Meanwhile, the city of Copenhagen was asking the Danish government for assistance, including the use of force, to expel Roma. Headlines in Sweden revealed how the government was in violation of domestic and EU law for deporting Roma for begging. That same week, Germany announced that it wants to expel 12,000 gypsies, including 6,000 children and adolescents, back to Kosovo, whence they had fled in the wake of the break-up of Yugoslavia, accused of collaboration with Serbia. Much ink has been spilt over Paris’s anti-ziganist ethnic cleansing, but Germany, Denmark and Sweden have been engaged in much the same behaviour, albeit more quietly and with not with the same law-and-order, vote-seeking pronouncements from their capitals. While human rights groups note a chilling echo of les rafles, the French round-ups of Jews during the second world war, the Elysee Palace claims the repatriations are voluntary, as the government is paying each adult EUR300 (plus EUR100 per child) to return to Romania or Bulgaria.įrom September, the government is to store the fingerprints of those who have enjoyed an ‘assisted repatriation’ in a biometric database in order to stop them from receiving any such ‘assistance’ in the future, should they return to France, as by EU law they can do immediately. The week before, French president Nicolas Sarkozy announced he was to destroy some 300 Roma encampments and cleanse France of around 700 Roma adults and children, later upped to 850. And this summer it came amid a fresh wave of persecution meted out to Europe’s Roma community and travellers by some of the most powerful member states in the union. The day marks the 66th anniversary of the corralling of 2,897 men, women and children into the Zigeunerfamilienlager, or ‘gypsy family camp’, at Auschwitz-Birkenau in 1944. Given the occasion of some wretched or not-quite-so-wretched tragedy or anniversary of a commonly agreed (but, crucially, non-controversial) historic injustice, Brussels copies and pastes in press-release form almost identical messages of condolence, regret and remembrance, whether the occasion be the anniversary of Kristallnacht, a Belgian train wreck, floods in Pakistan or the death of Michael Jackson.īut there was no solemn communique of sympathy on this year’s Roma Extermination Remembrance Day on 2 August. The European Commission has what could be called a ‘Condolence-O-Matic’ machine.
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