Most of the Iraqis washed up on Europe's shores are Kurds escaping the US-UK protected "safe haven" in northern Iraq, a source attached to an agency assisting refugees told The Irish Times. In the Kurdish "safe haven" there is no security and great economic hardship.
Feuds between the two major and various minor Kurdish factions leave many non-aligned people exposed to persecution or assassination. Iraqi Kurds are often caught up in ground and air incursions into the "safe haven" by the Turkish forces fighting Turkish Kurd rebels.
The 4,000 villages in this region are cut off from the rest of Iraq, the normal economic hinterland of the Kurdish provinces. Commerce consists of smuggling oil and people from Iraq to Turkey. The unemployment rate in the Kurdish haven is estimated to be 85 per cent.
Insecurity and hardship also drive Iraqis living outside the Kurdish haven to emigrate. Those dwelling within the "no-fly zones" patrolled by US and British aircraft fear routine bombings which are reported to have killed 300 Iraqis and wounded another 900 since 1998.
The majority of those offloaded from a freighter in France are said to be Kurds from the Mosul district, south of the "safe haven", driven from their homes and lands because the government is determined to "Arabise" the region by importing Arabs from elsewhere to take the place of local Kurds. Baghdad fears that the presence of Kurds in this sensitive location provides a pretext for Kurdish separatists in the "safe haven" to lay claim to the oilfields.
In southern Iraq, heterodox Shia Muslims who supported a dissident religious leader, Imam Muhammad as-Sadr, continue to suffer persecution by the authorities more than a year after he was killed for raising the standard of revolt in 1998. Shia emigres make their way northwards to the Kurdish "safe haven", where they are not welcome and urged to move along.
They and others wanting to leave put themselves into the hands of highly professional gangs of Kurdish smugglers who have agents in Turkey, Syria and Lebanon. Those who take the route from northern Iraq "walk for days through valleys and mountains with guides they do not know they can trust", the source said.
They are put aboard cargo vessels said to be sailing to Italy. Often they are dropped off elsewhere, on a stretch of isolated coast in Cyprus, Greece, Albania or the former Yugoslavia.
"They sell everything they possess - land, house, furniture - to get enough money to pay for their passage," the source said. When they reach their destinations they are destitute.
Forty per cent of street children begging and stealing in Greece's cities are Kurds.
Some married men leave their families behind. The group which landed in France consisted of 250 men, 180 women and 480 children. The majority have no documents. A few may have identity cards.
While the main motivation of 90 per cent of the refugees is economic, according to the informant, most also have "very good political reasons" for leaving their homeland. "They or members of their families have been to prison or are under threat of some sort," the informant said.
In spite of their harsh histories, most do not meet the stringent criteria set by the UN, international agencies and host countries for asylum as political refugees.
But this has not stemmed the tide. Tens of thousands are assembling in Turkey and congregating in Lebanon, waiting for ships to take them to the promised Italian shore. More were reportedly dumped in Cyprus during the first month of 2001 than in the whole of last year.