"Like many young Iraqis, Omid [Jamil Ali] had left Kurdistan to help his family back home," Kundnani explained. In the early 2000s, "the Kurds were caught in a vice between the targeted repression of Saddam Hussein's regime and Western sanctions [...] Young people, especially men, were encouraged to leave the region to try and find work in Western Europe."
So without much of a plan, Omid left for the UK. If he'd made it, one option would have been the slaughterhouse. "In the north of England, there were factories where chickens were bred, packaged and sent to supermarkets. The work was dirty, hot and hard," Kundnani said. "It's a fact that these companies were hiring undocumented Iraqi Kurds to do the work because nobody else wanted to do it."
Ali was the third man to die on the Eurotunnel site that year. In February 2001, Houner Abdulaye Iman, an Iraqi man in his thirties, was hit by a rail freight shuttle. Two months after that, a migrant was electrocuted while trying to board a shuttle.
The outlet Libération published an article about the latter incident titled 'La mort du migrant inconnu' – 'the death of the unknown migrant'. But he had a name, it can be found on his death certificate: Saratch Houdin Mohamad Harun. He was born in Ghazni, Afghanistan in 1977.
Both men are buried in the Coquelles cemetery, overlooking the Eurotunnel site.
A tunnel of possibility
The opening of the Eurotunnel in 1994 created a land border between the United Kingdom and France, governed by the 1986 Treaty of Canterbury. This allowed British and French police to carry out immigration checks in each other's territories, and thereby gave officers a chance to turn back irregular migrants before they crossed.
The Eurotunnel was hardly an easy route in, but for anybody wanting to get to the UK it presented a new possibility. And, starting with the war in Kosovo in the late 1990s, more and more people were turning up in Calais with exactly that goal in mind.
In September 1999, under pressure from civil society, a hangar previously used in the construction of the tunnel was requisitioned for use as accommodation. It became known as the Sangatte camp, and it was a gamechanger.
"Because of the Channel tunnel's geographic proximity [to Sangette], most attempted crossings were directed towards the Eurotunnel site," said Olivier Clochard, a geographer who studies this border. "People would try to climb into trucks or freight trains, or sometimes they would try to get on the Eurostar at Fréthun station."
Dominique Mégard, a former IT specialist with the company, confirmed this. "At the time of the Sangatte camp, migrant intrusions were an almost daily occurrence on the Eurotunnel site," he said. "Every night, when the majority of trucks were in transit, there were interruptions to traffic. Guys were managing to get onto the site by cutting through the fence."
Mégard said that every morning he read reports about what had happened the previous night. "More often than not, migrants would try to enter at terminal level, in order to hide on, under, or inside a truck," he said. "At the time, Eurotunnel only had a conventional rail fencing system, one aimed at preventing any intrusion by stray animals, for example."
A tunnel of danger
Like the Calais Port (see part 2), the tunnel began to receive security upgrades.
"Very quickly, the Eurotunnel site became barricaded, with a first, a second, and then a third fence." Clochard said.
In 2000, an initial programme doubled the 40 kilometres of fencing with a second barrier. It was equipped with infrared detectors, linked to a video surveillance system, and topped with concertina wire.
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