The number of camping/resisting people on the reef looks to be short of tens of people each day, but it is difficult to give an even vaguely right number. It keeps being a significant one, of about a hundred people. The local and national media – the first ones being an expression of the interest of the local tourism business, and the others of the “Raison d’Etat” that keeps bouncing these few hundreds of men and women from France to Italy and back, hit by this relentless logic, a symbol of a more general, structural and lasting condition of Fortress Europe politics – keep reporting about new arrivals between the train station and the reef.

The decrease of the presences is generally perceived by the picketeers and supporters that alternate each other at the border as a positive fact, emphasizing that other ways to reach France were found. France itself being an intermediate milestone of a road that looks to Great Britain or Scandinavian Northern Europe as its goal. In spite of the ridiculous engineering of European Union on the migrant “quotas” or the judicial (and byzantine) discriminations between regular migrants and “clandestines”, political and “humanitarian” refugees, these men and these woman daily exercise their right to flee, cracking the borders of an Europe in crisis.

What is most amazing is the composition of the migrants on the reefs, most of them being very young, between 15 (and even less) and 25 years old, for a great deal coming from Sudan, Darfur, Eritrea, someone from Mali and other African countries. They are fleeing from war, misery and devastations, or they look for a more dignified and empowering existance. All of them have a well clear idea about where to go and who to find: they are completely aware about what is happening in Calais…but they are moved by the desire to reconnect with family, friends, broken communities that regrouped over there. Difficult topics to explain to the petty politicians in Bruxelles and in the other European capitols, that keep trying passing each other the hot potato. But it will be even more arduous to make these determined lives to accept the math of the quotas and agreements. The crossing of borders, as tight-closed as they want them to be, is a de facto movement that throws neoliberal globalization into crisis. They have to get over it!

In the meantime, at the Permanent Picket the daily work of support and help in order to make this outpost of freedom and resistance (in spite of unfavourableconditions) a barely livable place, useful for restoring oneself and get precious information, goes on. Since monday an internet and mobile-charging point powered by a self-built solar panel is active. Camp showers were set up, and micro-dossiers and signs of legal information in Italian, French, English and Arabic were prepared. Since tuesday, the Eat the Rich collective, that has been preparing for months free meals in the Italian movement events and free spaces in various cities, set up a camp kitchen that will be satisfying the palates without fault. Even if mainstream media always and only interviews the Red Cross, it is these rank-and-file militants, helped by many supporters on both sides of the borders and by the Islamic communities of Ventimiglia, Menton, and other centres of the Cote d’Azur, the true pillars supporting this new chapter of migrant resistance.

Yesterday evening at 21.30, a public assembly of migrants and their supporters assessed the situation and decided on eventual new initiatives to start, keeping struggling against Europe and its armed borders, that in a few days will move more southwards in order “to wage war against people smugglers”. 

Ventimiglia, Fortress Europe, June 2015