The National Front member who fell in love with Calais Jungle migrant
Béatrice Huret stood on a beach on
the northern French coast before dawn, watching as her lover headed off
across the English Channel in a rickety boat. Would she ever see him
again? Had she been taken for a ride, used by a man she met just a few
weeks earlier to help him fulfil his dream of a new life in England?
Would he drown on the way?
As the boat disappeared over the dark horizon, Béatrice returned to her car, her head full of hope but also full of doubt.
The
45-year-old had just a couple years previously been a card-carrying
member of the far-right National Front (FN), and she was the widow of a
policeman who she says was racist.
Now here she was helping her
migrant lover, Mokhtar, whom she had met in the so-called Jungle migrant
camp in Calais, to sneak into Britain.
She recounts the story of
how her life changed the day she offered a lift to a teenage migrant in a
new book titled Calais Mon Amour.
Béatrice says that before his
death from cancer in 2010 her husband had been one of the huge number of
police officers deployed in Calais to keep migrants from breaking into
the Channel Tunnel terminal or the ferry port, in their bid to get to
the UK.
As a policeman he was not legally allowed to join a
political party, so he got his wife to sign up instead to Marine Le
Pen's FN, which paid her to distribute pamphlets.
She says that, unlike her husband, she was not really
racist. But she admits she was worried about "all these foreigners, who
seemed so different, and who were getting into France".
Béatrice
lived with her teenage son and her mother about 20km (12 miles) from the
Jungle, but she had never seen the giant shantytown built of tents and
shacks on waste ground on the outskirts of Calais.
On her way home
from work one very cold day in 2015, she took pity on a Sudanese boy
and agreed to drop him off at the camp, which at its peak last year was
home to 10,000 people, most of whom had fled war or poverty in Africa,
the Middle East, or Afghanistan.
Then, for the first time, she saw for herself what conditions there were like.
"I
felt as though I was in a war zone, it was like a war camp, a refugee
camp, and something went 'click' and I said to myself that I just had to
help," she says.
Suddenly migrants were no longer just a word, no longer an abstraction.
Béatrice,
who works at a centre where young people are trained to become carers,
started to bring food and clothing to people in the Jungle, roping in
friends and family members to help. Slowly she got to know the camp and
its people, ranging "from shepherds to lawyers to surgeons".
Then,
in February last year, she laid eyes on Mokhtar, a 34-year-old former
teacher who had had to flee his native Iran, where he faced persecution,
and was ostracised by his own family for having converted to
Christianity.
She met him just at the moment when photos of him, and of several of
his compatriots, were being published in newspapers around the world,
because they had sewed their lips together in protest at the appalling
living conditions in the Jungle.
"I sat down and then he came over
and very gently he asked me if I would like a cup of tea, and then he
went and made me tea, and it was a bit of a shock. It was love at first
sight," she says.
"It was just his look, it was so soft. There they were with their lips sewn up and they ask me, do I want some tea?"
But communication was an obstacle, as Mokhtar spoke no French and
she, unlike him, had little English. Their solution was to use Google
Translate.
A romance blossomed and Béatrice offered to put up
Mokhtar and some of his friends in her house, ignoring advice from her
friends that she was making a big mistake.
She was under no
illusions about her new lover's goal. Mokhtar had already tried to get
to England by hiding in the back of lorries and now he was about to try a
change of tack. He and two friends gave Béatrice about 1,000 euros
(£980; $1,130) and got her to buy a small boat for them.
On 11 June last year, Béatrice towed it to a beach near
Dunkirk, and the trio of migrants, none of whom had been in charge of a
boat before, set off at about 04:00 on a perilous journey across the
world's busiest shipping channel.
"We dressed them up so they would look like men out on a fishing trip, with fishing rods," she says with a smile.
That
was the moment when the whole thing might have ended, when Béatrice
hoped for the best but worried that she might have been had, and worried
that Mokhtar and his friends might even drown.
That very nearly came to pass, when the boat started taking water around 06:30, as it approached the English coast.
It was terrifying, but with hindsight there was something comic about it.
"The
youngest was vomiting from fear, the toughest one was smoking
cigarettes and saying 'Well, if you have to die, you have to die, that's
life,' and there was Mokhtar scooping out the water and phoning the
emergency services at the same time," she says.
The British coastguard sent out a helicopter which eventually spotted them and sent a boat out to the rescue.
The
three migrants were later questioned by immigration officers, and after
a couple of days Mokhtar was sent to an asylum centre from where he
could finally contact his beloved, who had been waiting anxiously on the
other side of the Channel.
"He gave his address in Wakefield. I went to see him the next weekend," Béatrice says.
And
ever since then she has taken a ferry every second week and driven up
to see her lover, who is now in a refugee hostel in Sheffield and who
has successfully applied for asylum in the UK. They keep in touch via
webcam nearly every night
So what of the future? The couple have no plans, Béatrice says, noting that "it hurts when you make plans that don't work out".
"If our relationship ends, then so be it [but] I owe Mokhtar a beautiful love story, the most beautiful one of my life."
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The
story for her does not end on a purely happy note. Last August she was
arrested and charged with people smuggling. She laughs when she speaks
of the charge, as for her the idea that she was in it for the money is
nothing short of ridiculous.
She was taken into custody at the
same police station where her late husband used to work. Released on
bail, she was placed under judicial supervision, and has to report to
police once a week, as she waits for her trial to begin later this
month.
If found guilty, she could in theory be sentenced to 10
years in prison and fined 750,000 euros, though in her case the penalty
would probably be less severe.
Béatrice has also been put on the
government watchlist of people who are deemed a potential threat to the
security of the state. Most people on this list are radical Islamists.
This too makes her laugh.
Was it all worth it?
"Yes," she replied without hesitation. "I did it for him. You do anything for love."
Béatrice Huret's book, Calais Mon Amour, is ghost-written by Catherine Siguret
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