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Stunned France Debates Future Of Shipwrecked Immigrants
FREJUS, France, Feb 18 (News Agencies) - The unprecedented arrival of more than 900 Kurdish migrants in France split the country's political class down the middle Sunday and threatened to overload its strict immigration system.
Politicians from both right and left clashed over how to deal with the Kurds, who claim to be fleeing oppression in Saddam Hussein's Iraq, after their dramatic arrival aboard a leaking freighter off a Cote d'Azur resort forced the asylum issue to the top of the national agenda.
Socialist Health Minister and former humanitarian campaigner Bernard Kouchner described Kurdish democrats as France's "allies against dictatorship" and compared the Riviera arrivals to the Vietnamese boat people.
From the right, the Gaullist candidate for mayor of Paris, Phillipe Seguin called for them to be protected.
"We are not going to bring ourselves down to the level of slave-traders by sending this group back to Saddam Hussein," he said.
But another right-wing heavyweight, former interior minister Charles Pasqua, said the illegals should be sent straight back home.
"We are faced with a problem of economic refugees, it's not a question of political refugees," he told France Info radio.
Meanwhile, President Jacques Chirac stayed above the fray, expressing his shock at the Kurds' arrival, but not speculating on their future status.
"These people were transported secretly in unacceptable conditions, which were shameful, dangerous and inhuman, reminiscent of another era," he said on Saturday. "Their legal status should be cleared up rapidly."
But it was unclear Sunday whether France's tough immigration system, based on a 1945 law and designed to deal with individual cases, could cope with the pressure of the latest arrivals.
"We are not equipped to cope with such a huge figure," a legal official said Sunday, adding: "The traffickers know that in sending 1,000 people they can destabilize states, and oblige them - if they don't alter their procedures - to allow illegal immigrants onto their territory."
Judges have until Wednesday to interview all the would-be refugees individually before deciding whether to allow them entry to French territory where they could eventually apply for asylum.
Any illegals not dealt with in that time could slip through the system and find themselves on French territory without a hearing, legal experts warned, as officials scrambled to reinforce magistrates and police in the Var region.
The process is being hampered because few of the immigrants speak French or English, and there are few Kurdish language interpreters.
As the immigrants received medical treatment in the military depot which has become their temporary home, the crew that drove their ship onto rocks off the French Riviera was still on the run.
Police were hunting for "three to five seamen at most", according to prosecutors. If found, they will face charges of "abetting illegal immigration".
The lifeboat used by the crew to escape was found Sunday close to the spot where the traffickers ran their ship onto rocks aground 25 miles (40 kilometers) west of Cannes early Saturday.
French border police said the ship's owner and captain had both been identified as Iraqi nationals and that Interpol had been asked to help track them.
Daniel Chaz, the assistant director of France's border police, told reporters outside the immigrant's camp that the Kurds were the victims of a joint operation by Turkish and Iraqi "mafia" gangs.
The Kurds, including more than 300 children under 10, were smuggled out of northern Iraq and kept in safe houses before being loaded onto the East Sea from a Turkish beach on February 10th and spending a week trapped in "disgusting conditions" below-decks, surviving on water and biscuits, Chaz said.
"It was horrible, I do not want to go through that again, I would rather set myself on fire," said Abdoul Salam, 32, one of the migrants.
Salam said he paid $5,000 for his family to escape their native northern Iraq. "We had no notion of time. Two or three times we thought the boat was sinking," he said, describing the harrowing journey.
"They were astonished to arrive in France. They had been told they would be taken to Europe, but they didn't know where," Chaz said, "They just wanted to come to a democratic country in Europe."
"I wanted to escape. [In Iraq] there is torture and death," said Mahmoud, 20. Ismael, 30, who also claimed persecution in Iraq said his family had started the journey locked in a truck, before boarding the East Sea.
"On the boat, they threatened us and kicked us," he said, adding that the crew were masked and spoke only to give orders like "sit" or "inside".
France, which received 38,590 applications for asylum last year according to the U.N. refugee agency, rejects more than three-quarters of requests and is not a favored destination for illegal immigrants.
It is more common for boatloads of illegals to arrive in Italy, from where the immigrants try to travel across Europe to Britain or other northern European states.
The U.N. High Commissioner for Refugee's delegation in France called on Europe to continue to welcome genuine refugees Sunday and announced it was sending lawyers to monitor the treatment of the Kurds.
Meanwhile, the Swedish Support Committee for Syrian Kurds, a Stockholm-based NGO, called into question the migrants' claim that they are all from Iraq.
"I recognized about 20 of them in television reports as being from Syrian towns where my relatives live. When I called my relatives, they told me that more than 500 of those Kurds were Syrians," Novin Harsan, a member of the committee, said.
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