The French mayor who refused the burial of a Roma baby who died just after Christmas has a history of stirring up sentiment against the community, Mediapart can reveal. Christian Leclerc faced a media storm after it was revealed that his council at Champlan south of Paris did not allow a young child called Maria Francesca to be buried in the town's cemetery. Now this website has obtained the recording of a town council meeting held on November 28th, 2014, during which the right-wing mayor openly stigmatises children from the Roma community who are at school in the town and stirs up prejudice about them. On the tape he can be heard contrasting Roma children with the “little boys and girls of Champlan” who “have a shower every morning”.
After the burial controversy broke last weekend Christian Leclerc, who stands on a 'diverse right' ticket, has changed his defence several times, while also trying to portray himself as the victim. First of all he claimed there were “few places available” in the local cemetery, and said that “priority [was] given to those who pay their local taxes”. Then the mayor spoke about a “misunderstanding”, before denying that he had refused to bury the ten-week-old girl at all. He later blamed an “administrative error” and claimed that comments had been “taken out of context”, while insisting he “very much” hoped the girl would be buried in the town after all. He also described the controversy as a “travesty” and threatened action for defamation. Now the mayor is said to be “distraught” over the controversy that has developed since Le Parisien newspaper broke the story on Saturday 3rd January.
Leclerc has recently received some support from Richard Trinquier, the right-wing UMP mayor of neighbouring Wissous, where Maria Francesca was finally buried on Monday January 5th. Tranquier told 20 Minutes: “I know Christian Leclerc well. He's not racist and is moderate in his remarks. He was on holiday last week and was not able to manage the situation easily.” Tranquier says the affair has now “gone too far”.
But the situation could yet get even worse for Leclerc. France's defender of public rights Jacques Toubon has taken up the case, telling Europe 1 radio that he intended to launch an investigation to discover the full facts of the affair. Then on Monday afternoon the prosecution authorities in nearby Evry announced they were opening a preliminary investigation for alleged “discrimination”.
Until last weekend the right-wing mayor of Champlan had been unknown on the national stage. He has been in post since 2008 and was re-elected last year in the first round of the local election with 74.11% of the vote. Before the story broke he had enjoyed the backing of former environment minister and local MP Nathalie Kosciusko-Morizet – usually known as NKM – the high-profile if unsuccessful UMP candidate to be mayor of Paris last year who was recently named as vice-president of the UMP by its new president Nicolas Sarkozy. In January 2012 the then-minister nominated Leclerc for France's highest award, the Legion of Honour, for his services to the environment.
Last Sunday NKM was forced out of her silence on the affair. Barely half an hour after prime minister Manuel Valls Tweeted: “Refusing a grave to a child because of her origin: an insult to her memory, an insult to what France stands for”, the UMP vice-president herself bitterly attacked her former protégé. “I don't understand what came over him. This refusal is pitiful, indefensible, unjustifiable. To refuse burial to a human being is to kill them a second time.” She added: “This behaviour is the opposite of all the humanist values that I defend.” Though on the morning of Tuesday January 6th, NKM pointed out in relation to the attacks on Christian Leclerc: “There is nothing in writing in this affair because these are things that took place on the phone.”
However, Mediapart can reveal concrete evidence of Leclerc's attitude to the Roma people in his town in the recent past. A council meeting in Champlan on November 28th, 2014, led to heated remarks both about the local Roma community and travellers who are living in the car park of a warehouse for an Asian supermarket. “It's full of caravans and all that that entails,” explains Christian Leclerc, on a recording of the meeting obtained by Mediapart. “We have emphasised that if there were an emergency, a fire starting or whatever it might be, everything would be burnt, the travellers as much as Tang Frères's stock and all that. It would run into several millions.”
The debate moves on to the “problem of the Roma in Champlan”. Christian Leclerc makes numerous discriminatory remarks about this community, referring to the “Middle Ages” and accusing the public authorities of lying. “They are hiding things from us,” he says on the tape. All the usual clichés and urban legends are there. The mayor talks about “rats as big as this” in the Roma settlements, and says that the Roma themselves can be seen “everywhere, on public transport, on the RATP [editor's note, regional rail network] as much as on the Europ' Essonne buses [editor's note, local bus network] and the Butte primary school, they are everywhere”.
Then on the recording another councillor from the right-wing majority stokes up the level of prejudice still further. “The day before yesterday I went by the [Roma] camp [editor's note, the term used by the councillor and later the mayor] and there were BMW 4x4s parked in the camp, I'd like to know how they could have got the money, I think I'm missing something here,” he says. Then in a tone that is more like that of a bar-room discussion that a council chamber debate the mayor pits various groups – the state, local councillors, the regional health authority, teachers, parents – against each other.
