The study of History improves the understanding of current events. So, we need to look back to the Gypsies History and learn it. Why?
- History Helps Us Understand People and Societies: it offers the only extensive evidential base for the contemplation and analysis of how societies function, and people need to have some sense of how societies function simply to run their own lives.
- History Helps Us Understand Change and How the Society We Live in Came to Be: the past causes the present, and so the future. Any time we try to know why something happened, we have to look for factors that took shape earlier.
- History Contributes to Moral Understanding: History also provides a terrain for moral contemplation. Studying the stories of individuals and situations in the past allows us to test our own moral sense, to hone it against some of the real complexities individuals have faced in difficult settings.
- History Provides Identity: historical data include evidence about how families, groups, institutions and whole countries were formed and about how they have evolved while retaining cohesion.
The Early History
The Gypsies are a close-knit communal people who have a shared background, but are scattered throughout the world. Their origins have been the subject of controversy throughout the centuries, but in modern times, we have discovered, from research into their language, that the gypsies originated in Northern India, from whence they spread throughout Europe and the Middle East. No one knows when the first gypsies left India or, indeed, why.
They seem to have arrived in the Middle East about 1000 AD, some going on into North Africa and others on into Europe. They were an intelligent people, used to living on their wits, who found it easy to impress the uneducated locals by giving themselves unwarranted titles and assuming the importance to go with them. Hence they arrived in Europe as Lords, Dukes, Counts and Earls of Little Egypt, demanding and receiving help and support from those in authority. Claiming that they had been ejected from their homeland, 'Little Egypt', by the wicked Saracens, or that they were on a pilgrimage, gained them succour from no less than the Pope himself, who demanded that they be given safe passage in the countries over which he had sway. So they were able to travel in relative safety, and could expect food and lodging from religious houses, as the rich of the time felt that it would assist their standing in the eyes of the church if they supported pilgrims. Having been on a pilgrimage to the Holy Land was the ultimate status symbol, but supporting those who had been on one, or were taking part in one was the next best thing. So with their quick wits and silver tongues they were soon under the protection of Kings throughout Europe.
We know for sure that a group of four hundred arrived in Germany, at Luneberg, in 1417. Their leaders, the 'Dukes' Andrew and Michael, along with sundry 'Counts' gave, by their dress, the impression of wealth and respectability. While they were well dressed, their followers were anything but. The 'nobles' stayed in the local hostelry, whilst the others camped or dossed wherever they could find shelter. As pilgrims, they were protected by a letter from the Emperor Sigismund. Sigismund, Roman emperor and King of Hungary and Bohemia, and son of the Emperor Charles 1V, was renowned as the great leader who had taken the combined armies of Christendom on a Crusade against the Turks in 1396. One of the most far-sighted statesman of his day, he tried to bring about the expulsion of the Turks from Europe by uniting all of Christendom against them.
Later, having persuaded Pope Martin V that they were on a seven year pilgrimage, they received a letter of protection allowing them free and unhindered access to all Christian countries. They lived off the generosity of the locals, and when insufficient was forthcoming, helped themselves. The ladies soon gained a reputation as fortune-tellers, but as many of their 'clients' were relieved of their purses at the same time, they also gained the not unfounded reputation of being thieves and pickpockets. Many were arrested and some executed.
Similar groups arrived in most of the countries of Central and Western Europe throughout the 1400's. They are recorded in Italy, France, Germany and Hungary. They roamed far and wide, living the nomadic life, with the men carrying on their trades as horse dealers, musicians amd workers of metal, while the women continued to tell fortunes and to relieve the unwary of their property. Despite their supposed religious nature, they were feared by many, and this built up into movements by governments against them.
Countries issued edicts against them, the first being Spain in about 1490, but this just drove them underground. Spain tried, over the next three hundred years, to prohibit their dress, language and customs and so force assimilation and an end to their wanderings. Country after country passed laws to reject and expel them, sometimes to colonies overseas. In 1539, France issued a nationwide expulsion order, England having attempted the same in 1530, under threat of imprisonment, but when that failed, the penalty became death in 1554. In parts of Central Europe they were forced into bondage, and in Romania made to live as chattel slaves - a situation which did not change until they gained their freedom in 1856. In many cases, their answer was to move elsewhere until such times as a law was made expelling them from there also, but, as all unsettled tribes who live among settled communities are open to becoming convenient scapegoats, the increased complaints, genuine or not, by the local populace surely led to official and legal persecution wherever they went.
