Refugees by the hundreds rush tunnel for Britain

SANGATTE, France -- Hundreds of refugees living in a cramped Red Cross center trampled barriers and raced past security officers at the Channel Tunnel in a desperate attempt to get to Britain by foot. The uprising ended early Wednesday with arrests and tear gas.

The drama shut down train traffic for the night and highlighted the plight of some 1,300 Iraqi Kurds, Afghans, Iranians and other refugees holed up indefinitely in this northern French village, vowing to try again and again to reach Britain. There, inspired by relatively liberal asylum laws, they dream of establishing homes, getting a job and living peaceful lives.

Every night, dozens of refugees who live in mobile homes and tents at the center attempt the dangerous crossing, trying either to jump on trains or navigate the tunnel on foot. Most are caught, but others make it through.

In all, about 550 refugees from the Red Cross center attempted the crossing in two waves beginning Tuesday night. Such a large-scale attempt is not unprecedented but is rare. The refugees were trying to take advantage of the reduced traffic on Christmas Day.

"We decided to form two groups -- A and B," Ahmed, a 23-year-old Afghan from Kabul, told The Associated Press Wednesday, speaking in a Persian dialect. "We thought we could cross all together by foot. We had almost managed, but at the very end the police stopped us." Asked if he thought the 33-mile crossing was possible on foot, he replied: "For Afghans, that is nothing, just exercise."

Another Afghan refugee, Zia, 24, said the plan was to launch the uprising just after dinnertime. "Some of us ate dinner two or three times, just to have enough energy to cross," he said.

Media event?

Both Eurotunnel and the Red Cross accused the refugees of staging a media event.

"This is a well-constructed media operation," said Alain Bertrand, an executive with Eurotunnel. "They knew very well that they would never make it to England," he told France-Info radio. "This is an attack, a strike to attract public opinion."

The Sangatte center, set up in an unused Eurotunnel building in 1999, houses Afghans, Iraqi Kurds, Iranians, Albanians and others. The 300 or so Afghans say they don't want to return home, even now that the Taliban are gone.

"It will be possible to go back when Afghanistan is in the hands of one single leader, and the country becomes independent and peaceful," Maryam, a 29-year-old mother of four, said recently. "In the meantime, I want my children to study in England and become doctors."

Sangatte's townspeople, who number only 900, aren't happy. "We have the feeling we're invaded," says Pascal Dubus, a doctor.

Refugees are keen to get to Britain, which is regarded not only as having liberal policies toward asylum seekers, but also a chaotic immigration system that can see applications languish for years. It is an image Prime Minister Tony Blair's Labor Party government has tried to shed, detaining refugees in immigration centers and vowing to cut bureaucracy and speed up decision-making.

Many don't make it

For some, the journey ends in tragedy. In June 2000, 58 Chinese refugees were found suffocated in the back of a tomato truck in the English Channel port of Dover. Earlier this month, eight bodies and five survivors were found in the back of a truck near a port in southern Ireland.

"Asylum seekers are taking increasingly desperate measures to enter Britain because they believe they are more likely to receive fair and humane treatment here," says Margaret Cally, deputy chief executive of the Refugee Council in Britain.

The melee began Tuesday at 9:15 p.m., when some 150 refugees broke through electronic barriers around the tunnel. Overwhelmed security forces called in French police, who tracked them down and arrested 129 of them. The refugees had managed to get one-quarter of the way through the tunnel. One of them suffered a fractured thigh, according to regional officials.

Just before 1 a.m., a new group of about 400 -- "Group B," according to the refugees -- tried to storm the same entrance. Riot police used tear gas to repel them.

About 50 refugees remained in custody on Wednesday evening, police said. The rest were returned to the center.

Eurotunnel has long demanded that the French government dismantle the Sangatte center. But France has refused and is setting up more centers in northern France to ease the burden at Sangatte.

Eurotunnel says it intercepted about 18,500 refugees trying to cross the tunnel in the first half of 2001 alone.