2nd September 2010
First They Came for the Romany
Mark Hanson
In a widely condemned series of moves, President Sarkozy of France has embarked on a genocidal policy of expulsion of the Roma community from France.
Declaring them to be illegally on French soil, the French have lambasted the Romanian authorities for what they claim is the export of the welfare burden. Citing EU figures, Pierre Lellouche, the French Europe minister, said that France contributed €5bn net a year to the EU budget while Romania received €4bn, yet spent a minute proportion of that on the Roma Gypsies.
The moves to oust the travelling community from France seems to be in direct contradiction to the freedom of movement in EU law, yet the French are rallying around themselves key players in the EU structure, calling for a meeting of several European interior ministers at which the French will aim to set out their case against the Roma.
The French minister Eric Besson said that: “Everything is in total conformity with European law, the 2004 directive [guaranteeing freedom of movement] , French law and the republican principles of France."
Yet the crackdown has been widely deplored. The EU has been somewhat lukewarm in its response, but the Vatican, the United Nations and many human rights groups have expressed outrage.
In a related development, the UK Government has indicated that it will increase the powers of local councils to clampdown on Traveller sites. It was John Major’s government that initially removed the legal burden of councils to provide sites for the travelling community, and whilst Labour tried to redress the balance by protecting unauthorised Gypsy sites, the new government of David Cameron seems to be washing even this small protection away.
Eric Pickles, the Communities Secretary, has said that councils will be offered financial incentives to allow authorised sites, yet the underlying tone is much the same as that in France: the Gypsies are a problem that must either be contained or expelled.
We would do well to remember the words of Martin Niemöller:
“They came first for the Communists,
and I didn't speak up because I wasn't a Communist.
Then they came for the trade unionists,
and I didn't speak up because I wasn't a trade unionist.
Then they came for the Jews,
and I didn't speak up because I wasn't a Jew.
Then they came for me
and by that time no one was left to speak up.”
