Recent history contains several examples of political leaders resorting to military action at times when public opinion is against them. Margaret Thatcher is widely credited with securing re-election in 1983 after going to war over those outposts of empire, the Falkland Islands, at a time of mass unemployment in Britain. Bill Clinton tried to distract attention from sexual peccadilloes that affected nobody beyond his immediate family in 1998 by bombing Afghanistan and Sudan. The resulting destruction of a Sudanese factory that was a principal supplier of medicines in a poor African country was deemed unworthy of comment by a supine US press.
Nicolas Sarkozy seems to be following the Thatcher/Clinton trend. One year before a presidential election, he has both political rivals and nominally independent editorial writers praising his hawkish stance on Libya.
France’s opening salvo of missiles against Libya has helped its president “win back his international stature”, according to Agence France-Presse. That verdict may have been slightly premature: there are rumblings of disquiet in NATO about France trying to upstage other “important” countries by making sure it was the first to attack.
The truth behind Sarkozy’s manoeuvre is doubtlessly crude. Sarkozy’s primary motivation in any major decision he takes is how it meshes with his plan to stay in office for as long as possible. So all his talk about being forced to assume a role “in the face of history” is claptrap. What he is really interested in is winning a second term.
You can be sure that Sarkozy has not been staying up at night shedding tears over how ordinary Libyans have been suffering under Muammar Gaddafi’s tyranny. Rather than protecting civilians, he is much more likely to be concerned with protecting the profits of Total, the French energy giant, which produced an average of 55,000 barrels of oil from Libyan wells per day in 2010. Let us remember that the same Sarkozy came out in favour of a ban on investment in Burma a few years back. The small print to his valiant act of support for Buddhist monks had an important caveat: Total could continue exploiting Burmese resources as before.
Nor should it be forgotten that Sarkozy had courted Gaddafi assiduously over the past few years. Business deals were central to this tawdry alliance. In 2009, the value of declared French arms sales to Libya came to €30.5 million. Ominously, these included nearly €500,000 worth of contracts belonging to a category called chemical and biological weapons and tear gas. They also included €17.5 million in sales of military planes. There is a breathtaking hypocrisy in calling for a no-fly zone against a country to which France had been supplying warplanes.
It is distressing, too, that the French Socialists have abandoned the chief responsibility of an opposition party: to oppose. Benoit Hamon, a leading member of the Socialists, has strongly backed Sarkozy on the Libya question.
Although Libya is a former Italian colony, rather than a French one, France has abetted crimes against humanity in various parts of the neighbouring region. Both Socialists and the centre-right in France are refusing to deal with imperialism’s toxic legacy. In 2005, they teamed up to introduce a provision in national law requiring that school textbooks celebrate “the positive role of the French presence in its overseas colonies, especially in North Africa.”
That amounted to a denial of historical reality. Four years earlier a book by Paul Assauresses revealed how France had supported widespread torture in Algeria, Libya’s next-door-neighbour. Assauresses admitted that as a French general he personally had committed grotesque abuses.
The US may be the world’s imperial leviathan today, yet French politicians are playing a supporting role. In his book The Breaking of Nations, Robert Cooper (now a senior official in the EU’s diplomatic service) lauds “limited form of voluntary empire” that the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund embody. The IMF is headed by Dominique Strauss-Kahn, a veteran French Socialist whose name keeps popping up whenever there is speculation about who could be the next president of his country (assuming Sarkozy’s defeat).
Strauss-Kahn has embraced neo-liberal ideology as zealously as any politician from the centre-right. The IMF’s prescriptions of austerity for countries stretching from Ireland to Jamaica in recent times all bear his signature. The idea that he would represent an alternative to his old nemesis Sarkozy is laughable.
There may be a few differences between Sarko and the Socialists on dossiers like working hours. But the Socialist leadership is not seriously interested in making society more egalitarian (in the country that is credited with inventing the concept of equality). Martine Aubry, its leader, has been exposed as a hollow opportunist. Last year, she was highly critical of government moves to expel Roma gypsies. Yet it emerged that she had supported the dismantlement of a Roma camp near Lille, where she was mayor. I have visited some of the Roma camps in that part of northern France myself and was deeply shocked by the poverty in them and how they lacked basic sanitation. Roma are among the most marginalised people in French society; shame on Aubry for attacking them.
