Who is really behind Sangatte?

I welcome immigrants - I'm the offspring of one - but I think this issue is deliberately being stoked up to destabilise our communities and encourage xenophobia. We all know that whenever a group of asylum-seekers enters the Channel Tunnel, newspaper headlines will scream "Invasion!". I'm not saying the asylum-seekers shouldn't come here, but that the Sangatte camps, two now, sitting close to our borders, seem to be a deliberate incitement to tabloid-fuelled paranoia. Asylum-seekers should not be treated in this way.

I have strong suspicions about the Red Cross. As an organisation it does an enormous amount of good, but for a long time I have suspected that there are elements which work within it and use it to further their extreme right-wing aims.

During the Second World War African Americans repeatedly accused the organisation of overt racial discrimination. There are many instances of this quoted in Mary Penick Motley's book "The Invisible Soldier" (Wayne State University Press, Detroit, Michigan, 1975).

Mark Davis's brilliant documentary "Blood on the Cross", shown on BBC's Correspondent series in July 1999, and on the Australian "Four Corners" series, covered the West Papua hostage tragedy, when indigenous West Papuans alleged that they had been shot at by people who travelled to their village in an International Red Cross helicopter, following a peaceful hostage-taking incident. The villagers said that they went out to welcome the Red Cross visitors, only to be met with men and at least one woman, armed with guns and shooting at them. Eight villagers were killed. Photographic evidence suggested that there was probably truth in their apparently bizarre allegations. The SAS - or elements within the SAS - were thought to have been involved, and the mercenary group Executive Outcomes were said to have been in the region at the time. At the heart of the crisis were western companies, including Rio Tinto Zinc.

As a medical relief organisation you would expect the Red Cross to be at the centre of areas of conflict, and in the course of my research into development issues I have come across them again and again - however they often seem to be at the centre of chaos, and sometimes I wonder whether as the ordinary workers in the Red Cross tend the sick and injured they are unknowingly accompanied by other elements using their cover to stir things up.

We should know the real story behind Sangatte.