France reverses its stance on Kurds

Only a few of the Kurds who queued until the early hours of yesterday to receive eight-day residence permits took immediate advantage of their freedom. A few wandered into the industrial zone adjacent to the military camp where they were held for four days. Kurdish immigrants arrived from elsewhere in France to offer the boat people lifts to the nearby town of Frejus.

Mr Lionel Jospin's government denied that it flip-flopped when it agreed to grant the 910 Kurds asylum-seeker status, after insisting that rules must be followed and that immigrant traffickers must not be rewarded.

Ten magistrates were to have begun hearing the cases yesterday, but the procedure was cancelled for all except two Palestinians who had made their way from southern Lebanon to join the group in the Turkish port of Iskanderun. The Kurds held a sit-down inside their camp to demand that the Palestinians also be freed.

Several factors forced the Prime Minister, Mr Lionel Jospin, to reverse his hardline stance on the boat people. The Foreign Ministry, a division of which handles asylum cases, strongly advised the government that, based on preliminary interviews, applications appeared well founded.

Human rights lawyers vociferously condemned the ex post facto creation of a "waiting zone" hours after the Kurds landed on French territory. Public opinion seemed to sympathise with the refugees, and the assigned judges showed signs of balking at procedural irregularities.

The Kurds now join 40,000 other official asylum-seekers who wait an average of six months for a response. If they file applications within eight days, the Kurds will be given three-month renewable residence permits but cannot work. The French state provides an allowance of 1,840 francs (£221) per month to each adult asylumseeker.

Every year thousands of asylum-seekers become illegal aliens in France after their applications are rejected, but the Iraqi Kurds can expect a higher success rate than the 19.4 per cent usually granted.

Almost all of the asylumseekers are from three villages near Mosul, in the oil-rich zone under the control of President Saddam Hussein. They told French officials the Iraqi army repeatedly surrounded their villages. Residents were forced to gather in the main square, and each time men were taken away never to be seen again.

A woman who had boarded the East Sea alone with a child said her husband, son and cousin were murdered in one such raid. A 35-year-old doctor named Ihsan was tortured after he refused to report to the police in Mosul every evening to answer questions about his patients.

Most of the asylum-seekers belong to the Yazidi sect which mixes pre-Islamic Zorastrianism and Islamic "heresy". Graffiti daubed on their houses called them "devil-worshippers". Mr Saddam is trying to "Arabise" their homeland. In being faithful to human rights rhetoric, the French may be assisting Iraqi and Turkish rulers in "ethnically cleansing" Kurdish regions.