Even the EU Commission scolds the president
Politicians usually look most ridiculous when they are pushed into the defensive to grapple with proven accusations, and when they base their defence on made-up, worse accusations nobody has accused them of to begin with. Point in case: France's infamy of swooping onto Roma and Travellers' dwellings, round up the occupants, finger-print, strip-search and load them into busses in early morning raids. The alikeness of GESTAPO attacks on civilians under Nazi occupation did not escape the EU Commission, and the EU Commissioner of Justice Viviane Reding spoke up this week, clearly fed up with the lies and excuses vented from the French government.
Ms Reding referred to a leaked document from the French Interior Ministry in which local authorities are asked to specifically target Roma and Travellers - most of them French citizens - in a crackdown aimed to deport members of that ethnic group as expediently and secretly as possible. The commissioner lambasted the French leadership and condemned the fact that its members lied to the commission previously.
"This is a situation I had thought Europe would not have to witness again after the Second World War," she said. I didn't either. But France's Europe Minister Pierre Lellouche lamely responded that a plane ticket back to Romania or Bulgaria is not the same thing as death trains and gas chambers. Nobody said that, Mr Lellouche; but the valid parallel which was pointed out by Ms Reding was that once again an ethnic group has been singled out for mass persecution, ill treatment and deportation, just because they belonged to the "wrong" and unpleasant" and undesired ethnicity.
Mr Sarkozy, born as Nicolas Paul Stéphane Sarközy de Nagy-Bocsa in Budapest and only to become French citizen in 1970 after 20 years as a stateless vagabond merely by virtue of past service in the French Legion, also waffled on about the inappropriateness to compare one wave of deportations with earlier ones in France. He then finished his tirade against the EU by mocking the Luxembourger Reding to open the tiny grand-duchy for the next wave of Roma refugees.
The crux of the matter is that around 14,000 Roma and Travellers have arrived in France since Romania and Bulgaria had to open their borders to ascend to the European Union. The ethnic minority is brutally surpressed and deprived of meaningful income in these countries and the flow of migrants intensified in recent years, mainly to Italy, France and Spain. The respective governments, in violation of EU law, continue the practice to deny members of the Roma and Travellers community with work permits despite the fact that they are European citizens as much as the Hungarian refugee Nicholas Sarkozy who, by a freak of coincidence, ended up as resident inside the Elysee Palace.
The state-sponsored discrimination and persecution of Roma and Travellers, who are French citizens mostly, needs to stop - even according to the EU commission at last. It would be helpful if the commission stepped up its cruisade for justice also in Spain, Italy, Hungary and Slovakia, where Gypsies are equally mistreated and deported to areas of Europe that remain to this day desolate, dilapitated, derelict and outright dangerous.
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