HURRIYET DAILY NEWS
Roma families push shopping carts with their belongings as they are evicted from an illegal camp in Villeneuve d’Ascq. French police evacuated some 150 people who resided in an illegal camp of travelling people and Roma in northern France.
French authorities yesterday expelled several hundred Roma from encampments in the north of the country, raising fears of a return to controversial policies championed by former president Nicolas Sarkozy.
The evacuations, along with expulsions of Roma to Romania by plane, came after Socialist President Francois Hollande’s interior minister, Manuel Valls, voiced concern about growing Roma encampments in several cities. France drew a chorus of criticism in 2010 for rounding up hundreds of Roma immigrants from illegal camps and sending them back to Romania and Bulgaria after right-wing Sarkozy announced a crackdown.
France, under Sarkozy, came under heated European Union criticism in 2010 for expelling more than 1,000 illegal Roma immigrants, a move seen as targeting an ethnic group. Action against Roma is now a sensitive issue. Two Roma encampments on state land near the northern city of Lille were evacuated yesterday, with around 200 people expelled from one camp and “15 caravans” from another, said Villeneuve d’Ascq Deputy Mayor Maryvonne Girard, according to Agence France-Presse.
Valls, who has cultivated a ‘tough on crime’ image, defended the raids as legal and necessary due to the health risks of hundreds of people living in makeshift accommodation.
Roma camps challenge to community life: Minister
“Unsanitary camps are unacceptable,” he said in a statement on Aug. 8. “Often located in the midst of working-class neighborhoods, they are also a challenge to community life.”
Police motorcycles accompanied the Roma on the road after they were expelled without resistance.
Frederic Rose, of the Paris police department, said French social workers went to the camp ahead of the officers’ arrival to tell them the settlement on public property was illegal and would be removed, The Associated Press reported. Rose said it was the largest of several camps of Gypsies, or Roma, in Paris.
Rights groups said no arrangements for temporary housing had been made for the group of Roma near Lille, which includes some 60 children. “What’s inconceivable for us is that people are thrown out without being told where they can go. We expected better after President Hollande’s words,” said Roseline Tiset of the Human Rights League. She said that during the presidential campaign earlier this year, Hollande wrote to Roma rights groups saying that under his government “when an unsanitary camp is dismantled, alternatives will be offered.”
Hurriyet Daily News for more