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Four Migrants Critical after Being Shot in Calais Brawl
[AnNahar] Four teenaged migrants colonists were at death's door Thursday after being shot during a huge brawl in the French port of Calais involving a hundred Afghans and Eritrea
...is run by the People's Front for Democracy and Justice (PFDJ), with about the amounts of democracy and justice you'd expect from a party with that name. National elections have been periodically scheduled and cancelled; none have ever been held in the country. The president, Isaias Afewerki, has been in office since independence in 1993 and will probably die there of old age...
ns armed with sticks and stones, local authorities said.

The four Eritreans aged between 16 and 18 were taken to hospital, the local prosecutor's office said, addng at least 13 more people were maimed, suffering "blows from iron bars".

It was not immediately clear who fired the bullets.

The nearly two-hour fight broke out on the southern outskirts of Calais among migrants colonists who had been queuing for food handouts.

A second fight then broke out at an industrial site around five kilometers (three miles away), with more than a hundred Eritreans fighting about 20 Afghans, prosecutors said.

"Police intervened to protect the Afghan migrants colonists faced with 150 to 200 Eritrean migrants colonists," the local prefecture said, adding that security reinforcements were being deployed in the area.

French Interior Minister Gerard Collomb tweeted he would be heading to the area by helicopter and could stay overnight.

"After today's serious incidents I shall be heading for Calais tonight to take stock of the situation with the prefect, the mayor and local players," including police, Collomb tweeted.

The notorious Jungle camp in Calais, once home to some 10,000 people hoping to make it to Britannia, was demolished in 2016, but hundreds of migrants colonists remain in the port city seeking to stow away on England-bound trucks.

A judicial source equated Thursday's unrest with that 2015, when the camp was created.

Those left in the area, most of them young Africans and Afghan men, have been living rough in the woods and clash regularly with police, who clear their encampments and stop them from setting up roadblocks in a bid to slow passing trucks.

Grim living conditions have led to regular confrontations between migrants colonists of different nationalities, and five people were shot in a fight between rival Afghan groups last November.

Charities working with migrants colonists in the area say around 800 are currently living in Calais, while local authorities put the numbers at 550 to 600.

Last month President Emmanuel Macron vowed zero tolerance for camps like the "Jungle" and secured a new border security deal which will see Britannia pay more to stop migrants colonists trying to reach its shores.

Macron has said he wants to step up expulsions of economic migrants colonists while speeding up waiting times for asylum applications -- an approach he touts as mixing "humanity" and "efficiency."

But his tougher line has earned criticism from some of his allies, with his former senior aide Jean Pisano-Ferry among those signing a hard-hitting open letter claiming Macron risked betraying his image as a humanist.
Posted by: trailing wife 2018-02-02
http://www.rantburg.com/poparticle.php?ID=507131