Kurds, on French Riviera, Recall Horrors of Week at Sea
By DONALD G. McNEIL Jr.
FREJUS, France, Feb. 18 - The contrast could not have been starker: 908 Kurdish migrants, unfed and unwashed after seven days at sea, huddled on the glittering coast of the Riviera, where the masses normally arrive in summer sporting sunglasses, skimpy sunwear and well-toned tans.
And the conundrum those new arrivals presented when they washed up not far from here before dawn on Saturday, abandoned by their smugglers, was sharp, too: not only for France, but for a Europe facing swelling tides of illegal immigrants from places as far-flung as Iraq or China.
Today, the Kurds began describing their horrifying journey from northern Iraq through Turkey to the manicured shores of the French Mediterranean: packed for a week in the darkened hold of a foundering freighter with barely room to lie down; given biscuits and water for nourishment and plastic bags for toilets; and kicked around by a crew in hooded masks who barked out monosyllabic commands in Turkish, like "sit," or "inside."
"The conditions inside were degrading," one man told reporters today. "There was nothing to eat. You were afraid all the time. You couldn't see the ocean."
"Two or three times, we thought the ship was sinking," said Abdoul Salam, a 32-year-old man who said he had paid $5,000 for his family to make the trip.
To hear the officials of France and the 14 other members of the European Union, the cases of refugees like these must be given careful - but firm - consideration. Seeking political asylum has become virtually the only way into a Western Europe cool to legal immigration, and politicians say many who come are just simple economic outcasts seeking a better life.
But that did not stop some 500,000 people from trying last year alone, thus highlighting the ironies and inconsistencies of a bloc that preaches integration and strives for well-being, but faces a backlash against arriving foreigners whose labor and energy it may in fact need to preserve future prosperity.
The journeys bring their own horrors: each year, the dozens of drowning deaths of Africans crossing from Morocco to Spain; last summer, the suffocation of 58 Chinese in the back of a truck at the English port of Dover.
Just this month, the current holder of the European Union's rotating presidency, Sweden, held a conference of all 15 member nations to highlight the horrors of people smuggling, and to agree on common penalties and joint pursuit. By some estimates, hundreds of thousands of women and children are being smuggled into Western Europe each year, many of them for prostitution.
On Saturday, tragedy was narrowly averted. The 908 Kurds, including some 300 children and three babies born on board the boat, were helped off after a few of the migrants waded ashore and raised the alarm. The boat, empty, then sank as it was being towed to the nearby naval base of Toulon.
Cheerful blue buses transported the Kurds to a base of the 21st Marine Regiment in this coastal town, where they were bedded down in cots in a vacant military warehouse. Today, they underwent medical checks by a team of 150 Red Cross volunteers, and voiced their hopes of applying for asylum.
"France is a country of democracy, a country of human rights," one Kurdish man told a French radio reporter.
But French officials, while deploring the tactics of the smuggling gangs and their exploitation of the poor, also made it clear that they did not want to be too welcoming, for fear of encouraging more migrations.
The police, who are conducting a manhunt for the fugitive crew that ran the boat aground, were expected to serve notice on Monday that the castaways are either not officially in France - the marine base would be given the legal no-man's status of a customs area - or are in France illegally.
Francoise Hollande, first secretary of the Socialist Party of Prime Minister Lionel Jospin, said the policy would be to "welcome them with humanity, but not to give them the illusion or hope of integration into our country."
The French government said it would start processing the Kurds' applications for asylum quickly, dispatching Elisabeth Guigou, minister of labor, to the area today to help get started.
But a former interior minister, Charles Pasqua, told a French radio station that the immigrants ought to be sent back because they are economic refugees, "and if we accept them here, then the floodgates will open."
French officials suggested today that France is not a popular destination with Kurds, who are more likely to have relatives in England or the United States. About 1,000 Kurds and Afghanis are in a transit camp in northern France hoping to get across the Channel to Britain.
Daniel Chaz, assistant director of the French border police, who interviewed some refugees, said they knew that they were headed for Western Europe but were surprised to find themselves in France.
They told him, he said, that they had been recruited in northern Iraq, near the borders with Syria and Turkey, where tens of thousands of farmers have been displaced by attacks by both the Turkish and Iraqi governments on the Kurds, who have sought a separate state on and off since the breakup of the Ottoman Empire after World War I.
One elderly Kurd who spoke to a French radio reporter today said his people were treated badly in Turkey, called vile names and attacked by soldiers. It was for that reason, he said, that he went to what he called "the human market" to try to flee.
Mr. Chaz said he was told that they paid about $250 each to get past Turkish soldiers guarding the border with Iraq, and then another $2,000 to $4,000 to be locked inside heavy trucks that crossed Turkey. Then they boarded the East Sea, where they were kept in what he called "disgusting conditions" in the holds so as not to alert coast guards.
That the Kurds landed in France seemed to be a big surprise to them all. There was some speculation that the freighter was headed for Italy, a common destination of the smugglers - many of them Turkish or Albanian - because it is the first European Union country many of the boats from Turkey or Africa can reach, and has a long coastline.
"I want to go where there is democracy," Ismail, a 30-year-old Iraqi Kurd who traveled with his wife and three children, told The Associated Press. "I would rather die than go back there."