Ethnic Roma who have built lives and careers in France hit back on Thursday at a government minister who said they were incapable of integrating and should be deported.
As the row over French Interior Minister Manuel Valls’ controversial remarks rumbled on, some of the Roma who have defied the odds to thrive in France warned that stereotyping a community that has been persecuted for centuries would not help anyone.
“My future is in France, for my work and for my children,” said Sorin Ciorba, who only four years ago was living with his family in a makeshift shack made from cardboard boxes in a camp on the outskirts of Paris.
The vast majority of the estimated 20,000 Roma in France live rough in similar, usually unauthorized, encampments. From there to the world of regular work and monthly rent is a long journey, and Ciorba readily admits he needed luck and help to make it.
He met a worker from the Emmaus charity who helped him find accommodation in a temporary housing project set up by a local authority and soon he was helping to build bungalows for other families.
“It’s while working that I learnt French,” he said, sitting in his colorful apartment in Paris’ 15th district, where he now lives with his wife and six children, having obtained a work permit and been taken on full-time by Emmaus.
“Not everybody steals or begs,” he said.
Liliana Hristache, who lived in a shantytown from 2004 to 2007, said her community could deliver, if given a chance.
“We really must be given opportunities,” said Hristache, who now works as a concierge in a building in the Paris suburb of Montreuil.
“I hear what Manuel Valls is saying. It’s true that the Roma have a very different mentality,” she said, arguing that does not, however, make them incapable of adapting to the French way of life.
“When my husband and I arrived in France, we did not know what an employment contract or a pay slip was ... but it’s changed now and we too have adapted,” she said.
A man who identified himself as Sergiu said he had come to France five years ago as he had been told that “by begging you can earn 50 euros [US$61.6] per day,” but he was soon disillusioned.
“I only earned maybe two euros a day, it was hard,” he said.
He now works in home care and receives 500 euros a month, of which he sends 150 euros back to his family in Romania.
“In Romania, it’s hard, there is no work… Here life is good, you can take a chance to advance. That’s why we are here,” he said.
Meanwhile, France signaled on Wednesday that it would join other EU countries in blocking Bulgaria and Romania’s entry to the Schengen group of countries, which allow passport-free travel between them, in a move widely interpreted as reflecting concern over Roma migration from the two countries.
“Today, we consider that Romania and Bulgaria do not fulfill the conditions to be integrated” into the Schengen area, government spokeswoman Najat Vallaud-Belkacem said.
France’s announcement came a day after the European Commission warned Paris that its attitude toward the Roma could put it in breach of its EU treaty commitments.
Valls also triggered an outcry from rights groups and some of his colleagues by saying any Roma not working should be “delivered back to the borders,” describing their way of life as “extremely different from ours,” and claiming they will never integrate into French society.
French Minister of Housing Cecile Duflot on Thursday described his comments as a betrayal of France’s fundamental values.
“When we all said in 2010 that [former French president] Nicolas Sarkozy’s dismantling of Roma camps was an absolute scandal, we could never have imagined using the same methods ourselves,” said Duflot, a member of the Greens, the junior governing partners with Valls’ Socialist Party.
CONFRONTATION: The water cannon attack was the second this month on the Philippine supply boat ‘Unaizah May 4,’ after an incident on March 5 The China Coast Guard yesterday morning blocked a Philippine supply vessel and damaged it with water cannons near a reef off the Southeast Asian country, the Philippines said. The Philippine military released video of what it said was a nearly hour-long attack off the Second Thomas Shoal (Renai Shoal, 仁愛暗沙) in the contested South China Sea, where Chinese ships have unleashed water cannons and collided with Philippine vessels in similar standoffs in the past few months. The China Coast Guard and other vessels “once again harassed, blocked, deployed water cannons, and executed dangerous maneuvers” against a routine rotation and resupply mission to
GLOBAL COMBAT AIR PROGRAM: The potential purchasers would be limited to the 15 nations with which Tokyo has signed defense partnership and equipment transfer deals Japan’s Cabinet yesterday approved a plan to sell future next-generation fighter jets that it is developing with the UK and Italy to other nations, in the latest move away from the country’s post-World War II pacifist principles. The contentious decision to allow international arms sales is expected to help secure Japan’s role in the joint fighter jet project, and is part of a move to build up the Japanese arms industry and bolster its role in global security. The Cabinet also endorsed a revision to Japan’s arms equipment and technology transfer guidelines to allow coproduced lethal weapons to be sold to nations
‘POLITICAL EARTHQUAKE’: Leo Varadkar said he was ‘no longer the best person’ to lead the nation and was stepping down for political, as well as personal, reasons Leo Varadkar on Wednesday announced that he was stepping down as Ireland’s prime minister and leader of the Fine Gael party in the governing coalition, citing “personal and political” reasons. Pundits called the surprise move, just 10 weeks before Ireland holds European Parliament and local elections, a “political earthquake.” A general election has to be held within a year. Irish Deputy Prime Minister Micheal Martin, leader of Fianna Fail, the main coalition partner, said Varadkar’s announcement was “unexpected,” but added that he expected the government to run its full term. An emotional Varadkar, who is in his second stint as prime minister and at
Thousands of devotees, some in a state of trance, gathered at a Buddhist temple on the outskirts of Bangkok renowned for sacred tattoos known as Sak Yant, paying their respects to a revered monk who mastered the practice and seeking purification. The gathering at Wat Bang Phra Buddhist temple is part of a Thai Wai Khru ritual in which devotees pay homage to Luang Phor Pern, the temple’s formal abbot, who died in 2002. He had a reputation for refining and popularizing the temple’s Sak Yant tattoo style. The idea that tattoos confer magical powers has existed in many parts of Asia