French police on Thursday evicted some 200 Roma gypsy migrants from makeshift camps in Hellemmes and Villeneuve d'Ascq, close to Lille, in an early morning raid that followed several other forced evictions earlier this week of hundreds of other Roma from settlements in Paris and Lyon.
The evictions in Lyon led to 240 of the homeless Roma being sent back to their native Romania by plane, also on Thursday, which French officials described as a voluntary repatriation, accompanied by a financial assistance payment of 300 euros per adult and 150 euros per child.
French NGO Médecins du Monde, which provides medical assistance to Roma camps in Lyon, said other Roma had already been repatriated to Romania from the south-eastern city on two previous flights, on May 10th and July 5th.
Maryvonne Girard, deputy mayor of the socialist-led Villeneuve d'Ascq town council, defended the forced evacuation on Thursday of a Roma camp which had been set up on land belonging to the town. "The tensions with [local residents] had become untenable," she told Agence France-Presse. She said local residents had endured "two-and-a-half years of nuisance".
The moves have outraged French associations campaigning for the rights of Roma, who are estimated to number between 15,000 and 20,000 in France and who were the target of a high-profile crackdown under the conservative government of former President Nicolas Sarkozy, including thousands of deportations.
The events this week followed several statements by socialist interior minister Manuel Valls that he intended to take a firm action against the proliferation of the camps, which are mostly home to migrants without any legal status of residence in France.
"Unsanitary camps are unacceptable," said Valls in a statement issued on Wednesday. "Often located in the midst of working class neighbourhoods, they are also a challenge to community life."
Speaking on Europe 1 radio station in July, Valls warned: “I cannot tolerate, and even less so when a legal ruling has been taken, that in these camps there are problems of public health which are today quite unacceptable […] Yes, when there is a legal ruling taken, there will be a dismantling of these camps”.
The forced evacuations have been increasing over recent weeks. On July 26th, some 300 Roma and Serbian families were removed from their makeshift camp near Aix-en-Provence, while other shelters were dismantled the same month in the south-eastern city of Lyon and in the central Loire region. Other forced evacuations were carried out on August 1st in Marseille and the Seine-Saint-Denis département (equivalent to a county) just north of Paris.
“I’d prefer that the government applies with great firmness a policy against job cuts instead of putting itself in the steps of the last by pointing the finger at a population like the Roma,” said Eric Coquerel, national secretary of the radical-left Parti de Gauche, part of the Front de Gauche alliance, on Thursday.
Campaigners have challenged Vals’ insistence that efforts are being made to offer alternative accommodation to the most vulnerable members of the displaced Roma community, and accused him of continuing the policies of his predecessor under Sarkozy - which were slammed as a “disgrace” by EU Justice Commissioner Viviane Reding, who alikened the situation to that of the deportation of Jews during World War II.
“At least the last president had the honesty to say what was going to happen,” said Lille-based Catholic priest and Roma rights campaigner, Father Arthur, speaking on Thursday.
Sarkozy launched his offensive against Roma migrants, who make up only a small, if highly visible, comparative number of illegal immigrants in France, in a fiery speech in Grenoble in July 2010. "The rule is clear, illegal immigrants must be sent back to their own country," he said, adding that Roma camps were "zones beyond the reach of the law that cannot be tolerated in France."
The speech followed the ransacking, earlier that same month, of a police station in the Loire Valley town of Saint Aignan by members of a local French Roma community. Armed with iron bars and hatchets, their attack was in revenge for the shooting dead by police of a 22 year-old Roma man who had driven through a check-point, injuring one of the police officers.
While the Loire events involved French Roma, it was the Romanian and Bulgarian Roma community living in France without legal residence status (see page 2) who were subsequently targeted by Sarkozy's high-profile and controversial campaign of deportations and the bulldozing of dozens of their camps.
“The Grenoble speech gave a brutal marching order,” said Mathieu Angotti, head of a federation of associations that provide assistance for social integration of Roma and other communities, the FARS, and a member of the RomEurope association that campaigns for the respect of Roma migrants’ human rights. Speaking earlier this month, before the latest expulsions, he continued: “Since then, we’ve been waiting for [police] prefects to adopt a more humane policy line. During the election campaign, the socialists sent out same such messages, but they were not from people in authority, and now the first message from the government is a tough one.”
