Refugees wait in UK Cyprus base

Amin Bango: He and companions were heading for Italy

By Russell Working in Dhekelia, Cyprus

Mohammed Ali and Avin Ibrahim thought they were heading for Italy when they paid $5,000 (5,649 euros) to people smugglers and sailed from Lebanon in 1998.

But their leaky 36-foot boat, crammed with 82 passengers, began taking in water off Cyprus.

As the passengers bailed and the boat sank, Mr Ibrahim found himself thinking: "It's better for me to die outside my country."

The Ibrahims were lucky. They and their fellow passengers were rescued by the British military.

These boat people have formed the core of a group of 103 mostly ethnic Kurds from Iraq who have been squatting for up to three years in the no-man's-land of a UK base at Dhekelia.

They are just a small part of a migration that is carrying thousands of Middle Eastern and African illegal aliens to the promised land of Europe every year.

Iraqi crackdown

The exact numbers of boat people are unknown, says Rupert Colville, a spokesman for the United Nations High Commission on Refugees (UNHCR) in Geneva, Switzerland.

If we could deport them, we would do

Rob Need, spokesman for Dhekelia base

The United Nations recognises 5.6 million people in Europe as refugees, but there may be millions more who haven't applied for asylum.

"It's very widespread and increasing, especially for those going to Italy or Greece," Mr Colville says.

"Greece and its islands are the nearest point [in the EU] for people coming through the Eastern Mediterranean."

In the case of the Dhekelia squatters, most came from Iraq, fleeing Saddam Hussein's brutal crackdown on Kurds.

Their numbers were boosted by a group of non-Kurdish Iraqis who crossed over from the Turkish-occupied half of Cyprus, apparently believing that sneaking on to a base was a shortcut to British citizenship.

The military thinks otherwise, and the decision about their refugee status is in the hands of the base administration, not the UK Government.

'Pariah' state

Only 21 have been granted refugee status by the officials, who have ruled that most are economic rather than political migrants.

Yet the bases - which have been feeding, housing and providing medical care for its uninvited guests - can't seem to get rid of them.

Mrs Ibrahim went into labour at sea

"If we could deport them, we would do," says Rob Need, a spokesman for the base.

"The difficulty is, Iraq is effectively a pariah state. There is no mechanism for deporting them to Iraq."

The boat people borrowed and scraped up thousands of dollars to make the journey. Kameron Amin Bango, 29, is a Kurd who was shot and crippled during factional fighting in his home town.

He and his brother fled to Lebanon, where each paid $2,000 (2,260 euros) for the trip to Italy.

"After we were rescued, we found out we weren't in Italy," he says ruefully. "But [the British] saved us, because the engine of the boat was broken; there was water in the boat."

No quick ticket

No one had a harder journey than the 23-year-old Mrs Ibrahim.

Pregnant when they sailed, she went into labour at sea.

If someone believes this is a shortcut to migrating to Britain... this is not the case

Rob Need

She lay on deck screaming while the other women held up blankets to offer a little privacy.

The men busied themselves bailing out the boat.

Everyone was afraid that their vessel would sink and all hands would be lost. Instead, Mrs Ibrahim gave birth to a healthy girl, and everyone survived.

If the military has been sparing in granting refugee status, it does so in part because some refugees seem to hold the mistaken notion that sneaking on to a base amounts to a quick ticket to London.

Mr Need explains: "If someone believes this is a shortcut to migrating to Britain, I hope we have proven that this is not the case."