Destination Europe

Europe sits on a demographic time bomb as a torrent of immigrants, mainly from Third World countries, inundates its porous shores. Meanwhile, masses of people from the continent's east are waiting for the expansion of the European Union to move west. VAIJU NARAVANE reports.

ERI ASAN AMIN is 18 years old. His dark face, lined and tired, stands out in stark contrast to the sheer white of his hospital pillow. He speaks with difficulty, quiet tears sliding down the side of his face. Terror lurks in his eyes as he recounts his brush with death.

"I am an Iraqi Kurd. There were nine of us in our group. I don't know how I came here or the route we took. The man who was our agent said when they found us we had to put our hands in the air and say `asylum'. We were not given any food, just very little water. It was dark inside the container and I don't know for how long we sailed. All I know is that I woke up here, in this hospital. All I know is that some of the others who were with me are dead. I thought I was dying too, that I would never see my mother again."

Amin was found more dead than alive after a harrowing sea crossing from the western Greek port of Igoumenitsa. His voyage that began in northern Iraq, and took him across Turkey, Bulgaria and Greece, ended in Avellino, an industrial suburb of Naples, in southern Italy. The police have been able to piece together what happened.

"This boy is a Kurd like the five who died, suffocated, and three others who survived. Their families gave a lot of money to professional people-smugglers to bring them here. They probably took the usual route through Turkey, Bulgaria and Greece, where they were put into a sea container bound for Italy. When the container arrived in Naples it was loaded on to a truck. Fortunately for them, the driver made a rest stop at Avellino. He heard noises coming from inside the truck and called the carabinieri. We had to force open the doors and remove the dead piled on top to release the living," Inspector Libero De Simone said.

Another police officer, Bianca Della Valle, is more forthcoming. "What you have seen here today is nothing. In Sicily, I have seen exhausted, sunburnt, dehydrated people, including women and children, wade ashore to collapse on the beach. They were put on leaky, unsafe ships that were abandoned in international waters just off the coast by an unscrupulous crew who made off in the early hours leaving these helpless people to fend for themselves. The boat ran aground on some rocks and over 60 people drowned because they couldn't swim. This is not an isolated incident. Such incidents are happening every day."

Italy has Europe's longest coastline, over 4,500 km, making it porous and very difficult to police. Laid out almost laterally, the Tunisian coast in the south is only 60 km away, while Albania, Slovenia, Croatia and Montenegro lie just across the Adriatic Sea. With well-entrenched organised crime gangs forever on the lookout for new and profitable ways of amassing money, it is hardly surprising that Italy has become the centrepiece of people-smuggling into Europe.

An estimated 500,000 illegal immigrants pour into Western Europe each year, a large chunk of them into Italy. Many of them are fleeing war, or religious and political persecution. But most of them are running away from economic deprivation, misery and hunger in an attempt to carve out a better life elsewhere. They come from Albania, Russia, central and eastern Europe, Turkey, Iraq, Afghanistan, India, Pakistan, Bangladesh, Sri Lanka, mainland China and South-East Asia. They pay on an average between $2,000 and $6,000 each, depending on the country from which they come, to unscrupulous agents to get them across to their European destination. In India and China, agents demand as much as $10,000. Linked to this gigantic human trafficking is a worrisome increase in trafficking of women by organised crime gangs.

Pino Arlacchi, Executive Director of the United Nations Office for Drug Control and Crime Prevention, says that people-smugglers make $7 billion a year from running prostitution rings, over and above what they make transporting human merchandise.

The Mafia Italian, Russian and Albanian play their part. The huge international network engaged in people-smuggling includes the Japanese Yakuza, the Chinese Snakeheads and countless other "freelance" family groups operating with nothing more than a couple of mobile phones. The network includes corrupt border guards, policemen and government and customs officials. Some of these links lead straight to top government and elected officials in countries such as Bosnia or Albania, where the country's Vice Prime Minister himself was accused of people-smuggling.

An incoherent Amin tries to explain: "We had no choice but to leave. There is no work in Iraq and we suffer persecution." He says his family begged and borrowed, worked and saved to scrape together the $2,500 that was paid to the agent. The family decided it would be him because he was young and strong and did not have a wife or children. Everyone contributed and now they all expect him to pay back by sending money home.

"I knew it would be hard, but not this hard," he recalls. "The agent told us nothing. The first part of the trip was done in a hidden compartment in a truck, behind a cargo of live chickens. Then we spent one night in a small room somewhere. The next night we boarded another truck and finally we were put into the container and the doors closed on us. It was pitch dark, no toilet, no food, no water. I don't know how long we were there," he says.

Amin is lucky part of the skewed conception of what constitutes luck that he comes from Iraq. Kurds from Iran or Turkey do not qualify for refugee status. They are the unlucky ones. Had he been Turkish he would have been up for deportation.