In the 20th century, persecution reached its height in Nazi Germany where about a quarter of a million were exterminated in concentration camps. Wherever the Nazi authorities came across them, they were bent on wiping them out. After the Second World War, the Communist authorities of Eastern Europe tried to integrate them into their system as factory labour, and, although this was totally against the Gypsy ways, succeeded to some degree in eliminating their full-time nomadic life style. There was great reluctance to grant recognition to the Gypsies as an ethnic group, and only in parts of the former Yugoslavia were they treated as a recognised minority group. In western Europe, the nomad life continued to some extent, but their way of life led to continuous clashes with a structure set up to manage life in settled communities, and still does to this day.
There are, at present, possibly up to six million gypsies in Europe with the largest concentrations being in the Balkans and Central Europe, with major groupings in Russia, Spain and France. In the former Communist countries many are suffering under the present economic hardship there, and with the collapse of national boundaries in Europe, there have been attempts by Central European groups to enter Britain, which has been sold to them as a country which is prepared to give handouts to all. Not being members of the EC they are not entitled to anything and have been returned.
Gypsies first appeared in the Americas in the 16th century when the colonies were being used, mainly, as dumping grounds for the undesirables of European society. By the end of the last century, however, the groups of gypsies were entering the US and Canada along with other European emigrees, with perhaps up to a million now being in North America. Initially they settled in country areas, but with the hardships of the Great Depression, they were forced into towns.
Over the years, with groups becoming isolated from one another, various distinctive groupings have developed, with their culture and social organisation changing and developing. They still tend to keep themselves to themselves and regard contact with non-Gypsies as polluting and a danger to their traditions and customs. Their language has been a major unifying force as they have kept Romani as their own, although dialects have developed and their own language has been affected by the language of the nation within which they live. Many groupings have taken up the religion of the areas within which they live, so there are Roman Catholics, Protestants, Orthodox and Muslims.
Gypsy life is still very firmly based on the primacy of the family with the elderly being revered and respected. Morality is very strict with chaperoning and the arrangement of marriages still the norm in some groupings. Bride-prices may still paid to the father of the bride to compensate him for the loss of a daughter.
In most of the world, Gypsies are now held in low esteem and tend to be involved in economically unimportant activities, which allow them to work on their own behalf. The traditional occupations are horse-trading, peddling and door to door trading, blacksmithing and metalworking, fortune-telling and healing, small scale craftwork such as wood carving, and music and entertainment. Many will remember the pan mender, the clothes peg maker and the fortune teller whose palm had to be crossed with silver. The pressure to stop their nomadic ways and settle is still increasing. In Scotland their right to special campsites has been hotly disputed. Their cause has not been helped by the increase in the number of new-age travellers who tend to be seen as a disparate group of individuals living life by their own rules at the expense of 'law-abiding society', who settle where they wish, do what they want and leave nothing but destruction behind. This type is exactly what the Gypsies are not. Nevertheless, the two groups have tended to become confused to the detriment of the true Romanies. There seems no doubt that with the Gypsies' growing awareness of their common origins, language and culture that their society will survive.
Source:http://www.scottishgypsies.co.uk/early.html
Yet in the history of modern France, the wartime Vichy regime has no monopoly on xenophobic reflexes and exclusionary policies. Over the course of the 20th century, it was French republican governments that laid the administrative and legal foundations for official discrimination against Gypsies.
In 1912, the republican government passed a battery of laws ostensibly aimed at vagrancy. Yet the government revealed its hand when it created an identity card that specifically targeted Gypsies. The French law used the term “nomads,” and did not specify “Gypsies,” but the instructions to local officials lent themselves to racial identification. (This is being repeated in Arizona’s proposed anti-immigrant law.)
The identity cards allowed authorities to track the movements of Gypsies during the first World War, but they were rarely interned in camps. That changed by the mid-1930s. With the great influx into France of political and religious refugees from Central and Eastern Europe, France created a new kind of identity card that, as the historian Pierre Piazza noted, sought “to delimit more rigorously the contours [of the national community] and to better locate those who did not make up part of it.”
