gasps. Manuela brandishes a packet of lentils and gestures to the box of toiletries. “Everything!” she replies in heavily accented French. An Italian in a white coat paces along the promenade, fretting about health in the camp. The good news is that the migrants, being mostly young men, have resilient bodies. The bad news, adds il dottore, furrowing his brow, is that conditions are “not exactly ideal for their well-being.”

These men and women are tormented daily by the mirage of free passage.

This is Saint Ludovic, Europe’s youngest village. Here migrants from North Africa and the Middle East, en route in search of a better life in the North, have been halted in their tracks by the inability of Europe’s leaders to agree on where their responsibilities towards these people lie. The camp is on the Italian Riviera, just meters from France. Across the bay is Menton, a pretty resort on the French side favored by holidaymakers from Milan and Turin. In the far distance the rock of Monaco, with its casinos and skyscrapers, is a blue shadow above the eucalyptus trees of Cap Martin, once home to the architect Le Corbusier.

***

As the sun continues to rise, the rocks come alive. One man brushes his teeth, gazing out over the water. Another shaves his friend’s head. Some clamber up to the pavement to charge their phones at a solar battery exuding wires, Medusa-like. They queue up at the portable toilets wedged between the France-bound and Italy-bound streams of holiday traffic. Ladies in khimars glide along the pavement. Sudanese music burbles from a radio.

Next to it sits a man with a road map of Norway. Unfurling it across his lap, he points to Oslo, where he hopes to live one day. Others in the camp are aiming for the Netherlands, where they have friends. Ahmed, a young man of about 18, wants to go to London “to go to high school.” “No!” exclaims the cheerful man next to him: “Manchester! Football!” Does he support Manchester United? Thunder suddenly crosses the man’s face. “No,” he retorts, severely: “Manchester City.”

These men and women are tormented daily by the mirage of free passage. France and Italy are both in the “borderless” Schengen area of European countries. Sure enough, the border seconds away from their makeshift beds is only lightly monitored. Joggers, cyclists and cars pass, uninhibited, in both directions. French and Italian gaggles of policemen watch the road. Above them on the hillside, trains rattle towards Nice, with its connections to Paris and thence to London, Rotterdam, Cologne, Copenhagen and Stockholm. Such places, a swift trip away for the average European, represent a Kafka-esque paradise, tantalizingly unattainable, for the migrants on the rocks below.

***

For them, there is no Schengen. This is the end of Europe. Freedom of movement has been suspended at this border — for those who look like they might be migrants from the Middle East and Africa, at least — because French authorities have declared the flow of people from Italy an
“exceptional circumstance.”

Ahmed tells his story. From Darfur, where genocide is allegedly ongoing and journalists are banned, he travelled across the Sahara by truck to the port of Zuwara in Libya, where the anarchic political situation makes it relatively easy for smugglers to do business. He spent months there waiting for a boat to take north. Watching television, he learned about Britain’s royals. When I tell him that I am from London, he immediately quizzes me about them. “George is the King?” No, I reply; first it is Elizabeth, then Charles, then William. “OK,” he concludes. “Elizabeth is the King.”

His boat deposited him off Catania, on the east coast of Sicily. From there he made his way by train to Rome, where he spent a couple of hours at the city’s Termini station. From there Ahmed continued via Genoa to Ventimiglia, before being picked up by police on the train into France. They sent him back to the camp on the border. But he remains determined to continue on to Nice, then “by train and walking” to Paris and on to Calais and London.

Like hundreds of others, Ahmed is stuck. Europe’s humanitarian response to the Mediterranean crisis, Operation Triton, rescues migrants like him from the waves and takes many to nearby Italy, a country that cannot accommodate the thousands staggering ashore on its coasts. The Italian government lets them pass through its territory, knowing that they want to reach northern Europe.