Said an official who wished to remain anonymous: "Amin's family is no more persecuted than similar Kurdish families in Iran or Turkey. But now that Iraq has become the civilised world's enemy number one, and with our Prime Minister Berlusconi bending over backwards to please the Americans, we do not dare throw out Iraqi Kurds. Their nationality becomes an entrance pass, as in the case of Afghans who won refugee status and political asylum, which were denied them for years, just after September 11. It's a strange world with arbitrary rules, shifting goalposts."

THE queue outside the Indian consulate in Milan is long. Barely 9 a.m. and there are already about 60 persons waiting. Kuldeep Singh (he prefers to give his brother's name) is a clean-shaven Sikh youth from Phagwara. "We paid an agent four lakh rupees. My parents even sold some family land to afford his rates. I got here by air, road and sea and when we were within sight of land on the ship, we were put into small boats and told to row or swim ashore. I was not afraid because I can swim, but others were. From Bari where I landed I made my way to Milan where I had been given a contact."

Kuldeep Singh has already found illegal employment milking cows at a dairy farm near Milan. Like many others he wants to take advantage of the Italian government's decision to grant amnesty to all illegal immigrants and give them resident status. Which is why he is in the queue. He will tell the Indian Consulate that he arrived in Italy legally; that his passport was robbed. He will make a declaration of theft and ask for another passport. He will then ask his employer to certify that he is a good and honest worker. Armed with these documents he will make his case before the immigration authorities, telling them he arrived long before he actually did.

This past month the influx of illegal immigrants into Italy has become a torrent. The government plans to grant amnesty to illegal aliens because deporting all clandestine immigrants an estimated 500,000 people would be too difficult and expensive. The amnesty scheme will be coupled with a draconian new anti-immigration law that will make it extremely difficult to win political asylum and mean automatic deportation for economic migrants.

Word of the amnesty scheme has got around and boatloads of people have started arriving each day... For people like Kuldeep Singh, this is a not-to-be-missed opportunity that will mean a work permit, a bank account, the possibility of sending children to a proper school, renting a house everything most people take for granted. It will also mean freedom from the ever-present fear of getting caught and deported.

Other European governments, however, doubt Italy's ability to police its borders effectively. Germany, for instance, which sees Italy as a developing country in matters of policing and border control, has repeatedly offered to "assist" Italy in keeping illegal immigrants out. The North Atlantic Treaty Organisation (NATO) recently decided to use its fleet to "monitor" the Adriatic Sea to stop mainly Albanian clandestine immigrants from reaching the Italian shores.

The two most popular immigration routes into Italy are from Tunisia to the island of Lampedusa (for north African Arabs and black Africans), and the 80-km Albania-Italy run favoured by Kosovo Albanians, Afghans, Kurds and Chinese. These smuggling rings are very organised and extremely profitable.

Greece and Turkey are the two main staging posts with would-be migrants passing from agent to agent until their final destination is reached. Some of the contracts and "deals" promoted by mafia agents include a "re-try" should an initial attempt fail.

IT takes wild courage and iron determination to attempt an illegal crossing from France into Britain as a stowaway on trucks and freight trains. And yet, night after night, hundreds of desperate refugees, men, women and children, walk the two miles from the Red Cross refugee camp at Sangatte to the perimeter of the Channel Tunnel terminal at Coquelles in the hope of leaping onto a slow moving freight train that will take them to Britain, the El Dorado of their collective imagination. Some of them have even lain between the tracks in a bid to slow down or stop a train. Many have died in the process.

Access to Eurotunnel's Coquelles terminal is monitored by over 200 closed circuit television (CCTV) cameras. Every gate has a 24-hour guard and the site is surrounded by 35 km of razor wire. The vast majority of those caught by heat sensors, sniffer dogs or securitymen carrying carbondioxide detectors are bussed or forced to return to Sangatte on foot. They will wait a day or two, then attempt the same crossing, again and again, until one day they succeed.

Located on the French side of the Channel Tunnel, which connects France to Britain, the infamous refugee camp of Sangatte is in fact a rundown, reconverted hangar that served as a warehouse during the building of the tunnel. In 1999 the disused and dilapidated building, all 25,000 square metres of it, was handed over to the International Red Cross with instructions to turn it into a shelter for the hundreds of refugees thronging the port, the railway station and the nearby city of Calais.

"`Get these undesirable people off the roads and into shelters so they stop being a public menace. Put them somewhere they are not seen so they do not disturb the sleep of the pious and prosperous inhabitants of Calais'. This was the real reason behind the creation of Sangatte, not concern for the refugees themselves," snorts social worker Dominique Santoro who works in Calais and the surrounding area. "They congregate here because Britain is where they want to go. The British government has more to offer asylum-seekers. They are in France on sufferance and the government here does nothing for them. They have been given a temporary stay permit until their asylum application is processed. But they do not have the right to work. They have to rely on charity handouts and what little money they brought with them. The living conditions here are grim and very basic. Despite what the newspapers say about the government pampering refugees and encouraging them, I can tell you, their life is no picnic," she says.