With relentless logic, there followed the creation of dozens of “special centers” — soon to become concentration camps — for refugees recently arrived on French soil. At the same time, France passed a law empowering officials to strip recently naturalized citizens of French nationality. Finally, shortly before the German invasion in the summer of 1940, the French government ordered local officials to herd “nomads” into assigned areas. In justifying its action, the government declared: “Wandering individuals generally without a home, a homeland, or an actual profession, constitute a danger for national security ... that must be removed.”
Of course, the republic would never have applied a racist policy toward Gypsies and Jews as Vichy did, much less participate in the systematic deportation of these groups to the death camps. In this respect, Vichy and the republic have nothing in common.
Nonetheless, the continuities between democratic and authoritarian phases in French history lead to a more general observation, often overlooked: Democracies are as likely as authoritarian states to practice xenophobic or racist politics.
Thinkers from Plato to Tocqueville have commented on the dangers inherent in the rule of the majority — especially when the majority is swayed by the passionate actions and speeches of the few. The lot of Gypsies in contemporary France and Romania is a case in point. While these states do not subject their Roma populations to the punitive policies pursued by Pétain’s France or Ceausescu’s Romania, they do relegate them to the margins of their societies.
In present-day Romania, the Roma population has a poverty rate three times higher than the national average, with low life expectancy, low rates of literacy and 100 percent unemployment in some areas. Since joining the European Union, the Romanian government has reluctantly designed initiatives aimed at facilitating integration of the Roma. Affirmative action programs and the appointment of local-level educational and health mediators have been the most publicized. But the effectiveness of these programs has been at best limited, and anti-Roma sentiments persist in the public and among policy makers.
Romanians now see the French expulsions as proof that integration of the Roma into any European society is mere utopia. So the actions of the French government are undermining the already frail attempts at implementing policies that would target Roma discrimination in Romania.
As for France, Daniel Cohn-Bendit, leader of the European Green Party, says that Sarkozy has “taken the French for fools” in pursuing his anti-Roma policy. Perhaps. But recent polls reveal a nation evenly divided over the issue, so Cohn-Bendit’s claim means that nearly half the French population are fools.
We need only consider earlier French laws aimed at the Gypsies, passed in 1912, 1938 and 1940, to see that xenophobia flared at those moments when France faced the threat of war. Moreover, on the eve of both the first and second World Wars, France was awash in fears over the nation’s declining birthrate and its capacity to maintain its historical legacy as a dominant economic, cultural, political and military power.
While the French republic doesn’t now face the prospect of war, it does face other crises: economic stagnation, decaying inner cities and a top-heavy state staggering under the increasingly unrealistic expectations of the public. It must also wrestle with perplexing questions of national identity and national security provoked by an E.U. that continues to extend its writ.
Here’s the rub for Sarkozy, and blessing for the Roma: The E.U., long criticized for its “democratic deficit,” may now become the defender of last resort for Europe’s last stateless people.
Source: http://www.nytimes.com/2010/09/07/opinion/07iht-edzaretsky.html
The "GYPSY PROBLEM" in FRANCE
The discrimination against and marginalization of Gypsies has a long history in France.
Pushed to the edges of society in medieval Europe due to their dark skin, strange language, indifference to established religion, and perceived threat to guilds, the first anti-Gypsy legislation in France appeared in 1539. In moder times, the Third Republic's battle against vagrancy, which began in the 1880s, ultimately resulted in the law of July 16, 1912. The law provided the government with a legal means to control traveling professions, defined various categories of itinerant mercahnts, and introduced a new identity card aimed specifically at Gypsies. The French government, drawing upon the traditionsof revolutionary republicanism, was careful to avoid defining Gypsies in racial terms in the new law. Instead, the law separated mobile traders into three groups: traveling salesmen (marchands ambulants), traders at markets and fairs (forains), and nomads (nomades). The first article of the law defined traveling salesmen as anyone (French or foreign) having a fixed residence in France and practicing an itinerant trade. The second article required "forains" - French nationals who had no fixed residence and lived by selling items at markets and fairs - to carry a special identity card with a picture, stating their personal informations, profession, and last address. The third article defined nomads, "regardless of nationality", as "all individuals circulating in France without a home or fixed residence and not falling into anu of the above categories, even if they have resources or claim to exercise a profession". The law also required individuals in this third category to carry anthropometric identity cards documenting their physical characteristics.
