The first of the evacuated gypsies return to Romania from France
The Romanian media is completely absorbed by the issue of the Roma of Romanian and Bulgarian origin being repatriated by the government in France.
23 August 2010, 12:53
Every headline in Bucharest and every news bulletin on Friday opened with the news that, on Thursday, the first Romanian gypsies evacuated from France arrived back into the country.
They formed a group of 61 people, with France announcing that they were part of a group of 400 people that will return in August and September as part of the so-called "voluntary return" procedure.
The government in Paris offered every adult who would return 300 Euro, and every child 100 Euro.
This monetary incentive was called by some "protection money" which by the French taxpayers have to fork out to solve an intractable situation: on the one hand, the government cannot forcibly remove the Roma without violating their rights as European citizens, on the other the same government is under strong public pressure to solve the issue of the Roma settled in illegal camps on public property.
These people are accused of pretty much every traditional form of crime, from working under the counter, begging and pickpocketing to human trafficking, prostitution and extortion, both in Romania and in France.
Traian Basescu, in the unenviable position of being president to the Romanian roma, said that he proposed a continental program for the integration of the Roma as far back as 2008, but that some European Union states did not deem the project necessary.
Now, European Commissioner for Human Rights Thomas Hammemberg himself said that the problem is not national, but continental.
In an interview for Radio Romania, he deplored the heavy handed measures taken by France, but also said that Bucharest has taken too few measures it had pledged upon when integrating into the Union in 2007.
The daily Romania Libera headline reads as an angry sentence: “Gypsy integration? Try law enforcement!”.
The daily continues on the same angry note: “If alternative justice, trafficking children, marriage between minors, theft, tax evasion, etc., are part of the cultural identity of the Roma, then maybe the authorities should remember our customs, according to which people who do those things go to jail”, writes the daily journal.
(Radio România Internaţional, Serviciul în limba engleză).