The cowardice of the French Socialists is replicated by their sister parties in Greece, Spain and Ireland. Those parties are all cutting back on public expenditure in a way that harms the poor most. The case for building a genuine left has never been more urgent.
·First published by New Europe (www.neurope.eu), 27 March – 2 April 2011
Showing posts with label Roma. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Roma. Show all posts
Monday, March 28, 2011
Monday, October 25, 2010
My 'date' with Angela Merkel: let's see how multiculturalism hasn't failed
Far-right politicians may soon need to padlock their wardrobes. Should present trends continue they could find that all their clothes have been stolen by “mainstream” parties.
The xenophobic tone of recent rhetoric from two of Europe’s most powerful leaders is frightening to anyone with a rudimentary grasp of this continent’s history. First, Nicolas Sarkozy engaged in the worst kind of populism when he announced an onslaught on the Roma. Sarkozy’s efforts to criminalise an entire ethnic group proved that he is not averse to stoking the flames of racism in order to appear tougher than the Front National (at a time when a successor to Jean-Marie Le Pen is being chosen).
Unlike Sarkozy, Angela Merkel does not appear to face a significant electoral challenge from Nazi admirers. But this hasn’t stopped her from directing insults against Muslims that would be considered taboo if aimed at followers of any other religion. During the first week of October, the chancellor told Muslims they must accept that “our culture is based on Christian and Jewish values”. Later in the month, she went further by declaring multiculturalism to have “utterly failed”.
Whether intentionally or not, Merkel has thrown down the gauntlet to the left. There is an onus on everyone who regards himself or herself as egalitarian to counter her bigotry. I’m not advocating that we respond with a misty-eyed “United Colours of Benetton” view of diversity but that we shatter the myths she is so busy propagating.
Myth number one: multiculturalism has failed. Yes, it is easy to find districts in many cities and towns where there is tension between different ethnic groups. But there are even more cases where a minority has enriched a city by creating an ambience that is vibrant and exciting. If Merkel doesn’t believe me, I’ll gladly take her for a drink in Matongé, the African quarter of Brussels, when she jets in for this week’s EU summit.
Myth number two: migration is “illegal”. In a just world, it would be unnecessary to travel outside one’s own home country to make a decent living. The world we have today is far from just – not least because European governments are committed to defending an economic system that widens global inequalities. As long as this system remains, the poor will have little choice than to migrate. There is nothing criminal about this.
Myth number three: Europe is “overrun” by asylum-seekers. Data compiled by the United Nations refugee agency, the UNHCR, indicate that there were 377,000 applications for asylum filed in industrialised countries last year, around the same number as 2008. It is telling that the top countries of origin for asylum-seekers were Afghanistan and Iraq, two countries occupied by the US and its European allies. If we want fewer asylum-seekers, let’s have fewer wars.
Myth number four: Europe is based on Christian and Jewish values. As Muslims have lived in Western Europe since the eighth century, those who try to airbrush Islam out of our history have concocted an intellectual fraud. Europe equally has long had millions of atheists and agnostics. So how can its values be the property of just one or two religions?
I began by noting that the far-right is setting an agenda that more “moderate” parties feel obliged to follow. This does not mean that I predict the far-right will vanish once its repugnant policies are implemented. The strong performance of extremists in recent parliamentary elections in Sweden and the Netherlands shows how adept they are at tapping into the disillusionment that is widespread in these dangerous times.
The Slovenian philosopher Slavoj Zizek has linked the rising popularity of far-right firebrands to what he calls “the withdrawal of leftist politics”. Speaking on the excellent American TV programme Democracy Now! last week, he said: “It is as if the left, being obsessed by the idea that we shouldn’t appear as reactionary in the economic sense, that is to say that ‘No, we are not the old trade union representatives of the working class, we are for postmodern digital capitalism’, they don’t want to touch the working class or so-called lower ordinary people. And here right-wingers enter. The horrible paradox is that, apart from some small leftist fringe parties, the only serious political force in Europe today which still is ready to appeal to the ordinary working people are the right-wing anti-immigrants?”