Article three of the July 16, 1912, law thus introduced both a new administrative category and a new identity card without clearly defining who was a "nomad". (...) it is exactly Gypsies (Tsiganes) that the legislator meant to designate by the term "nomad". The establishment of anthropometric cards also demonstrated the lawmaker's association of nomadic Gypsies with criminality.(...) Mny believed that the "criminal" behaviour of Gypsies - begging, stealing and vagabondage - was passed on to future generations. Modifying the criminal's social environment, however, could rectify this behaviour.
Indeed, one goal of the 1912 law was to make the itinerating Gypsy population sedentary, thereby eliminating the threat from dangerous vagrants on French roads and simultaneously encouraging assimilation. Lwamakers believed that those who choose to conform to French cultural norms, including having a permanent residence, could be integrated into society.(...) Many immigrants proved willing to adapt to French culture, but Gypsies throughout Europe have remained remarkably hesitant to adopt the dominant culture's norms.(...)
With the start of the Great war in 1914, fear of all foreigners and the Government's desire to control foreign populations increased. Foreign nationals from enemy states - including Gypsies - faced internment and surveillance throughout the War. (...). Fear of espionage, desertion, subversive activity, and shortages led to the extension of identity cards from undesirable nomads to immigrants in general in 1917, when cards became mandatory for every foreign resident over the age of fifteen.(...)
Immediately following the Great War, politicans called for identity cards for French nationals. These calls intensified in 1930s as waves of refugees flooded France, and officials wanted to be able to control the movement of all French residents, identify citizens, and create a sense of national belonging. (...) What had begun as a means of identifying and controlling nomads would now apply to everyone living in France, although anthropometric cards for nomads continued to distinguish them from the rest of the population. (...) Antinomad measures also continued to appear between the wars. (...) The difference between French and foreign was thus crystallized and codified unnder the Third Republic and could be readily used against foreign, undesirable nomads.(...)
Although the April 29, 1940, circular restricting nomadic movement during the war advised creating concetration camps, this policy quickly changed following the French defeat. After the armistice, Nazi officials requested the establishment of concentration camps foy Gypsies throughout France under French administration. (...)
The laws concerning the movement of non-Gypsy French and foreigners during the War required these populations to remain within the zone where they resided (occupied or unoccupied, etc). (...) The constant threat of reassignment to another area also added to the uncertainty of nomads' daily lives.(...)
The inability to practice traditional occupations that required mobility, such as bringing in seasonal crops or selling wares at markets and fairs, brought nomads into conflict with the surrounding populations.
Though permitted to move about within a prescribed area, nomads, like many other French residents, could no longer meet all their material needs. It soon became apparent that rather than forcing Gypsies to find regular employment, the circumscribed areas only further encouraged them to turn to illegal activities such as begging and stealing or to abandon their areas of assigned residence. (...)
Gypsies failure to conform to the accpeted ideas of family - the centerpiece of the National Revolution - became another reason for the Government and for ordinary citizens to exclude them from society. (...)
The National Revolution clearly contributed to the exclusion of nomads from French society during the Second war, but quotidian concrens dominated attitudes and reactions. Citing the material difficults created by living in proximity to the Gypsies and pointing to the moral shortvomings of the community as a whole, petitions and complaints called for the removal of the undesirable population from towns and villages. Individuals expressed this deires clearly and explicitly. (...) Powerty, living conditions, and thievery became central issues in ordinary citizens treatment of Gypsies during the war, reminding us that shortages became a political issue that directly affected outsiders.
Source: Fogg, Shannon (2009): "The Politics of Everyday Life in Vichy France - Foreigners, Undesirables and Strangers". Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
France and the Gypsies, Then and Now
Many commentators and activists have reacted with fury to the French government’s expulsion of hundreds of Roma, or Gypsies, to Bulgaria and Romania. Many critics liken these expulsions to the deportations of Jews organized by France’s Vichy regime during World War II. It’s hard to know what is more outrageous: the policies practiced by President Nicolas Sarkozy or the analogies proffered by his critics.