Reacting to the evacuations of the camps near Lille on Thursday, Roseline Tiset, a member of the French branch of the League of Human Rights, agreed. "What's inconceivable for us is that people are thrown out without being told where they can go," she said. "We expected better after President Hollande's declarations."
During his presidential election campaign, François Hollande wrote to human rights associations involved in providing assistance to Roma migrants in France, promising that “whenever an insalubrious camp is dismantled, alternative solutions will be offered. We cannot continue to accept that families are chased away from a place without a solution.”
'These European citizens are treated like dogs'
“Manuel Valls insists he will respect the law, but on the ground the expulsion methods will remain brutal,” commented Laurent El Ghozi, president of a federation of associations providing support for gypsy and traveller communities in France, the Fédération Nationale des Associations Solidaires d’Action avec les Tsiganes et les gens du voyage (FNASAT), in an interview with Mediapart earlier this month.
The dozens of associations providing assistance and legal support to Roma migrants have demanded an end to measures established under the previous government that limit the rights to employment for Bulgarian and Romanian nationals, for an opening up of their rights to social benefit support, and an end to their expulsions from temporary camps whenever alternative lodging is not offered.
“Dismantling [the camps] without any solution for re-lodging adds to the precarious social position of the Roma, because people who are ill, children and pregnant women are cut off from medical care,” said Thierry Brigaud, president of the NGO Médecins du Monde, the ‘French doctors' association that has been one of the most active in providing humanitarian assistance to Roma migrant camps in France.
Enlargement : Illustration 2
Nationals from Romania and Bulgaria, members of the European Union since 2007, are subjected to special ‘transitory’ measures taken in France and eight other EU-member states (Germany, the UK, Ireland, Belgium, Luxembourg, Holland, Austria, and Malta) which limit their rights to work and residency. In France, they are entitled to a three-month residence visa upon entering the country, but they are then subjected to a lengthy, and often prohibitory, period before they can receive a full-blown residence permit.
For this, they must first establish a work contract with an employer, which must then by submitted to a labour ministry agency, the DIRECCTE (Direction régionale des entreprises, de la concurrence, de la consommation, du travail et de l’emploi) which will decide whether to authorize the proposed employment. If the authorization is delivered, the next required step is the application for a long-term residence permit from the local prefecture. “Lots of months pass and employers become discouraged,” said Myriam Argoud, an official with the French social support charity Secours catholique.
Furthermore, employers of Romanian or Bulgarian nationals must pay a special tax to the French Office of Immigration and Integration (OFII), which can, depending on individual cases, amount to as much as half the gross salary offered.
“In truth, poor Romanian and Bulgarian migrants don’t have access to the job market and so they find themselves in an illegal position at the end of three months,” said Laurent El Ghozi of the FNASAT.
The EU has ordered that the ‘transitory’ measures be lifted by 2014. “That amounts to another year and a half of suffering ahead,” added Myriam Argoud.
She and her colleagues in other associations are hoping that members of the new Left majority in both the upper and lower houses of the French parliament, respectively the Senate and National Assembly, may force the government to abandon the measures before 2014. In June, Green party members of the Senate lodged a debating resolution calling for the end of the measures, and which will be put to a vote later this summer.
“The manhunt must end,” wrote Jean-Marc Coppola, vice-president of the council for the Provence and Riviera regions of south-east France (PACA), a member of the radical-left Front de Gauche party and councilor on the Marseille city council, in a communiqué released earlier this month. He was reacting to the forced evacuation of 20 Roma families from an emergency accommodation centre in Marseille on August 1st. “Suffering humiliation and terror via the multiplication of legal procedures and expulsions with grave consequences for the children concerned, these European citizens are treated like dogs amid the indifference and contempt of the majority of elected representatives of all political sides,” he continued, appealing to the new socialist government to reverse the policies of its predecessors.
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English version: Graham Tearse