October 30, 2001
Illegal Immigrants Bring Halt to Channel Tunnel Traffic
nytimes.com
By DONALD G. McNEIL Jr.
ARIS, Oct. 30 — The Channel Tunnel was closed to freight traffic for 11 hours today after dozens of asylum-seekers broke into a freight yard near Calais and tried to hide on trains bound for Britain.
About 150 immigrants were arrested and 100 others were said to be hiding on trains or in the 32-mile-long tunnel, where the freight tracks were closed for safety reasons. Passenger bullet trains were not affected.
Most of those arrested were Afghans, Iranians or Iraqi and Turkish Kurds who live in a Red Cross refugee camp near a tunnel entrance, authorities said.
Every year, thousands of refugees try to sneak through the tunnel at its various entrances. Dogs and barbed wire guard entrances and, even miles away in France and Belgium, highways have signs warning truckers not to stop for fear that their trucks will be boarded.
In the last two months, groups of 44, 80 and 100 migrants were intercepted by French authorities trying to dash into the tunnel for the long, dangerous walk.
A French police official said today that the migrants "try to find weak points where they can get through." Some have been known to jump onto trucks from bridges or to leap in front of trains to slow them down so others may board.
Winning political asylum is seen as easier in Britain than in France, and there are larger Middle-Eastern communities to blend into. Britain this week announced plans to make asylum-seekers carry identity cards with their pictures and coded fingerprints.
Eurotunnel, which operates the tunnel, unsuccessfully sued earlier this year trying to force the French government to move a refugee camp in Sangatte that is only two miles from a tunnel entrance.
Instead, the French government announced plans to build bigger camps because the existing one was overcrowded.
The British government argues that the camps themselves encourage asylum-seekers to sneak or to be smuggled into western Europe since they can legally get within a stone's throw of Britain and live at public expense while plotting their break-ins.
France and Germany are regarded as parsimonious in awarding refugee status. They do not, for instance, normally award it to Afghanis fleeing the Taliban because the laws recognize only "state persecution" and the Taliban are not a recognized government.
The British grant asylum status or temporary residence permits to about 30 percent of all applicants, but opinion polls show that many voters want a crackdown on asylum-seekers.
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