GRIGNY, France – It looked like any shantytown the world over – tarps to keep out the weather, scattered bits of trash that no truck would ever collect, plastic buckets to lug water. Then one of the inhabitants of this Roma camp on the northwest edge of Paris, a teenage boy named Darius, was beaten into a coma, apparently by residents of a neighboring housing project.
Within hours, the Roma – or gypsies – vanished, seeking sanctuary in a new location on the fringes of one of the world’s wealthiest cities. Three weeks later, 16-year-old Darius remains unconscious. His family is in hiding. Police have made no arrests.
France is coming under increasing pressure to answer allegations it is encouraging harassment of Europe’s poorest minority group in hopes the Roma, also known as Gypsies, will leave the country.
About 20,000 are living in France, a number that appears to have changed little despite a decade spent bulldozing the squats that spring up, season after season, on unclaimed land. In 2013, the number of people evicted equaled the number still here, according to government figures. With job prospects and discrimination even worse back in their homelands in Eastern Europe, Roma migrants keep coming back.
French government policy on the Roma seems to be in crisis. The official in charge of Roma resettlement lost his job last week. The government will not say why, nor whether he will be replaced.
Police say the Roma give contradictory accounts of attacks against them. Roma say they are scared of retribution and distrustful of authorities in a country whose image as a beacon for the downtrodden is sullied by its long record of abuse of the minority. France’s Roma policies are under criticism by Europe’s top human-rights court as well as Amnesty International and other organizations.
Despite European Union borders that opened to the Roma this year, life is about to get even more difficult for them in France: The government is launching its annual operation to destroy Roma shantytowns, scheduled with the argument that homeless children suffer less during summer vacation.
“Out of a country of 67 million, we’re talking about 15-20,000 people. It’s not an invasion,” said Loic Gandais, president of an association in an outlying area of the Paris region called Essonne, the home territory of France’s combative prime minister, Manuel Valls. Valls, as France’s top security official last year, publicly linked the Roma with crime and disorder, feeding on stereotypes widespread throughout Europe.
With high rates of illiteracy and unemployment as well as little access to the European Union’s promised labor market, the Roma catch blame for the kind of petty crimes – pickpocketing, scrap-metal theft, burglary – that are highly visible in the daily life of the better-heeled. Last week, a group of Romanian Roma was convicted of forcing children as young as 9 to steal cellphones and wallets. It was the sort of trial that for some confirms deeply held prejudices against a group that – as Valls once put it – “does not wish to integrate.”
