Into the Fight

This blog was first published by Act Build Change. Also posted by the CPC & Iron Rule.

The refugees of the Jungle paid a deep cost for their organising, but in so doing opened a route to safety for thousands of children. Helping those most impacted by injustice get into the fight is critical - both for the unique capabilities they bring and for the way their participation changes the frame and re-architects the winning movements that come with them.

2016, family reunited by Safe Passage, St Pancras International Station. Credit Safe Passage Int

I didn’t know what to expect, walking into the Jungle refugee camp for the first time in September 2015. What I found was a cross between the worst shanty town I’d ever seen and a truly shit Glastonbury festival.

There were dozens of small shacks built out of anything lying to hand, hundreds of tents and, remarkably, a ramshackle Orthodox Church. Scattered across the sand dunes and old rubbish tip the camp was organised ethno-linguistically, little Sudan here, little Afghanistan there linked by small and winding paths through the tents, the trash and the sewage.

By day it was a quiet place, as thousands of refugees grabbed what sleep they could. About 5pm it would come alive, people waking up, queuing for hours to use the minimal & abysmal sanitation facilities the French courts had forced the government to provide, and then getting ready to go out and “try”.

It sounds so simple, “to try”. What it meant was walking hours towards the ferry terminal or train lines in shoes that were falling apart, with a sleeping bag or piece of sack to throw over the lines of razor wire as you tried to scale fence after fence to climb onto a lorry or high speed train. 

Part of the Glastonbury feel came from the hundreds of volunteers from the UK, people who had gone out to try and help taking donations of food, tents, blankets with them. The day I arrived was the same day Help Refugees began their work, the same day by coincidence our friends at Good Chance put up their theatre dome.

At the time I was the lead organiser at CitizensUK, helping drive the resettlement of 20,000 Syrians from the region, and it felt increasingly untenable for us to say nothing about Calais. With our focus more political than humanitarian, the Rev Keith Hebden and I took no donations, no charitable aid, just a single question - “why”.

We wanted to listen to the people in the Jungle, to understand why with Germany & Sweden open people would be risking their lives and taking these appalling risks. With public sympathy for Syrians high we sought out Little Syria and there on the side of the sand dune perhaps pompously announced who we were and that we were going to have a meeting in 15 minutes time.

This is the starting point in any decent community organising - a “listening campaign”. We call it a campaign because it is more than just listening, because in hearing people’s why you can hear all the ways that a big problem like the Jungle breaks down into smaller and specific chunks you can do something about, as well as finding the leaders needed to do something about them. 

A quarter of an hour later a group of some 30 Syrians had gathered, collected the only two chairs they had in the camp to offer us, and piled us with coats and tea as the cold wind bit. Keith & I asked our question, and from every person came the same answer - they were trying to reach someone, an uncle with a sofa they could sleep on, a cousin with a garage where they might get a job. Many were just kids, teenage boys some of whom were trying to reach members of their nuclear family - sisters, brothers, even parents. 

Having heard these people described as a horde, a swarm, a feral mass, finding that a bunch of them were just kids trying to reach their family was deeply shocking. Kids belong with their families, and a situation that demanded they risk their lives to reach them was indefensible. I said to the Syrians that I could offer no guarantees but that I thought we could build a campaign around those children - one that might gradually widen to others too. I explained though that we couldn’t do this for the Syrians, only with them - we would need them to decide to act, a decision that would start with compiling a census of all the Syrians in the Jungle: their ages, who they were trying to reach, documentation, any relevant medical information.

I asked them to pick four leaders to work with us, and after a brief discussion four men came forward. As I took their names and phone numbers, and gave them mine, a fifth man in a beanie stepped forward and demanded in broken English that he be allowed to join the group. OK, so be it I said, before turning round and heading for home.

I came back to to the UK and started meeting everyone I could. Late one evening in her living room I met the people who would count, Charlotte Kilroy from Doughty Street Chambers and Sonal Ghelani from the Migrant Law Project. They felt a challenge could be brought in the courts for the kids and so one month after I first stepped foot in the Jungle I went back to share the good news.

Of the five Syrians only one remained. The other four had moved on, some had made it to the UK, others had given up. Only the wild looking man with the beanie was there, but in his hands was a notebook with 157 names in it. We took off our shoes and sat down inside a tent, he poured tea for us as I explained the good news - I’d found some lawyers, we could mount a challenge, one I could build a campaign around and the legal team would be here in just a month. He stood up and stormed out.

An hour later, having chased Abu Omar through the dunes to try and find what I’d done wrong I learned for the first time just how much I had asked of these Syrians. Every night  for the month I was in London, as the camp had emptied, Abu Omar had stayed behind with his book. Everyone thought he was crazy, they told him he was wasting his time and should try and make it like everyone else. Through the cold and the rain, through the casual violence and degradation of the place Abu Omar had remained, patiently completing his census. I called Sonal and said a month would be too long. She agreed to come out on Tuesday, and there and then my friend Adam O’Taylor and I started taking down kid’s details in a tent on the dunes.

