French novel envisaged arrival of boat people

When a leaky freighter filled with Kurdish refugees crashed on rocks off the Cote d'Azur on February 17th, a friend telephoned the French writer Jean Raspail to tell him: "The Camp of the Saints is happening."

"I was intrigued, fascinated. It's an amazing thing for a novelist to see his stories come true," Mr Raspail says. "Except that in my book, there are between 40 and 50 boats carrying a million people from the Third World". The East Sea carried "only" 910 Iraqi Kurds.

Mr Raspail published The Camp of the Saints, which predicted the invasion of the West by the Third World, in 1973. He took the title from the Book of Revelation, chapter 20, where nations are numerous as grains of sand: "And they went up on the breadth of the earth, and compassed the camp of the saints about, and the beloved city . . ."

Mr Raspail's novel recounts the deliberate grounding of ships on the beach at Boulouris, between Cannes and St Tropez. "I got the location right, to within 50 metres," he says. "I was staying in a 19th century house that belonged to an aunt, with a private jetty going into the sea. Every day, I swam around the rocks where the East Sea landed. Inspiration comes like that. One day I said to myself, `If they arrived . . .', and I took up my pen and started writing."

French critics called the book racist and alarmist. Yet it sold 250,000 copies, won the T.S. Eliot Prize in Chicago and was translated into 14 languages.

In 1985, Mr Raspail sent a new edition of The Camp of the Saints to the then education minister, Mr Lionel Jospin. "He sent back a typed note thanking me, with a handwritten addendum which referred to `this book which tells of a science fiction that will not happen'."

In the novel, the president of France goes on the evening television news with the intention of ordering the army to throw the refugees into the sea.

There is, Mr Raspail says, an unavoidable moral question which the West still refuses to address: "If you let them in, there will be another million waiting - and eventually we will no longer be ourselves. But if you try to stop them, how do you do it? You cannot shoot women and children. This debate is the heart of the novel."

At the last moment, Raspail's fictional French president is unable to read the speech he has prepared, and instead welcomes the boat people to France.

"This is what [the Prime Minister, Mr] Jospin did this week", Mr Raspail says, alluding to the sudden government turnaround on Tuesday, when the Kurds were granted the status of asylum-seekers.