Mohamed Raouf and Shakwan Nouri were ebullient, standing in the muddy road outside the Red Cross camp at Sangatte at the French end of the Channel Tunnel. Dr Raouf, a tall 29-year-old surgeon, and Mr Nouri, his short, 23-year-old ambulance driver, are Kurds from Suleimaniya, Iraq.
They had taken the Paris-Calais train the day before and spent the night in the dirty, over-crowded grey warehouse behind us. After a two-month journey, England, their promised land, was just 30 kilometres across the Channel. From the nearby beach, they could see the white cliffs of Dover.
When darkness fell the two Kurds would pay $200 to a smuggler from inside the camp to lead them the few kilometres to the Channel Tunnel or the ferry port in Calais, show them how to jump on a moving freight car just before it entered the passage, or sneak under the tarpaulin of a lorry waiting in the parking lot. If they failed they would keep trying and eventually they would make it.
Dr Raouf was already rehearsing his asylum application. "My life is in danger from Saddam's spies who are active in Suleimaniya," he said. "I worked in the Mine Action Programme of the Save the Children Fund - the Iraqis have turned all of Kurdistan into a minefield. On television Saddam said, `I will get anyone who works for international organisations - especially the Mine Action Programme'."
Like 90 per cent of Sangatte's inhabitants, Dr Raouf and Mr Nouri are single men under the age of 30. Most are relatively educated and affluent. Kurds form the single largest group, followed by Afghans. "Twenty of us left Kurdistan together," said Dr Raouf. "We walked for six days through Iran into Turkey. From Turkey we took a bus and a train to Greece, then the train to here." The entire journey cost $4,000, though other refugees pay far more. "I have no passport," he continued. "Every time I met officials I bribed them."
That it is possible to travel from Kurdistan to the English Channel without a passport is the least surreal detail of the Sangatte story. The camp was opened in September 1999 because a few dozen Kosovar refugees were sleeping rough in Calais. It was meant to house 400 people at most, but today holds 1,700. There are 15 showers and 15 toilets. The refugees suffer from scabies and queue two hours for each meal. "It's the only camp like this in Europe - and it has become unmanageable," says Camille Chaize, a spokeswoman for the French Red Cross, which runs the camp on behalf of the government.
P&O Stena and the Eurotunnel company have spent millions of pounds on security, including carbon dioxide tests in freight lorries, searchlights, concertina razor wire, private security guards and Alsatian dogs. The measures have created the present bottleneck at Sangatte, but Ms Chaize estimates at least 50 refugees still cross nightly. In two years close to 40,000 people have transited Sangatte. Only 120 asked for asylum in France.
Paris announced this week that it may open another camp in a mental hospital at Bailleul, near the Belgian border, to take the pressure off Sangatte. The plan is supported by the Minister for Employment and Solidarity, Ms Elisabeth Guigou, but opposed by the Interior Minister, Mr Daniel Vaillant. On Tuesday, a court in Lille will consider a lawsuit by the Eurotunnel company, demanding that the Sangatte camp be shut down.
While the French goverment dawdles, the camp has created outrage in Britain, and will be the subject of a meeting between the British Home Secretary Mr David Blunkett and Mr Vaillant next Wednesday.
Britain accuses France of letting the refugees cross the Channel to get rid of the problem. Their job is to control who enters their country - not who leaves it, French immigration authorities respond. If Britain didn't allow asylum-seekers to work, give them free housing, food, clothing, and pocket money it wouldn't be such a magnet, the French add.
Meanwhile, smugglers get rich and refugees risk their lives in the nightly ritual because Europe is incapable of formulating a coherent immigration policy. Five refugees have been killed this year, one on Monday night, when a drunk driver ran over a 20-year-old Kurdish man making the nightly trek down the road to the tunnel. One refugee was electrocuted when he tried to jump from a bridge onto a train and fell on the 24,000 volt catenary.
On Tuesday night an 18-year-old Afghan was shot in the thigh as he tried to get through the fence surrounding the tunnel. He is recovering in Calais hospital. Eurotunnel, which privately employs 300 security guards, insists it is not at fault, which leaves the few dozen CRS riot police who patrol the area.
That may explain why the CRS broke up my conversation with Dr Raouf and Mr Nouri and threatened to arrest me if I approached the camp again. Frightened by what they call "hysteria" in the British media, most of the actors in the Sangatte drama - the police, Eurotunnel and the Red Cross - have clamped shut and allow only telephone contact with spokesmen.
More than 100 refugees marched down the road towards the tunnel on Wednesday, to protest against the death of the Kurd and the shooting of the Afghan. When the CRS blocked them they staged a sit-in. That night a knife fight broke out inside the camp for the third time.
The socialist mayor of Sangatte, Mr Andre Segard, has been alerted that another 2,000 Afghans are making their way towards his town via Russia. "They must shut the centre down," he says. "The situation is intolerable." A kindly school inspector, Mr Segard says his little seaside resort can cope no longer. "It's not about xenophobia or racism. You can't expect a little community of 900 to receive the misery of the world," he tells me, paraphrasing the former prime minister Michel Rocard. "Property prices have crashed. Parents are afraid to let their children go outside. The beach is dirty. It's getting harder for the refugees to cross, and they're running out of money, so they'll start stealing. I fear an explosion. The refugees have knives; the locals have hunting rifles."
The taxi drivers who ferry the women, children and old people back and forth to the parking-lots where they try to sneak onto lorries have only sympathy for the refugees. Some of the shopkeepers say they are well-behaved and polite. "I'll bet the baker told you that - he's a collaborator," says the barman at the Weekend a Sangatte grocery story and cafe.
"Me, I've had enough of them. You're a woman; try wearing a bikini on our beach with them staring at you." Four young Kurdish men come in to buy cigarettes. They wear the same baggy trousers and the combed-back hair I remember from Zakho and Dohuk. Suddenly the smoky, greasy cafe with its Johnny Halliday records and men nursing pints of lager is transformed into Kurdistan on the English Channel.
The barman ignores them to continue his lament. "They never have French change," he grumbles. "It's hundred dollar bills, thousand deutschmark notes."
It is mid-afternoon and the refugees congregate around the phone booth beside the village church, taking turns calling friends and relatives in England. Some show me snapshots of wives and children left behind. Jawad (45), looks the saddest. A Soviet-trained lawyer, he fled Mazar-isharif, Afghanistan, three months ago with his small daughters Nazanine and Mariam. "My wife Hamida is a doctor. The Taliban would not let her travel." Jawad spent $13,000 to reach Sangatte via Turkenmenistan, Uzbekistan, Kazakstan, Russia, Ukraine, Hungary, Slovakia, Germany and Paris.
"People think we come here because we are poor," he says. "That's not the reason; we come here to save our lives."
A 15-year-old with dark red hair and a baseball shirt is every bit as cheerful as Jawad is despondent. The others call him Dana-brabchuk - "little brother Dana". His father sold the family's house in Kirkuk, Kurdistan, to send the boy alone. The nightly dash across the ferry parking-lot or through the fields around the tunnel is a game he relishes. "Tonight I'll be in London," he boasts, laughing.
Serder (24), a Kurdish computer programmer from Suleimaniya, has tried to cross the Channel seven times in 10 days. "I tried four times in a van on the ferry. The French police asked for my papers and I gave up. They told me, `Go back to Sangatte and try again tomorrow'." The other three times Serder scaled the fence around the Channel tunnel and ran after moving freight cars. "If we stay in France, we have to stay in Sangatte," he says. "No work, no house. We didn't come to live in a camp. We will try again tonight. The train is harder, but if you make it, in 20 minutes you change your life."