Our legal team took instruction from 7 boys that same week and Abu Omar spent the next 3 months, through the winter, working to persuade the boys to show up to their legal appointments and give up the dangers of “trying” each night. With no proven route to safety it is hard to really explain just how much was being asked, both of him and the boys in his care. 

We broke the story publicly and began to build campaigning momentum through the Refugee Welcome Teams we’d helped found across the country, and with major actors like Save the Children & UNHCR who leveraged the lists of children we began to compile in parliamentary lobbying.

On December 29th Masoud Naveed, one of the boys on our waiting list who was trying to reach his sister in West London, climbed onto a lorry that he was told was headed to the UK. Worried it was going the wrong way he looked up and was killed as it passed under a bridge. We helped raise funds to repatriate his body and his family joined the campaign, his brother in-law joining the delegation we took to meet the Immigration Minister to talk about how one day the phone had just stopped ringing.

Just one month later the route denied to Masoud opened. A judge ruled in our favour and Abu Omar took the four remaining Syrian boys and put them on the Eurostar. Watching them reunited with their families in London, having travelled here safely and legally, is something I will never forget. 

Over the coming months our work grew at pace. Our legal operations ramped up bringing dozens of cases, each leveraging that first precedent. Campaigning in Parliament ramped up in support of the Dubs amendment and with the first wave of demolitions due in Calais our productive relationship with Help Refugees really clicked into gear - bringing armies of celebrities to the cause, alongside the Refugee Welcome Teams, faith leaders, politicians and NGOs we’d already begun to coordinate.

Every week we reunited more families. Every week we drove concessions out of a hostile government. And yet every time I visited Calais Abu Omar seemed angrier and angrier. Only later that spring, 6 months after we began working together, did he finally share with me that he himself had a family - a wife and four young children, who were still back in Syria and in danger. That family was relying on him to make it to the UK and bring them to safety through family reunion. I remember the feeling in my stomach, like it had just been ripped out, when I finally understood all I had been asking of this man. We shifted approach and Abu Omar’s attention finally shifted to his own family’s safety. By the end of that year over 1,000 children had reached safety through routes he helped open. Over the next few years those routes opened for children in Calais would also be forced open in Italy, in Greece, and the broader MENA region through this same mix of community organising, litigation, and operations. Thousands more children and families benefited.

To be an organiser, to make change with and not for others, is to believe that people are the answer and not the problem. Organisers challenge people to take on a terrible responsibility - to choose to fight the injustices affecting them, while offering only meagre hope and a sincere commitment to fight alongside them. To me, carrying that terrible challenge, is to carry the light of freedom. 

But this isn’t just a story about organising in general. Nor is it just a story about the heroism of one man, though undoubtedly it is that story as well. 

In recent years many organisations, foundations, activists have turned towards organising in the UK. Typically the analysis goes like this - we’ve experienced 15 years of occasional victories but more often a steady and grinding defeat. Instruments of law we used to defend those in need have been eroded. Economic inequality, and with it political inequality, has compounded. All the while the issues facing us have become more acute than ever - the cost of living crisis, the climate crisis, the housing crisis…Organising, an approach that aims not just to win but to build power capable of winning again, seems to hold out hope and so units are created and positions rebranded.

Normally these organising efforts end up loosely focused on marginal constituencies in the hope this will deliver meaningful political clout. Where this investment can be sustained long term, and where the organising is excellent quality, such an approach can deliver real gains. But in telling this story I want to raise other questions - “organising” yes, but organising who, organising why, organising how?

The work of Safe Passage is an approach that focuses limited resources in organising those at the very harshest end of oppression. Not because by organising them on their own they can win - but because by building organisation there they can get in the fight.

No number of professional british organisers could have done what Abu Omar did in the Jungle. Only the Syrians living there could complete a census. Only one of their own could have persuaded the boys to go to their appointments, to speak to the press, to sit and wait through winter. 

Beyond the unique capabilities that those directly impacted bring to bear, they also occupy a unique moral position. By helping bring the most impacted into the fight you can build and energise the wider coalitions around them that can win. In our case it was celebrities, politicians, faith leaders, the Refugee Welcome Teams, lawyers and NGOs - a coalition that repeatedly beat a majority Conservative government in parliamentary votes, the courts, and the public square.

A great deal of energy is spent on strategic communications and discussions of framing. Bringing the most impacted into the fight reframes and polarises issues not through tweaks to the “message”, but through changing the “messenger”. When people speak for themselves the moral clarity they bring re-architects the coalitions needed to make change possible. As Marshall Ganz puts it, “movements are moral projects”. The most impacted have a critical, though not exclusive role to play, in bringing those moral projects to life.