Separately, Zizek has warned that the future of European politics is likely to be dominated by figures like Silvio Berlusconi, a man who has thought nothing about forming a grubby alliance with largely unreconstructed fascists. This warning should rouse all of us on the left from our slumber. Running Europe is too important a business to be left to charlatans such as Berlusconi.
There is no magic formula for how the left can reclaim the ground lost to the far-right. Doing so will take organisation, determination and perspiration. Clearly, we should address the grievances that often lead otherwise decent people to vote for fascist scumbags. But we should never pander to the far-right. Our dedication to justice is not something to feel embarrassed about.
Another important message is that the alternative to multiculturalism isn’t much fun. I should know – the part of Ireland where I grew up was almost exclusively white. My country is an economic disaster zone but immigration has made it a far sexier place than it used to be. Thank God.
·First published by New Europe (www.neeurope.eu), 24-30 October 2010
The xenophobic tone of recent rhetoric from two of Europe’s most powerful leaders is frightening to anyone with a rudimentary grasp of this continent’s history. First, Nicolas Sarkozy engaged in the worst kind of populism when he announced an onslaught on the Roma. Sarkozy’s efforts to criminalise an entire ethnic group proved that he is not averse to stoking the flames of racism in order to appear tougher than the Front National (at a time when a successor to Jean-Marie Le Pen is being chosen).
Unlike Sarkozy, Angela Merkel does not appear to face a significant electoral challenge from Nazi admirers. But this hasn’t stopped her from directing insults against Muslims that would be considered taboo if aimed at followers of any other religion. During the first week of October, the chancellor told Muslims they must accept that “our culture is based on Christian and Jewish values”. Later in the month, she went further by declaring multiculturalism to have “utterly failed”.
Whether intentionally or not, Merkel has thrown down the gauntlet to the left. There is an onus on everyone who regards himself or herself as egalitarian to counter her bigotry. I’m not advocating that we respond with a misty-eyed “United Colours of Benetton” view of diversity but that we shatter the myths she is so busy propagating.
Myth number one: multiculturalism has failed. Yes, it is easy to find districts in many cities and towns where there is tension between different ethnic groups. But there are even more cases where a minority has enriched a city by creating an ambience that is vibrant and exciting. If Merkel doesn’t believe me, I’ll gladly take her for a drink in Matongé, the African quarter of Brussels, when she jets in for this week’s EU summit.
Myth number two: migration is “illegal”. In a just world, it would be unnecessary to travel outside one’s own home country to make a decent living. The world we have today is far from just – not least because European governments are committed to defending an economic system that widens global inequalities. As long as this system remains, the poor will have little choice than to migrate. There is nothing criminal about this.
Myth number three: Europe is “overrun” by asylum-seekers. Data compiled by the United Nations refugee agency, the UNHCR, indicate that there were 377,000 applications for asylum filed in industrialised countries last year, around the same number as 2008. It is telling that the top countries of origin for asylum-seekers were Afghanistan and Iraq, two countries occupied by the US and its European allies. If we want fewer asylum-seekers, let’s have fewer wars.
Myth number four: Europe is based on Christian and Jewish values. As Muslims have lived in Western Europe since the eighth century, those who try to airbrush Islam out of our history have concocted an intellectual fraud. Europe equally has long had millions of atheists and agnostics. So how can its values be the property of just one or two religions?
I began by noting that the far-right is setting an agenda that more “moderate” parties feel obliged to follow. This does not mean that I predict the far-right will vanish once its repugnant policies are implemented. The strong performance of extremists in recent parliamentary elections in Sweden and the Netherlands shows how adept they are at tapping into the disillusionment that is widespread in these dangerous times.
The Slovenian philosopher Slavoj Zizek has linked the rising popularity of far-right firebrands to what he calls “the withdrawal of leftist politics”. Speaking on the excellent American TV programme Democracy Now! last week, he said: “It is as if the left, being obsessed by the idea that we shouldn’t appear as reactionary in the economic sense, that is to say that ‘No, we are not the old trade union representatives of the working class, we are for postmodern digital capitalism’, they don’t want to touch the working class or so-called lower ordinary people. And here right-wingers enter. The horrible paradox is that, apart from some small leftist fringe parties, the only serious political force in Europe today which still is ready to appeal to the ordinary working people are the right-wing anti-immigrants?”