Yet its neighbors deny the migrants passage. On June 25, northern European countries, including France, rejected a system of mandatory quotas proposed by the European Commission for the admission of some 40,000 migrants. A furious Matteo Renzi, the Italian premier, chastised other EU leaders for their lack of solidarity: “You are not worthy of calling yourselves Europe,” he told his counterparts. The EU gave itself a deadline of July 20 to set voluntary quotas for the 40,000 instead. But a summit of European interior ministers held that day — anti-immigrant populists breathing down the necks of many governing parties represented at the table — failed to produce agreements covering that number. Even where countries have agreed to take in migrants, none will be relocated until at least October; possibly long after.

***

For now, however, migrants like Ahmed start the final stage of their journey at Ventimiglia, the last train station in Italy — about five kilometers east of Saint Ludovic. This pastel-colored market town at the mouth of the Roya river, which feeds meltwater from the Alps to the Mediterranean, feels like a war zone. Police vans and carabinieri, chatting on their mobile phones, vie with café tables and chairs for domination on the pavements.

The migrants are not — technically — penned in. They are free to wander into Ventimiglia and indeed right up to the French border.

Until recently the station’s airy ticket hall was full of migrants and their makeshift beds. Now there is little evidence of them, but for a few bean-thin black men sitting under palm trees outside the concourse. But east along the tracks, between the train line and a row of derelict offices, is the pen into which they have been pushed. Clothes are drying on fences, walls and every vertical space. A Red Cross canteen serves stew and crescents of watermelon. Inside, on the ground floor of the office block, every available space is taken up by camp beds; about 30 to each small room.

A refugee argues with a representative of the National Front | EPA

Out in the yard, a group of migrants gathers. Asked (using a translator) where they are from, their replies vary: Syria, Eritrea and Sudan. Mostly they stick together according to nationality. They are not here because they want to be — one man has tried ten times to enter France — but because they want to continue to northern Europe. Asked where they want to go, members of the crowd name Norway, Sweden, Britain and Germany. A young Sudanese man barges past and out of the pen. He wears dreadlocks, a “Chicago” T-shirt, dirty jeans and a wry expression. His name, it transpires, is Ali.

The migrants are not — technically — penned in. They are free to wander into Ventimiglia and indeed right up to the French border. The station next to which they live has no ticket barriers. Along with the camp at Saint Ludovic, this is that rare place in the EU where welfare is truly free at the point of use, where no identification is expected and no signatures demanded.

The only liberty the migrants at Ventimiglia notably lack is the one they crave: the freedom to cross the French border and go where they want to go. At any given moment, many hundreds — be they Sudanese families traveling through the Sahara on trucks, Syrians silently praying that their “Zodiac” dinghy survives the waves or Eritreans selling lighters at Rome’s Termini station — are headed for this bottleneck.

As I wait for my train in the empty ticket hall, a young African man approaches me. “Nice?” he asks, pointing to departure board prominently displaying the train westwards to France leaving in ten minutes. In Italian, I try to tell him it departs from platform three: “il binario tre.” “Tre?” he replies, typing something into his mobile. The letters are in Arabic. I point to number three on his phone’s keypad. He nods. We make our way through the subway and climb the stairs to the platform. There a double-decker SNCF, the French national railway company, train — the vessel of his hopes and dreams — stands waiting to depart.

I proceed along the platform, and before climbing on board I look back. My new friend has gone. Perhaps he was suspicious. Perhaps he was just investigating. He has returned to the camp. Re-turned to waiting and hoping.

***

From Ventimiglia the train proceeds along the coast. Yachts bob out at sea; tourists lounge in their swimming pools. Bougainvillea tumbles down railway cuttings and dangles, velvety and languid, from balconies and walls on the hillside above the line. The air in the carriage whooshes as the train enters a tunnel under the hillside. Schengen rules dictate that the train should continue on to Nice uninterrupted. But as it pulls into Menton Garavan, the first station on the French side, two police minibuses pull up. Officers of the CRS, France’s riot police, stroll over to the station, check-ing their watches.