The Roma children who go to school “amid the little boys and girls from Champlan who have a shower every morning” are singled out for particular attention by the mayor. Leclerc claims they are “massively overprotected” by the education authorities. “It's like, one gets the impression that it's more interesting for the teachers to look after Roma children that the Champlan children,” he says. The mayor just wants one thing, for the Roma to be expelled once and for all. Where would they go? “That's not my problem at all,” he says.
The temperature of the debate rises around the council table. An opposition councillor speaks and says she is “shocked” by the situation. “It shocks me in two senses. It indeed shocks me because there are children from the [town] and there is after all a safety risk and a health risk … but it also shocks me that .. ok, what's being done about it, what?” she asks.
The mayor who stirs up fear about local residents
A few days before that council meeting Christian Leclerc had written to the town's 2,700 local residents to complain about the “hygiene conditions” in the “camps”, as he describes the places where these vulnerable people live. Taking little account of medical confidentiality, and at the risk of spreading alarm, he held up the Roma community for general condemnation by making public information which, according to the regional health authority the Agence Régionale de Santé (ARS), should have remained confidential.
In his “announcement” (see below) the mayor mentioned the case of a child “belonging to the Roma community” who was a tuberculosis carrier, as well as “numerous cases of scabies in the schools”. Cranking up the concern, he claimed that the current health situation was “very worrying” and even “unmanageable”. And he appealed to the public authorities over this “genuine health emergency”. Judging that the current expulsion procedure was too slow, he implicitly called on the prefect – the state's local representative – to intervene and dismantle the flimsy homes. The revelation of a supposed case of TB seemed to him an acceptable pretext to demand the use of the forces of law and order, rather than simply seeking better health case for the child concerned.
Even though the mayor had been informed by the competent authorities that the child in question was being monitored in hospital and that he was not contagious, Christian Leclerc asked his municipal services to “disinfect” the town's bus “several times” as well as school buildings such as the canteen and sleeping area. He thus established a climate of fear that forced both the state health authorities and education officials to step in to reassure the population and put an end to the stigmatisation.
Michel Huguet, the health authority official in charge of the Essonne département – county- where Champlan is located, wrote tartly to Christian Leclerc on November 28th. In the letter he urged the mayor to respect “medical confidentiality” before making it clear that even if the child in question had TB he could neither be considered ill or contagious. Thanks to the treatment he had received, the bacillus that causes TB remained “dormant”, said the health official.
“The paediatric service at Orsay Hospital [in the north of the Essonne] is looking after the monitoring of this child who is brought in regularly by his parents,” wrote Huguet. “This monitoring confirms that the treatment is being followed perfectly.” Responding to the mayor’s claim that he was acting to “protect the inhabitants”, Huguet said that a meeting had been organised at the Butte school buildings on November 20th, in order to “reassure” parents and teachers. “It was underlined that latent tuberculosis does not require [a child] to be removed from school because they are not contagious and in no way represent any health risk for the population who attend the schools or who can perhaps come in contact with this child.” As for the scabies, just one case had been reported, said the health official. And this case involved not a Roma child but an out-of-school activities organiser. “No other case has been reported in the two scholastic establishments and no suspected cases have been confirmed by the doctors,” wrote the official.
However, the mayor's letter had an impact. He caused concern, even panic, among local residents, the activity organisers – some of whom wanted to invoke their right to withdraw from school events – and parents. Parental concern reached such a point that education inspectors had to come up with a clarification that was stuck inside the special exercise books used by French schools to communicate with parents. “You have received … an announcement given out to your children at the end of school by activity organisers. This document could lead to confusion and cause concern within families. It thus seems necessary to clarify matters and to give you the facts to understand the situation in an entirely rational way,” wrote the school inspector Martine Degorce-Dumas.
The education official, too, pointed out that the child was not sick, and as for scabies she noted that there were “ordinary rules of hygiene to respect but no large-scale disinfection is necessary”. She added: “The school is a collective venture where one learns the Republic's values. Among these are tolerance and respect for others.”
The issue of the Roma people is, however, not the only one over which the mayor of Champlan is accused of preying on people's fears. Christian Leclerc's political opponents say that the issue of the environment is not simply an election campaign theme for him. “He uses it to terrify the inhabitants,” says his socialist opponent Jean-François Castell. “He has put out some appalling statements on the subject, you got the impression we were all going to die.”
Though Christian Leclerc, who has not responded to Mediapart's request for a comment, has attracted all the media flak, his counterpart in neighbouring Wissous, Richard Trinquier, is not considered a “friend” of the local Roma people either. “He hasn't carried out expulsions because his predecessor took care of that,” says Serge Guichard, of the local Roma support group the Association de Solidarité en Essonne avec les Familles Roumaines et Roms (ASEFRR), with irony. Guichard also notes that the mayor of Wissous was found guilty of discrimination last summer not against the Roma – but against women wearing the veil. He was the mayor who issued a regulation banning veiled women from the municipal swimming pool. This regulation was suspended by the courts in July 2014.
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- The French version of this article can be read here.
English version by Michael Streeter