Separately, Zizek has warned that the future of European politics is likely to be dominated by figures like Silvio Berlusconi, a man who has thought nothing about forming a grubby alliance with largely unreconstructed fascists. This warning should rouse all of us on the left from our slumber. Running Europe is too important a business to be left to charlatans such as Berlusconi.
There is no magic formula for how the left can reclaim the ground lost to the far-right. Doing so will take organisation, determination and perspiration. Clearly, we should address the grievances that often lead otherwise decent people to vote for fascist scumbags. But we should never pander to the far-right. Our dedication to justice is not something to feel embarrassed about.
Another important message is that the alternative to multiculturalism isn’t much fun. I should know – the part of Ireland where I grew up was almost exclusively white. My country is an economic disaster zone but immigration has made it a far sexier place than it used to be. Thank God.
·First published by New Europe (www.neeurope.eu), 24-30 October 2010
Monday, September 13, 2010
On the margins, then expelled: how France treats Roma
Lille, France
Broken bicycles and old suitcases mark the entrance to the makeshift camp. Ankle-deep in mud that is newly wet from a rain-shower, the visitor is taken by the hand by lively children to meet their parents. “Papers?”, a woman named Elena asks, proffering her identity card. It shows she is from Romania, a member state of the European Union, just like France. In four years time, Romanian citizens will be allowed to work and live wherever they wish in the EU; for now, Elena, her family and all Roma gypsies in France face the risk that they could be expelled from the country at any moment.
In the centre of Villeneuve d’Ascq, an economically depressed suburb of Lille, transparent panels display excerpts from the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. Everyone has the right to a decent standard of living, one panel proclaims. No-one shall be arbitrarily deprived of property, says another.
It does not take long to find evidence of how these rights – officially regarded as fundamental by the United Nations – are being denied a short distance away. Lacking proper toilet facilities and running water, the children have to urinate on the edges of a car park. Meanwhile, the threat that the camp with its six caravans could be dismantled appears very real; bulldozers have been used to deprive other Romas of refuge nearby in recent weeks.
“We have many problems with the police,” a man called Vasir says, clearing out the boot of his car. “The police come here many times. We have no work, no money, nothing.”
The Lille region in northern France has been at the centre of efforts by the French government to drive Roma out of the country.
In July, the French president Nicolas Sarkozy gave an inflammatory speech, in which he blamed crime on foreigners and announced that Roma camps would not be “tolerated”. The first police operation against a Roma camp following that speech occurred in Lesquin, also near Lille. Forty-eight people and 14 caravans were “evacuated” – in the words of officialdom - during that move, kicking off a process that saw 1,000 Roma expelled from France in the month of August.
In another operation, nine adults and 12 children were forced out of their mobile homes one morning in the last week of August. The official reason given was that they were occupying private land.
The expulsions have not gone unchallenged. A Lille court has ruled twice recently against the national government’s policy that Roma camps can be considered a threat to public order. And some locals have taken to the streets of Lille, alleging that Sarkozy’s policy on Roma – coupled with his controversial efforts to cut the country’s social welfare system - are bringing shame to France.
The plight of the estimated 1,200 Roma in and around Lille has become the subject of squabbling between rival political parties, too. After Martine Aubry, leader of the opposition Socialist Party, spoke out about the expulsions, Sarkozy’s centre-right allies responded with claims of double standards. Aubry had requested that Roma be uprooted from camps earlier in the summer, when she was mayor of Lille, her rivals revealed.
Although a 2004 EU law forbids collective deportations from one of the Union’s member states to another, the Brussels authorities have been reluctant to take any action against France. José Manuel Barroso, the European Commission’s president, made no reference to the French policy of expelling Roma – and similar practices in some other EU countries – when he made his first ever “State of the Union” speech Sep. 7. Barroso’s reticence came despite how he had met Sarkozy the previous day and despite how the treatment of the Roma had been discussed extensively between France and the European Commission over the previous few weeks.
Viviane Reding, Europe’s justice commissioner, has similarly declined to publicly say that France has contravened EU law, even though internal papers prepared by officials working under her direction suggest that it has. One such paper refutes French assertions that the deportations were voluntary and says that the granting of small sums of money to Roma deportees was not sufficient to ensure that France complied with EU rules on the free movement of people.
