“I am combative, tonic. Today, I am going home, and tomorrow morning, I will be immediately operational”, assured Thursday, November 4 on franceinfo the priest Philippe Demeestère, who ended the same day a 25-day hunger strike, to denounce the treatment of migrants in Calais.
The 72-year-old Catholic Relief chaplain, who lost eight kilos during his hunger strike, is stopping this fast to devote himself to other migrant aid projects. “I must work to prepare a night shelter for the weakened people among the exiles, as soon as possible, before the cold weather”, he explains.
Father Demeestère also announces to franceinfo that from the end of November, he will go “sleep in the different places of life where the exiled people will want to welcome him”, in order to be “present when the police come to dislodge them in the morning”. He will invite other people to come with him, in order, he explains, to show that the exiled people “are part of our horizon, are beings of flesh and it is not paper identities that will separate us from them”.
Philippe Demeestère insists on the fact that he would not have stopped his hunger strike if Anaïs Vogel and Ludovic Holbein, two association activists, had not joined him and both continued this strike movement. “I can withdraw because they are there, it is in full agreement with them”, he assures. “I exercise this dimension of radicalism” otherwise.
“It’s about playing on different strings, to demonstrate, and to show that we will not let go of the song.”
Philippe Demeestère, chaplain of Secours Catholiqueto franceinfo
The priest justifies the continuation of these actions by the “inadmissibility of what is happening [à Calais]”. He tells Franceinfo about a police operation carried out on the night of Wednesday November 3 to Thursday: “the police came with water to put out the fires lit by the exiled people to cook and warm themselves”. Father Demeestère wonders about “the meaning of this act, which appears to me to be pure sadism. How can we make exiled people who are undergoing this understand that they are dealing with a State that wants them good?”
For him, what is happening in Calais is “the radicalism of evil, an evil of false chips, which dresses in all the virtues”. The head of the French Office for Immigration and Integration (Ofii), Didier Leschi, announced on Wednesday the creation of a “night accommodation lock” with 300 places, which “will be open every day after the evacuations” of migrants. The people who will go there will then be “oriented towards long-term accommodation outside Calais”, he clarified. The state pledged on Tuesday to propose “systematically” accommodation for migrants displaced from their makeshift camps.