Yet in the history of modern France, the wartime Vichy regime has no monopoly on xenophobic reflexes and exclusionary policies. Over the course of the 20th century, it was French republican governments that laid the administrative and legal foundations for official discrimination against Gypsies.
In 1912, the republican government passed a battery of laws ostensibly aimed at vagrancy. Yet the government revealed its hand when it created an identity card that specifically targeted Gypsies. The French law used the term “nomads,” and did not specify “Gypsies,” but the instructions to local officials lent themselves to racial identification. (This is being repeated in Arizona’s proposed anti-immigrant law.)
The identity cards allowed authorities to track the movements of Gypsies during the first World War, but they were rarely interned in camps. That changed by the mid-1930s. With the great influx into France of political and religious refugees from Central and Eastern Europe, France created a new kind of identity card that, as the historian Pierre Piazza noted, sought “to delimit more rigorously the contours [of the national community] and to better locate those who did not make up part of it.”
With relentless logic, there followed the creation of dozens of “special centers” — soon to become concentration camps — for refugees recently arrived on French soil. At the same time, France passed a law empowering officials to strip recently naturalized citizens of French nationality. Finally, shortly before the German invasion in the summer of 1940, the French government ordered local officials to herd “nomads” into assigned areas. In justifying its action, the government declared: “Wandering individuals generally without a home, a homeland, or an actual profession, constitute a danger for national security ... that must be removed.”
When the Vichy regime came into existence a few months later, it built upon policies and structures introduced by the now-defunct republic. The popular view of Vichy — as four years that had nothing in common with what went before or what followed — cedes to a more accurate rendering, which shows important and unsettling continuities between democratic governments and authoritarian regimes in France.
Of course, the republic would never have applied a racist policy toward Gypsies and Jews as Vichy did, much less participate in the systematic deportation of these groups to the death camps. In this respect, Vichy and the republic have nothing in common.
Nonetheless, the continuities between democratic and authoritarian phases in French history lead to a more general observation, often overlooked: Democracies are as likely as authoritarian states to practice xenophobic or racist politics.
Thinkers from Plato to Tocqueville have commented on the dangers inherent in the rule of the majority — especially when the majority is swayed by the passionate actions and speeches of the few. The lot of Gypsies in contemporary France and Romania is a case in point. While these states do not subject their Roma populations to the punitive policies pursued by Pétain’s France or Ceausescu’s Romania, they do relegate them to the margins of their societies.
In present-day Romania, the Roma population has a poverty rate three times higher than the national average, with low life expectancy, low rates of literacy and 100 percent unemployment in some areas. Since joining the European Union, the Romanian government has reluctantly designed initiatives aimed at facilitating integration of the Roma. Affirmative action programs and the appointment of local-level educational and health mediators have been the most publicized. But the effectiveness of these programs has been at best limited, and anti-Roma sentiments persist in the public and among policy makers.
Romanians now see the French expulsions as proof that integration of the Roma into any European society is mere utopia. So the actions of the French government are undermining the already frail attempts at implementing policies that would target Roma discrimination in Romania.
As for France, Daniel Cohn-Bendit, leader of the European Green Party, says that Sarkozy has “taken the French for fools” in pursuing his anti-Roma policy. Perhaps. But recent polls reveal a nation evenly divided over the issue, so Cohn-Bendit’s claim means that nearly half the French population are fools.
We need only consider earlier French laws aimed at the Gypsies, passed in 1912, 1938 and 1940, to see that xenophobia flared at those moments when France faced the threat of war. Moreover, on the eve of both the first and second World Wars, France was awash in fears over the nation’s declining birthrate and its capacity to maintain its historical legacy as a dominant economic, cultural, political and military power.
While the French republic doesn’t now face the prospect of war, it does face other crises: economic stagnation, decaying inner cities and a top-heavy state staggering under the increasingly unrealistic expectations of the public. It must also wrestle with perplexing questions of national identity and national security provoked by an E.U. that continues to extend its writ.
Here’s the rub for Sarkozy, and blessing for the Roma: The E.U., long criticized for its “democratic deficit,” may now become the defender of last resort for Europe’s last stateless people.