Because the European Parliament – the EU’s only directly-elected body – was on holidays in August, it was also silent about the deportations. Yet once it resumed business, the assembly approved a resolution against the French policy. Supported by 337 members of Parliament – with 245 against – the resolution rejected “any statements which link minorities and immigration with criminality and create discriminatory stereotypes”.
•First published by Inter Press Service (www.ipsnews.net), 13 September 2010
Broken bicycles and old suitcases mark the entrance to the makeshift camp. Ankle-deep in mud that is newly wet from a rain-shower, the visitor is taken by the hand by lively children to meet their parents. “Papers?”, a woman named Elena asks, proffering her identity card. It shows she is from Romania, a member state of the European Union, just like France. In four years time, Romanian citizens will be allowed to work and live wherever they wish in the EU; for now, Elena, her family and all Roma gypsies in France face the risk that they could be expelled from the country at any moment.
In the centre of Villeneuve d’Ascq, an economically depressed suburb of Lille, transparent panels display excerpts from the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. Everyone has the right to a decent standard of living, one panel proclaims. No-one shall be arbitrarily deprived of property, says another.
It does not take long to find evidence of how these rights – officially regarded as fundamental by the United Nations – are being denied a short distance away. Lacking proper toilet facilities and running water, the children have to urinate on the edges of a car park. Meanwhile, the threat that the camp with its six caravans could be dismantled appears very real; bulldozers have been used to deprive other Romas of refuge nearby in recent weeks.
“We have many problems with the police,” a man called Vasir says, clearing out the boot of his car. “The police come here many times. We have no work, no money, nothing.”
The Lille region in northern France has been at the centre of efforts by the French government to drive Roma out of the country.
In July, the French president Nicolas Sarkozy gave an inflammatory speech, in which he blamed crime on foreigners and announced that Roma camps would not be “tolerated”. The first police operation against a Roma camp following that speech occurred in Lesquin, also near Lille. Forty-eight people and 14 caravans were “evacuated” – in the words of officialdom - during that move, kicking off a process that saw 1,000 Roma expelled from France in the month of August.
In another operation, nine adults and 12 children were forced out of their mobile homes one morning in the last week of August. The official reason given was that they were occupying private land.
The expulsions have not gone unchallenged. A Lille court has ruled twice recently against the national government’s policy that Roma camps can be considered a threat to public order. And some locals have taken to the streets of Lille, alleging that Sarkozy’s policy on Roma – coupled with his controversial efforts to cut the country’s social welfare system - are bringing shame to France.
The plight of the estimated 1,200 Roma in and around Lille has become the subject of squabbling between rival political parties, too. After Martine Aubry, leader of the opposition Socialist Party, spoke out about the expulsions, Sarkozy’s centre-right allies responded with claims of double standards. Aubry had requested that Roma be uprooted from camps earlier in the summer, when she was mayor of Lille, her rivals revealed.
Although a 2004 EU law forbids collective deportations from one of the Union’s member states to another, the Brussels authorities have been reluctant to take any action against France. José Manuel Barroso, the European Commission’s president, made no reference to the French policy of expelling Roma – and similar practices in some other EU countries – when he made his first ever “State of the Union” speech Sep. 7. Barroso’s reticence came despite how he had met Sarkozy the previous day and despite how the treatment of the Roma had been discussed extensively between France and the European Commission over the previous few weeks.
Viviane Reding, Europe’s justice commissioner, has similarly declined to publicly say that France has contravened EU law, even though internal papers prepared by officials working under her direction suggest that it has. One such paper refutes French assertions that the deportations were voluntary and says that the granting of small sums of money to Roma deportees was not sufficient to ensure that France complied with EU rules on the free movement of people.
Because the European Parliament – the EU’s only directly-elected body – was on holidays in August, it was also silent about the deportations. Yet once it resumed business, the assembly approved a resolution against the French policy. Supported by 337 members of Parliament – with 245 against – the resolution rejected “any statements which link minorities and immigration with criminality and create discriminatory stereotypes”.
•First published by Inter Press Service (www.ipsnews.net), 13 September 2010
Monday, September 6, 2010
Plight of Roma low priority for EU
Roma gypsies are routinely described as Europe’s largest ethnic minority. Numbering between 10 and 16 million, their combined population exceeds that of many European Union countries. Yet their numerical strength offers no compensation for the poverty, persecution and scapegoating that the Roma have to endure – or for how their welfare is accorded a low priority by the EU’s institutions.
