RELATIVES OF DROWNED MIGRANT CALL FOR ACTION FROM BRITAIN AND FRANCE
▶ Body of woman from Iraqi Kurdistan is first to be publicly identified after boat sinks while crossing Channel
The bodies of migrants who drowned in the English Channel last week have been recovered and their identities are being made public, but the political will to prevent another disaster appears to be mired in Anglo-French discord.
Baran Nuri Muhamadamin, 24, from Iraqi Kurdistan was travelling to be with her fiance in the UK.
She was among the 27 who drowned and has been the first to be publicly identified.
Her fiance said he was tracking her as she crossed from France and saw her GPS signal disappear.
Her grieving father, Nuri Mohammed Mohammed Amin, and a cousin want the tragedy to put pressure on governments to tackle peoplesmuggling gangs.
The cousin urged the British and French governments to help people resettle rather than “force them to take this route of death”.
But tension is high between the countries most closely involved – the UK and France – after a long-running dispute over the best way to handle the migrant crisis, and a host of other factors.
It appeared initially as though Paris and London were putting the tragedy first and setting aside their differences.
But UK Prime Minister Boris Johnson posted a picture on Twitter of a letter sent to French President Emmanuel Macron demanding joint patrols along France’s northern coast.
Mr Johnson also called for a bilateral returns agreement to allow migrants who travelled to the UK illegally to be sent back to France.
The public posting of the letter angered France enough for Paris to withdraw an invitation for the UK to join international talks on the issue to be held today in France.
“One leader does not communicate with another on these questions on Twitter, by public letter. We are not whistleblowers,” Mr Macron said.
Other factors keeping tensions high include the continuing fallout from Brexit and the Aukus intelligence agreement between the UK, US and Australia that led to France losing out on contracts to build submarines.
On Friday, French fishermen blocked traffic in the Channel tunnel in a protest against post-Brexit fishing rights.
The fishing industry is economically small in both countries but it has become politically symbolic.
Despite the political crisis sparked by the latest migrant deaths in the Channel, the issue of groups trying to reach the UK from France goes back even farther.
UK Minister for Security Damian Hinds said yesterday that relations between France and Britain were strong as he defended the letter from Mr Johnson.
“Nobody is proposing breaching sovereignty. The prime minister’s letter proposes doing things which go further than we have gone to date,” Mr Hinds said.
Three children and seven women were among the 27 migrants who drowned as they made the perilous crossing through one of the world’s busiest shipping lanes.
With most of the bodies not yet identified, more migrants living at a makeshift camp near Dunkirk still hope to attempt the crossing.
Ben Greening, executive director of Migration Watch UK, criticised the Anglo-French dispute and said it was the result “of the mess that’s been allowed to take root” in the Channel.
Both sides are to blame for a lack of decisive action in recent months that could have prevented migrants from undertaking the journey, he said.
But he said the UK government, in particular, was responsible for an “abysmal failure” to put measures in place to stop small boats from crossing the Channel illegally.
“The horrendous tragedy we saw a couple of days ago was, very sadly, predictable because we knew that these routes were dangerous,” Mr Greening said.
“People had already died before that and yet the combined incompetence of the governments of France and the UK have allowed this situation to get worse before our very eyes.”
Almost 6,880 people have crossed the Channel in small boats this month, Migration Watch said. The overall total for this year stands at 26,631.
That is more than three times the number last year, when 8,461 people landed on British shores after making the voyage.
Baran Nuri Muhamadamin’s fiance said he lost her signal as she crossed the Channel.
“After four hours and 18 minutes from the moment she went into that boat, I think they were in the middle of the sea, then I lost her,” he said.