France begins its controversial expulsion of about 700 Roma to Romania and Bulgaria today, amid rising criticism of French President Nicolas Sarkozy’s clampdown on the minority.
The first 79 Roma who agreed to a so-called “voluntary return procedure” will be put on an afternoon flight to Bucharest, the first such expulsion since Sarkozy last month vowed action against Roma, Gypsy and traveler communities.
France intends to fly 132 more to Timisoara, in western Romania, and Bucharest tomorrow and 160 on Thursday next week, with each adult granted 300 euros (US$385) and each minor 100 euros.
PHOTO: AFP
With unease growing over the roundups using tactics that one member of Sarkozy’s ruling party compared to those of Nazi-era France, the French Ministry of the Interior insisted on Wednesday that each case had been looked at individually. Romanian Foreign Minister Teodor Baconschi said he was worried about the risk of “xenophobic reactions.”
“I am worried about the risks of populism and xenophobic reactions in a context of economic crisis,” Baconschi said in an interview with the Romanian service of Radio France International (RFI Romania).
The EU’s executive arm has said France must abide by the bloc’s freedom of movement rules when it expels Roma living illegally in the country.
The European Commission is following the situation “very attentively,” spokesman Matthew Newman said.
Most of the Roma who were sent to Romania last year returned to France afterwards as European citizens free to travel in the EU, French officials admitted.
The French foreign ministry insisted the measures being taken against the Roma were in line with European rules.
French foreign ministry spokesman Bernard Valero said a European directive “expressly allows for restrictions on the right to move freely for reasons of public order, public security and public health.”
There are about 15,000 Roma of Eastern European origin in France.
Meanwhile, as their compatriots are rounded up and put on planes, the inhabitants of one small village of indomitable Roma outside Paris are still holding out against the French authorities.
“I’ll stay in France until I die, there’s no point going back,” says Ianco Petro, 28, who lives with his family in one of a handful of yellow portakabins that form this “integration village” in Aubervilliers, north of Paris.
Scattered over a few hundred square meters of dusty gravel next to a disused chicken abattoir, their lives represent an alternative to the summertime round-ups and expulsions ordered by Sarkozy.
In 2005, Petro did not speak French, lived in a tiny caravan and barely eked out a living by selling scrap metal. Today, he is a qualified window fitter, speaks French and is waiting to move his family into an apartment.
Unlike most of the around 15,000 Roma living in France, he cannot legally be expelled, because, thanks to the “village,” he is able to satisfy the strict bureaucratic requirements demanded of any foreigner living in France.
The site was opened in December 2007 and Roma who live here must promise two things — to try to find work and to send their children to school.
“No one much thought this would work,” he tells reporters. “Employers can be afraid of Roma, because they have gold teeth, because they look like Gypsies.”
Aubervilliers’ Socialist mayor Jacques Salvator says that the project’s annual cost is about 300,000 euros, spread between different authorities, but that no one has yet criticized the money being spent.
“No one has yet openly said they’re against the program. The cost is about 1 euro per inhabitant, but certainly some people will feel that the money is not being well spent,” he said. “Perhaps they will start to express this openly given how the president of the republic is using the situation for political leverage.”
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