That few Brussels officials pay much attention to the situation facing Roma has been exemplified in recent weeks as Nicolas Sarkozy’s government in France effectively declared a war against gypsies. When the Paris authorities announced in late July that it had authorised the systematic destruction of Roma camps and the large-scale expulsion of Roma to Bulgaria and Romania, the European Commission initially insisted that the surrounding matters concerned national EU governments only.
Following the deportation of about 1,000 Roma by France during the month of August, the Commission has finally questioned the legality of these measures. In an unpublished paper, the EU’s executive arm cast doubts on assurances by Paris that all of the deportations were voluntary and therefore did not breach a 2004 law – known as the “free movement directive” – that forbids group deportations from one of the Union’s states to another.
According to the paper, the granting of lump sums ranging from 100 euros (129 dollars) for child deportees to 300 euros for adults “was not sufficient” to exempt France from the EU’s “free movement principles”.
“The response (from Brussels) has been very slow,” Sophie Kammerer from the European Network Against Racism said. “Although the measures were announced by the French at the end of July, the first press statement from Viviane Reding (the EU’s justice commissioner) wasn’t until the end of August. So almost a month passed with no reaction. Now, at least, the Commission is looking seriously into the matter.”
Kammerer noted that under EU law, deportation orders must be given in writing one month before they take effect and must allow for the possibility that they can be appealed. “Clearly, this was not respected,” she added. “The camps were dismantled one day and people were asked to leave the next day.”
So far, however, Reding has not given any indication of whether she would be willing to start legal proceedings against France. Her spokesman Matthew Newman took issue with suggestions that the Commission had dithered in reacting to the French announcement.
“The Commission has been deeply involved in Roma issues for years,” he said. “We give large sums of money to Roma integration. It is really quite surprising to hear people say we are not on top of this issue. If anything, we have been trying to raise attention to the discrimination faced by the Roma.”
France has struck a defiant tone in the contacts it has had with the EU authorities. Eric Besson, an immigration minister, insisted during a visit to Brussels last week that there have been no “collective deportations” but that some Roma have been required to leave France over their involvement in theft and “aggressive begging”. Besson claimed that France has been subject to “needless and scandalous accusations” over the measures it has taken.
The French offensive against Roma bears some similarities to an initiative unveiled by Italy in May 2008. The Italian “security package” provided for the dismantling of Roma camps and the automatic deportation of migrants who cannot prove that they have regular employment. Since then, thousands of Roma have been pushed out of Italy.
Europe’s more recent wave of attacks against Roma kicked off in July when the mayor of Copenhagen Frank Jensen urged the Danish national authorities to ensure that “criminal Roma” were arrested and expelled. More than 20 Roma were deported from Denmark soon afterwards.
Germany, Belgium, Britain and Sweden are among the other EU countries that have either taken action against the Roma or stated their intention to do so. Meanwhile, anti-Roma sentiment and the tendency to blame Roma for crime has been vigorously exploited by far-right politicians in many parts of Europe. The Hungarian extremist party Jobbik has called for Roma to be forced to live in segregated camps from the general population. In response to its call, the Hungarian Socialist Party said it hoped that Jobbik did not wish to have “concentration camps” erected.
And racism against Roma manifested itself in a particularly violent way in Slovakia in late August when a gunmen killed six members of a Roma family and another woman in Bratislava. Some human rights campaigners have linked the murders to the negative stereotyping of Roma by powerful European politicians.
Ivan Ivanov, director of the European Roma Information Office, the main group representing Roma in Brussels, said he had warned five years ago that his community was likely to come under attack from several EU governments. He urged the European Commission both to take robust action against France for contravening EU law and to draw up a comprehensive strategy for combating discrimination against Roma. Despite the Roma’s status as Europe’s largest ethnic minority, the Commission does not have a specific unit of officials dedicated to serving their interests. The Commission’s employment department, for example, has only one official tasked with handling issues affecting the Roma.
“The European institutions should not look at this on a case-by-case basis but should come up with a proper European approach, ” Ivanov said. “Roma are European citizens, so they should benefit from the same rights as any other European citizens.”