It is a chilly, grey, windswept autumn day; washing flutters idly on a clothesline. The entire camp is fenced in and guarded by armed special reserve policemen holding back dogs. Made up of a large hangar and several portakabins (mobile homes, temporary shelters that can be dismantled) it is a forbidding, gloomy place. Journalists are not allowed inside and the camp's single lawyer is himself under constant surveillance by the police.

Originally meant for 400 people, the camp now has about 1,800 people. Fights, including with knives and broken bottles, are a common occurrence amongst the dominant groups, Kurds and Afghans. While this sad and desolate place has become a buffer zone between two of the world's richest nations, it has also come to symbolise the Western world's failure to address the issue of immigration in any but a repressive, knee-jerk manner. Earlier this year, a desperate Kurdish asylum-seeker stitched his lips together in protest against the inhuman treatment meted out to refugees and the appalling conditions in the camp. In May, a 25-year-old man was killed in a brawl following a football match at the camp.

Professor Marc Gentilini, the president of the French Red Cross, said the young man's death "further underlines the unbearable misery and suffering faced by people fleeing their own societies because of poverty, war or political instability".

The existence of the camp in France and repeated attempts by its inhabitants to seek asylum in Britain created a major diplomatic row between the two neighbours with Britain accusing the French of encouraging asylum-seekers by locating the camp so close to the Channel Tunnel.

The presence of the refugees in Sangatte has also led to social tensions in the village and Calais. "I now keep a revolver by my side. Anyone trying anything funny and I won't hesitate to fire," says Claude Devos, who owns the local caf Le Weekend. "Business is down. These people have given us a bad name and tourism has slumped," he grumbles.

Many in Calais describe the refugees as "wild", "dangerous" or "savage" some kind of human sub-species.

In an attempt to dispel these preconceived notions, Michel Derr, the camp's director, commissioned a team of social scientists to prepare a report on the camp and its inhabitants. What emerges is startling. Contrary to popular belief, most residents of the camp are educated; almost all of them have passed high school while some hold impressive university degrees. The average price they paid to get here is $6,000.

The majority of the 284 persons questioned in the sample said that they came to Europe not because of economic reasons most of them had employment, businesses or land back home but because of insecurity, violence and persecution. Not surprisingly therefore, 90 per cent of the camp's inhabitants are Iraqi Kurds or Afghans.

"And look at the way we are treated here. Worse than dogs. We are followed, branded as liars and criminals, tracked with dogs and heat sensors. We have a lot to contribute to this society and we are willing to work. All we ask for is a chance to prove ourselves," says Wasim, a Tajik from Afghanistan.

And now, Sangatte is to be closed. No more refugees will be allowed in after mid-November and the camp will be shut down completely by April 2003. French Interior Minister Nicolas Sarkozy and his British counterpart David Blunkett announced that refugees agreeing to be repatriated would be given $2,000 to return home. Those who stubbornly refuse the handout will be "otherwise dealt with".

But the closure of the camp will not solve any problems. They will, on the contrary, create new ones. "By closing the camp the refugees will not go away. They will camp out in the streets or in parks and use the bushes as toilets as they did before," says Dominique Santoro.

Joel Lelieu, a Calais-based member of the Human Rights League, echoes her words. "It is very easy to announce a closure. These people will now find themselves on the street. This Sangatte will close but another one will surely open in its place. The problem lies not with Sangatte but with the fact that refugees exist and that governments of rich nations wish to do nothing to help them," he says.

The Channel Tunnel has often been promoted as a symbol of progress, one that dismantles suspicion and encourages the free movement of people, the mingling of cultures. Sangatte, with its barbaric security measures, razor wire fencing, its tales of overcrowding, human misery and death is a living reproach to this symbol. It underlines the absence in Europe of a coherent policy on immigration.

Sangatte is constantly in the limelight because the drama surrounding the nightly crossings the surveillance, the danger has the feel of a cheap thriller; but there are countless Sangattes dotting the European landscape where refugees are left to rot, surviving on scraps of handouts, largely ignored by governments and populations. No wall, no fence, no system of policing, no legal framework can or will stop people fleeing oppression and poverty in their own countries. The $7-million investment Eurotunel (the company that manages the Channel Tunnel) has sunk into security measures has not dissuaded Sangatte's desperate refugees from trying again and yet again.

There are two sets of conflicting treaties in force in Europe, the Dublin Convention of 1990 and the Schengen Treaty. According to the former, to which Britain is a signatory, all refugees must remain in or be sent back to the European Union country where they first landed as asylum-seekers. The facts of how and where people first landed are difficult to verify.

There is an obvious need for harmonisation of E.U. regulations as well as a more equitable distribution of refugees across Europe. The E.U. has fixed 2004 as the target year to come up with solutions within the framework of a common immigration policy but the initial discussions are already running into heavy weather because states regard any question relating to migratory flows as a matter linked to sovereignty. There is no doubt, however, that with large parts of Europe now voting Right, the inclination will be towards increasingly restrictive legislation.