CALAIS, France — Mysterious armed groups are on the prowl, targeting migrants in night attacks in Calais and elsewhere in northern France, sowing fear among the displaced travelers living in squalid slums and deepening concerns the city is becoming a tinderbox of anti-migrant, anti-Muslim rage that’s fueling a budding nationalist movement.
The stalkers, sometimes masked, slip through the night armed with clubs, brass knuckles, pepper spray or knives, according to accounts by migrants and groups working to provide medical and legal help.
After months of what appear to be organized attacks, police made their first arrests Thursday, taking seven men armed with iron bars and extendable batons into custody for a suspected attack on five Iraqi Kurds at Loon-Plage, a port town between Calais and nearby Dunkirk. The seven faced charges of violence in a group and forming a group to commit violence, said Dunkirk prosecutor Eric Fouard. Some of the men, aged 24-47, said they sympathized with extreme-right movements in Calais identified as xenophobic, he said.
“The ideas they peddle are that there are too many migrants in France,” Fouard said by telephone, noting that one of the seven was from Brittany and another from the Paris region.
The head of a legal center set up for the refugees in the makeshift Calais camp alleged on Friday that those living there are regularly subject to police violence, as well. Marianne Humbersot told reporters she was filing 13 complaints — five for violence by militia and eight at the hands of police.
“I have a 13 year old who had his foot broken. And 10 days before being attacked by police, he had his nose broken by racists,” Humbersot said.
Migrants — who have converged in northern France hoping to sneak into Britain — have also long complained about police brutality, accounts backed up by medical units that treat them. But attacks in recent months, accounts suggest, are organized and carried out by a militia-style group or groups, opening a new dimension of violence.
A growing security crackdown aimed at keeping thousands of migrants from reaching Britain is giving Calais a fortress-like look. The city bristles with tall barbed wire fences, blinks with police lights and is disfigured by open spaces cleared of brush — including at the two entrances to the camp — so police can better survey.
On Friday, officials in France’s northern Pas-de-Calais region said that half of the sprawling makeshift migrant camp will be evacuated. Prefect Fabienne Buccio said between 800 to 1,000 migrants will have to leave their dwellings in the camp on the edge of Calais, which now has shops, mosques, churches and schools built by migrants and volunteers.
Among the city’s population, a potentially toxic cocktail of frustration and anger is brewing, with pro- and anti-migrant groups facing off in demonstrations. On social networks, anti-migrant groups, often calling themselves “patriots,” are using increasingly virulent language.
“We are playing with fire because people are becoming defensive. They are organizing themselves,” said the Doctors of the World coordinator for northern France, Amin Trouve-Baghdouche.
About 150 people defied a ban on a Feb. 6 demonstration in Calais organized by the anti-Islam movement PEGIDA, which staged protests in numerous European countries that day. Police charged the Calais demonstration to end it, pulling a retired four-star general who once headed the Foreign Legion into their security net. Gen. Christian Piquemal was arrested, charged and ordered to stand trial along with four others, outraging some right and far-right politicians and his partisans. Three others, all armed, were convicted and given jail terms of up to three months.
A week earlier, about 50 migrants broke through fencing and briefly occupied a ferry, the “Spirit of Britain,” at the Calais port during a demonstration by some 2,000 migrants and supporters.
There are currently about 4,200 migrants in Calais, from Syria, Iraq, Afghanistan, Eritrea and elsewhere, and up to 2,000 more in another makeshift camp near Dunkirk, with hundreds of others scattered along the coast hoping to finish their journeys in Britain.
The “jungle,” as the open-air Calais migrant slum is known, embodies in one sprawling stretch of filth and mud the hardships, and horrors, of uprooted lives. And the city’s tensions reflect simmering uncertainty around Europe as it absorbs 1 million Syrian refugees and other migrants who arrived last year.