•First published by Inter Press Service (www.ipsnews.net), 6 September 2010
That few Brussels officials pay much attention to the situation facing Roma has been exemplified in recent weeks as Nicolas Sarkozy’s government in France effectively declared a war against gypsies. When the Paris authorities announced in late July that it had authorised the systematic destruction of Roma camps and the large-scale expulsion of Roma to Bulgaria and Romania, the European Commission initially insisted that the surrounding matters concerned national EU governments only.
Following the deportation of about 1,000 Roma by France during the month of August, the Commission has finally questioned the legality of these measures. In an unpublished paper, the EU’s executive arm cast doubts on assurances by Paris that all of the deportations were voluntary and therefore did not breach a 2004 law – known as the “free movement directive” – that forbids group deportations from one of the Union’s states to another.
According to the paper, the granting of lump sums ranging from 100 euros (129 dollars) for child deportees to 300 euros for adults “was not sufficient” to exempt France from the EU’s “free movement principles”.
“The response (from Brussels) has been very slow,” Sophie Kammerer from the European Network Against Racism said. “Although the measures were announced by the French at the end of July, the first press statement from Viviane Reding (the EU’s justice commissioner) wasn’t until the end of August. So almost a month passed with no reaction. Now, at least, the Commission is looking seriously into the matter.”
Kammerer noted that under EU law, deportation orders must be given in writing one month before they take effect and must allow for the possibility that they can be appealed. “Clearly, this was not respected,” she added. “The camps were dismantled one day and people were asked to leave the next day.”
So far, however, Reding has not given any indication of whether she would be willing to start legal proceedings against France. Her spokesman Matthew Newman took issue with suggestions that the Commission had dithered in reacting to the French announcement.
“The Commission has been deeply involved in Roma issues for years,” he said. “We give large sums of money to Roma integration. It is really quite surprising to hear people say we are not on top of this issue. If anything, we have been trying to raise attention to the discrimination faced by the Roma.”
France has struck a defiant tone in the contacts it has had with the EU authorities. Eric Besson, an immigration minister, insisted during a visit to Brussels last week that there have been no “collective deportations” but that some Roma have been required to leave France over their involvement in theft and “aggressive begging”. Besson claimed that France has been subject to “needless and scandalous accusations” over the measures it has taken.
The French offensive against Roma bears some similarities to an initiative unveiled by Italy in May 2008. The Italian “security package” provided for the dismantling of Roma camps and the automatic deportation of migrants who cannot prove that they have regular employment. Since then, thousands of Roma have been pushed out of Italy.
Europe’s more recent wave of attacks against Roma kicked off in July when the mayor of Copenhagen Frank Jensen urged the Danish national authorities to ensure that “criminal Roma” were arrested and expelled. More than 20 Roma were deported from Denmark soon afterwards.
Germany, Belgium, Britain and Sweden are among the other EU countries that have either taken action against the Roma or stated their intention to do so. Meanwhile, anti-Roma sentiment and the tendency to blame Roma for crime has been vigorously exploited by far-right politicians in many parts of Europe. The Hungarian extremist party Jobbik has called for Roma to be forced to live in segregated camps from the general population. In response to its call, the Hungarian Socialist Party said it hoped that Jobbik did not wish to have “concentration camps” erected.
And racism against Roma manifested itself in a particularly violent way in Slovakia in late August when a gunmen killed six members of a Roma family and another woman in Bratislava. Some human rights campaigners have linked the murders to the negative stereotyping of Roma by powerful European politicians.
Ivan Ivanov, director of the European Roma Information Office, the main group representing Roma in Brussels, said he had warned five years ago that his community was likely to come under attack from several EU governments. He urged the European Commission both to take robust action against France for contravening EU law and to draw up a comprehensive strategy for combating discrimination against Roma. Despite the Roma’s status as Europe’s largest ethnic minority, the Commission does not have a specific unit of officials dedicated to serving their interests. The Commission’s employment department, for example, has only one official tasked with handling issues affecting the Roma.
“The European institutions should not look at this on a case-by-case basis but should come up with a proper European approach, ” Ivanov said. “Roma are European citizens, so they should benefit from the same rights as any other European citizens.”
•First published by Inter Press Service (www.ipsnews.net), 6 September 2010
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