October 21, 2002	Monday	Sha’aban 14,1423

PARIS, Oct 20 - Only a week after a decision by French President Jacques Chirac setting up a major new policy on immigration, France appears to be sending out contradictory signals with regard to how the new immigration policy is to be applied.

Although the policy attempts to draw a clear line as to which immigrants are “desirable,” and whose who are not, recent decisions by the French Government seem to taken on a wholly different basis.

In Lyons, for example, six paperless immigrants who had gone on a hunger strike in Eglise Saint-Andre were told yesterday by the local prefect that they would be awarded temporary residency and work papers if they would cease their hunger strike, which was into its eighth week.

A seventh striker had to be transported earlier in the week to Edouard Herriot hospital, also in Lyons, because his condition had become grave.

A representative of the local human rights organisation, the Ligue des Droits de l’Homme (LDH), said, however, that he found the governmental decision “unfortunate,” for he felt that the decision to award papers or not should be taken according to wholly different criteria.

“The way things are,” said Jacques Dumortier, the local representative of the LDH, “such decisions could push people to suicide, just as today’s decision required six paperless immigrants to go without food for 57 days, with a seventh man close to death in hospital. The papers should really be attributed from now on by going through the regular channels.”

But, as far as were concerned several thousand paperless immigrants who marched in Paris yesterday, papers should be given out neither at the end of a hunger strike, or through regular channels, but simply to everybody presently on French soil who asks for them — a wholesale regularisation, like that recently taken by Italy, that the marchers said France should emulate.

ONLY FIVE TAKERS: Meanwhile, at the Sangatte refugee camp near Calais, French authorities were having difficulty finding candidates for another new policy that accords 2000 Euros ($2000) to each Afghan refugee ready and willing to return to Kabul, and this with a government-paid airline ticket. In spite of the great deal of publicity recently given the programme, which was announced recently during a joint declaration by Nicholas Sarkozy, the French Interior Minister, and his British counterpart, Home Secretary David Blunkett, French authorities have so far found only five takers for the new programme.

They include four bachelors in their 20s and a 45-year old married man, and all five were awaited Thursday at Kabul Airport. As it happens, a good portion of the 2,000 refugees presently at Sangatte are from Afghanistan, with French authorities now saying that it will be more difficult than they’d envisioned persuading a sufficient number of refugees to return to Afghanistan in time for the Sangatte camp to close in late March of next year, and this in spite of the 2000-Euro bounty that the authorities have agreed to give to each adult willing to return to Kabul, as well as 450 Euros to each dependent child.