Source: http://www.nytimes.com/2010/09/07/opinion/07iht-edzaretsky.html
SARKOZY and The GYPSIES
(Aug. 6) -- French President Nicolas Sarkozy is cracking down on immigrants in his country, starting with the dismantling of the so-called "gypsy camps." On Friday, French police officers evicted 135 people of Roma descent from their squatter camp outside the city of Saint-Etienne.
Sarkozy may be toughening his stance on the already marginalized population to boost his ratings, which have dropped because of a financial scandal. This might be a smart move on his part as 79 percent of voters support Sarkozy's efforts to empty out such camps, according to opinion polls.
Some call Sarkozy's campaign a racially motivated ethnic cleansing, others support the forced removal of immigrants and itinerants, illegal or not. But, how did this massive plan come about? And what will happen to the homeless immigrants? Surge Desk brings you the basics.
1. Why are travelers in France living in illegal settlements?In 2000, France adopted the Besson law, which makes providing housing for travelers mandatory. According to the European Roma Rights Centre, France has not been following the law. Thus, travelers, mostly Roma, end up living in unsanitary and dangerous areas. The ERRC went on to say that the dire living conditions force gypsies to "unjustified violence."
2. How many immigrants are there in France?Approximately 15,000 gypsies and Roma are currently calling France home. The ones living in squatter camps and abandoned buildings are soon to be homeless, if they aren't already.
3. Why Is France forcibly displacing gypsies?In July, Sarkozy was moved to action when a gypsy-police confrontation resulted in the death of a young gypsy in Loire Valley, spurring anonymous ax and pyro rioters to attack a police station, other buildings and vehicles. Sarkozy called a meeting and said illegal Roma immigrants are getting booted from France. He then added that the need for public order is another reason for "systematically evacuating" illegal immigrants. Sarkozy said they are the ones mainly responsible for "trafficking, prostitution and exploitation of children."
4. What's Sarkozy's plan?Sarkozy's goal is to break down 50 percent of illegal gypsy camps in the next three months. Bulgarian and Romanian gypsies must return to their countries of origin if they do anything illegal, the interior minister said. Moreover, plans are in the works to remove French nationality status from immigrants with criminal records.
5. Who opposes Sarkozy's campaign?Rights groups say, first off, that Sarkozy's wording of minority groups as the "traveling community" is racist. Last month, ERRC's letter to Sarkozy says it is "alarmed at [his] call for the systematic evacuation of illegal settlements and the involvement of tax authorities in verifying the status of occupants."
Other opponents say Sarkozy must specify minority groups, instead of mashing them together. Ethnic Roma should be differentiated from gypsies, who should be differentiated from nonimmigrant French travelers. Instead, many are grouped together under the arguably pejorative term gypsies.
"As happens too often in history, gypsies are once more being made scapegoats by a ruling class tangled up in political and financial scandals," UFAT, a gypsy rights group, said. Roma are also easy targets.
6. What options do evicted gypsies have?The only option so far is to find a legal, authorized housing area. For foreign criminal gypsies, they will be sent back to their countries of origin, which in most cases is Romania.
Source: http://www.aolnews.com/surge-desk/article/the-basics-of-french-president-sarkozys-gypsy-crackdown/19584597
Sarkozy may be toughening his stance on the already marginalized population to boost his ratings, which have dropped because of a financial scandal. This might be a smart move on his part as 79 percent of voters support Sarkozy's efforts to empty out such camps, according to opinion polls.
Some call Sarkozy's campaign a racially motivated ethnic cleansing, others support the forced removal of immigrants and itinerants, illegal or not. But, how did this massive plan come about? And what will happen to the homeless immigrants? Surge Desk brings you the basics.
1. Why are travelers in France living in illegal settlements?In 2000, France adopted the Besson law, which makes providing housing for travelers mandatory. According to the European Roma Rights Centre, France has not been following the law. Thus, travelers, mostly Roma, end up living in unsanitary and dangerous areas. The ERRC went on to say that the dire living conditions force gypsies to "unjustified violence."
2. How many immigrants are there in France?Approximately 15,000 gypsies and Roma are currently calling France home. The ones living in squatter camps and abandoned buildings are soon to be homeless, if they aren't already.
