This empty patch of ground is what was once the infamous Calais Jungle camp, which has now been cleared by riot police after clashes with migrants refusing to leave.
The shacks and tents that once crowded the massive area where migrants camped out on their way to try and get to Britain has been razed to the ground, with cranes and heavy machinery now on site finishing the job.
A few illegal camps sprang up nearby but police – who fired tear gas at migrants hurling rocks at them last week – now appear to have completely cleared the area.
Although riot police today swooped on an illegal migrant camp in north eastern Paris, where thousands travelled to after the clearance, just after dawn on Monday.
The raid sparked a brief stand-off at a site where numbers have soared, with many setting up tents and sleeping rough in public parks now the migrant issue has spilled into the streets of Paris.
The operation largely consisted of identity checks on some of an estimated 2,500 migrants sleeping rough around a canal and urban train bridge near Paris’s Stalingrad metro station.
It came as pressure mounted on the government to clear and shut the camp and tension has risen in tandem with speculation that police will move in to evacuate and close the camp indefinitively in the coming days.
One witness said a digger moved in to clear a small part of the camp, a tentacular sprawl of tents, mattresses, blankets and the meagre belongings of migrants who come mainly from war-torn countries such as Afghanistan.
Migrants shouted at police in riot gear as the digger swept debris and rubbish away in a small section of the camp, which was otherwise left largely intact. One policeman sprayed a migrant with tear gas.
After a couple of hours, police allowed migrants to move back in after a tidy-up by municipal cleaning workers.
In a letter sent to Interior Minister Bernard Cazeneuve, a copy of which was obtained by Reuters, Paris Mayor Anne Hidalgo requested that the camp be shut rapidly on humanitarian and sanitary grounds.
City Hall officials say the numbers living and sleeping rough in the area have swollen by about a third since the evacuation last week of the Jungle camp in Calais, where more than 6,000 people were living.
The Calais camp, a vast shanty town on sandy scrubland where demolition workers finished the destruction job today.
The images from the demolition came to symbolise Europe’s fraught efforts to cope with a record influx of migrants fleeing strife and poverty in countries from Afghanistan to Sudan.
French President Francois Hollande urged Britain at the weekend to shoulder its part of the responsibility for 1,500 minors who have been housed temporarily in container boxes in Calais following the clearout.
The rest of the 6,000-plus inhabitants of the Jungle have been dispatched to lodgings across France, pending examination of their asylum cases.
‘It’s up to Britain now to fully live up to its duty, that’s not finished yet,’ said Pascal Brice, the head of France’s refugee agency, Ofpra.
Daily Mail
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