Then the doors slide open. At the front of the train the driver steps out, sticking his hands into his pockets and raising his face to the morning sun. The officers board the train; each by his designated door. The SNCF timetable has not been amended, so the check needs to be fast. The policemen stride through the carriages, looking under seats and rattling the toilet doors (which have been locked, to prevent migrants from hiding in them).

One officer emerges, corralling a teenager before him. Then his colleague does the same, his quarry older; in his mid-twenties. As the young man is marched down the platform it becomes clear who he is: Ali, the guy in dreadlocks from the Ventimiglia camp. Another CRS officer disembarks from the train with two young men. Then another. In total nine migrants are pulled from the carriages.

The police officers on either side of the French-Italian border do not seem to speak each other’s languages, nor those of the migrants.

The police chief signals to the driver, who climbs back inside. As the train pulls away, the policemen demand documentation. It transpires that one of the Arab men with a rucksack has a French passport. He is sent down the platform, away from those without papers. Grumpily, he lights a cigarette and scans the timetable. Then the police process the migrants. “Ticket, no ticket?”, they ask repeatedly. The men do not reply. Then the officers go through their rucksacks. One pulls out a tube of cream and gestures to another: “Do we leave that boss, or what?” The chief dismisses it with a wave of his hand.

Then comes the questioning. “Speak English?” asks one policeman. “Arabe,” replies the teenager. “Your name, your name, your name?” continues the officer. Given a slip of paper and a pen, the adolescent jots it down in Arabic script. The policeman glances, impatient, at his colleague. The adolescent points again at the paper. “Salah,” he enunciates. The officers continue: “Année de naissance? Your birzday? Your birzday?” Salah makes the number 16 with his fingers. The officers note it down. “Identity?” they ask. Salah produces a soggy piece of card with handwriting on it. “Ça ne suffit pas,” sighs the officer: “That’s not enough.” Notes taken, the officers hustle the migrants into the vans. These speed down the hill, then turn left onto the coastal road, heading towards the border with Italy.

The same drill takes place every time a train from Ventimiglia arrives at Menton Garavan; some migrants have attempted the journey tens of times in the hope of slipping through. When they fail, some are directed to the camp at Saint Ludovic. Dark-skinned men lope back past beach clubs, rucksacks on their shoulders, towards the border. From there many walk all the way to Ventimiglia to try the train again. The sides of roads and tunnels between Menton and its Italian neighbor are strewn with woolen hats and sweat-stained jumpers; clothes acquired for the journey north but abandoned on the hot walk back to square one.

***

It is easy to see this stretch of serrated, foam-flecked coastline as the continent at its worst; a diorama of official Europe. The police officers on either side of the French-Italian border do not seem to speak each other’s languages, nor those of the migrants. They cluster in national groups. They represent Europe’s governments; reluctant to live up to their rhetoric and work together on common responsibilities. The weary, frustrated young men meters away, on the run from poverty, violence and (in some cases) oppression, pay the price for this failure: limbo.

Yet the picture is not uniformly grim. The migrant camps also illustrate a Europe of citizens. In the Red Cross tents at Saint Ludovic and at Ventimiglia, people of different nationalities and languages, different creeds and backgrounds, have forged a temporary but cosmopolitan little community on the shore of the Mediterranean. One might expect the camps to be sad, tense places. Instead they exude decency: from the volunteers providing the migrants with a modicum of dignity and comfort, to the locals donating food and toiletries, to the good-humored and optimistic migrants themselves.

Their very optimism, moreover, serves as a reminder that Europe remains a beacon of hope for those beyond its shores and borders — for the Maidan protesters in Ukraine, for refugees from Syria, for the young and forward-looking in Turkey, in Bosnia, in Belarus, in Morocco and even farther away. The camps are not just exhibits of the institutions’ failure.

They should also provide impetus and inspiration for the continent — a standard by which to judge its inadequate leaders. Saint Ludovic may be the end of Europe. But it is also a starting point.