3. Why Is France forcibly displacing gypsies?In July, Sarkozy was moved to action when a gypsy-police confrontation resulted in the death of a young gypsy in Loire Valley, spurring anonymous ax and pyro rioters to attack a police station, other buildings and vehicles. Sarkozy called a meeting and said illegal Roma immigrants are getting booted from France. He then added that the need for public order is another reason for "systematically evacuating" illegal immigrants. Sarkozy said they are the ones mainly responsible for "trafficking, prostitution and exploitation of children."
4. What's Sarkozy's plan?Sarkozy's goal is to break down 50 percent of illegal gypsy camps in the next three months. Bulgarian and Romanian gypsies must return to their countries of origin if they do anything illegal, the interior minister said. Moreover, plans are in the works to remove French nationality status from immigrants with criminal records.
5. Who opposes Sarkozy's campaign?Rights groups say, first off, that Sarkozy's wording of minority groups as the "traveling community" is racist. Last month, ERRC's letter to Sarkozy says it is "alarmed at [his] call for the systematic evacuation of illegal settlements and the involvement of tax authorities in verifying the status of occupants."
Other opponents say Sarkozy must specify minority groups, instead of mashing them together. Ethnic Roma should be differentiated from gypsies, who should be differentiated from nonimmigrant French travelers. Instead, many are grouped together under the arguably pejorative term gypsies.
"As happens too often in history, gypsies are once more being made scapegoats by a ruling class tangled up in political and financial scandals," UFAT, a gypsy rights group, said. Roma are also easy targets.
6. What options do evicted gypsies have?The only option so far is to find a legal, authorized housing area. For foreign criminal gypsies, they will be sent back to their countries of origin, which in most cases is Romania.
Source: http://www.aolnews.com/surge-desk/article/the-basics-of-french-president-sarkozys-gypsy-crackdown/19584597
MY PERSONAL VIEW
That is a fact that Gypsies traditions, values and way of life are differents from ours and, sometimes, the fear they inspire turn very difficult their coexistence with sedentary populations. Some of them became locals with houses and jobs and others are nomads, travellers. But the truth is that they are individuals, citizens like us, and they have rights and obligations like us.
Today we are living in a globalized world where cultural diversity is an essential aspect of human development. According to the "Unesco Universal Declaration on Cultural Diversity" (2001), Unesco believes that acceptance and recognition of cultural diversity are conducive to dialogue, respect and mutual understanding among civilizations and cultures in the world. Also, the "Convention on the Protection and Promotion of the Cultural Expresions" (2007) provides a solid basis of the promotion of cultural diversity which is an indispensable asset for various issues including poverty and sustainable development.
So, in the case of Gypsies expulsion, where is acceptance, recognition, respect, dialogue and mutual understanding?
Under the welcome and the tolerance of the French Republic, Nicolas Sarkosy, immigrant of the second generation himself - forgot the French Revolution acquisitions, values and principles which have made Human Rights History. And by denying automatic French citizenship to people born in France if their parents are foreign and if they have a record of juvenile deliquency, he is actually transmiting the idea that all foreigns, all immigrants, aren´t welcome in France, giving a profound discomfort to nature-born and naturalized french citizens in French society. Well, Gypsies are really a minority! Sarkosy can´t also forget how France became a powerful economical country after the First Great War!
So, he should apply the law to all criminal citizens - immigrants or not - only because they are transgressing the law, not because of their origins or skin and shoul also show the world the principles that have been proudly upheld in France for decades and decades.
Under the welcome and the tolerance of the French Republic, Nicolas Sarkosy, immigrant of the second generation himself - forgot the French Revolution acquisitions, values and principles which have made Human Rights History. And by denying automatic French citizenship to people born in France if their parents are foreign and if they have a record of juvenile deliquency, he is actually transmiting the idea that all foreigns, all immigrants, aren´t welcome in France, giving a profound discomfort to nature-born and naturalized french citizens in French society. Well, Gypsies are really a minority! Sarkosy can´t also forget how France became a powerful economical country after the First Great War!
So, he should apply the law to all criminal citizens - immigrants or not - only because they are transgressing the law, not because of their origins or skin and shoul also show the world the principles that have been proudly upheld in France for decades and decades.
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