Matthew Omolesky: The Long Road ... France and the Roma Expulsions
[Matthew Omolesky specialized in European affairs at the Whitehead School of Diplomacy's graduate program, and received his juris doctor from The Ohio State University's Moritz College of Law.]
On the morning of July 17, 2010, the residents of the French commune of Saint-Aignan awoke to the sound of rioting, though few in the picturesque Loire Valley village could have guessed the reason for all the tumult. The previous night, a Traveler and robbery suspect by the name of Luigi Duquenet had barreled through a police checkpoint in his car, injuring a gendarme in the process, and was accelerating towards a second checkpoint before he was shot and killed. Within hours, dozens of incensed fellow gens du voyage, armed with hatchets and crowbars, were rampaging through the medieval streets of Saint-Aignan, chopping down trees, setting cars alight, pillaging stores, and storming the village police station. "It was," as Mayor Jean-Michel Billon put it, "a settling of scores between the travelers and the gendarmerie." The coming weeks would provide ample evidence that the clashes had in no wise settled any scores.
By the next day three hundred soldiers were patrolling the streets of Saint-Aignan, and soon thereafter France's President Nicolas Sarkozy was vowing that the rioters would be "severely punished," and that the "the problems created by the behavior of certain Travelers and Roma" would be addressed once and for all. The ensuing measures, Sarkozy continued, would be part of the "implacable struggle the government is leading against crime" and the "veritable war" being waged against those "delinquents" threatening France's ordre publique. Pierre Lellouche, France's Minister for Europe, concurred: "we are faced with a real problem and the time has come to deal with it." It was not long before French ministers were considering corrective measures ranging from the tightening of immigration controls to the systematic evacuation and dismantling of illegal encampments, the better to deal with the "sources of illegal trafficking, of profoundly shocking living standards, of exploitation of children for begging, of prostitution and of crime."
Such rhetoric in reaction to the events in Saint-Aignan was altogether predictable, given the emphasis placed on matters of law and order by France's governing Union pour un Mouvement Populaire (with Sarkozy himself having made international headlines with his 2005 comments about the need to "hose down" lawless estates and root out criminal "scum"), but in this case it cannot be said that the French government was engaging in mere posturing for popular consumption. Some three hundred Roma camps were quickly targeted for demolition, and on August 12, Interior Minister Brice Hortefeux announced that some 850 Roma would be systematically deported to Romania and Bulgaria (albeit each with 300 euros in hand). The first repatriations followed two weeks later, with more planned for the month of September. A lawyer for the Roma leadership, Henri Braun, cautioned that the government was "preparing to open a blighted page in the history of France," but Sarkozy's administration may in fact be setting a continental precedent. On August 21, the Italian Interior Minister, Roberto Maroni, told the daily Corriere della Sera that "if anything, it's time to go a step further," calling for outright "expulsions just like those for illegal immigrants, not assisted or voluntary repatriations."
For the various itinerant communities of France -- the tsiganes, the manouches, the gitanes, the Roma, and the Sinti -- the ongoing crackdown occurring in France, and now threatened elsewhere, is only the most recent chapter in a centuries-old story of tribulation and alienation. The zhalvini gilyi, or dirges, of the Roma folk tradition invariably stress the pitfalls of a peripatetic life on the lungo drom, the "long road." "Oh Lord," bemoaned Bronisława Wajs, the mid-twentieth century Polish-Romani poet, "Where can I go? What can I do?" now that "time of the wandering Gypsies has long passed." A Transylvanian dirge laments: "God, oh God! How you have thrashed me,/Perhaps nobody more than me," before concluding "Oh, what can I do, all alone?" The dislocation and unfocused nostalgia that are part and parcel of the itinerant lifestyle, coupled with centuries of persecution, in turn led to widespread fatalism, with one Serbian Gypsy song resignedly foreseeing that "The crack of Doom/is coming soon./Let it come,/it doesn't matter."
For the Roma and other Travelers, the "crack of Doom" has indeed sounded out with some frequency over the years, as European anti-ziganism is of considerable vintage. Anti-Gypsy sentiment, long a feature of the European social landscape, was first institutionalized in early modern Central Europe, with the Holy Roman Emperor Maximilian I outlawing the community in 1500, and with Ferdinand I expelling the scapegoated Roma from Prague after an unexplained 1541 fire. By 1548 the Diet of Augsburg had declared that "whosoever kills a Gypsy, shall be guilty of no murder," and by 1710 the Holy Roman Emperor Joseph I would go a step further, demanding "that all adult [Roma] males were to be hanged without trial, whereas women and young males were to be flogged and banished forever." Thirty-nine years later the Spanish monarch Philip V was still taking aim at "this multitude of infamous and noxious people" that needed to be "contained and corrected"; round-ups occurred in Spain and France up through the Napoleonic period. The situation for the Roma, Sinti, and Lalleri was even worse in the east, and it would not be until 1856 that the outright enslavement of Gypsies was abolished in Moldavia and Wallachia.
The 20th century would bring no respite...
Read entire article at American Spectator
On the morning of July 17, 2010, the residents of the French commune of Saint-Aignan awoke to the sound of rioting, though few in the picturesque Loire Valley village could have guessed the reason for all the tumult. The previous night, a Traveler and robbery suspect by the name of Luigi Duquenet had barreled through a police checkpoint in his car, injuring a gendarme in the process, and was accelerating towards a second checkpoint before he was shot and killed. Within hours, dozens of incensed fellow gens du voyage, armed with hatchets and crowbars, were rampaging through the medieval streets of Saint-Aignan, chopping down trees, setting cars alight, pillaging stores, and storming the village police station. "It was," as Mayor Jean-Michel Billon put it, "a settling of scores between the travelers and the gendarmerie." The coming weeks would provide ample evidence that the clashes had in no wise settled any scores.
By the next day three hundred soldiers were patrolling the streets of Saint-Aignan, and soon thereafter France's President Nicolas Sarkozy was vowing that the rioters would be "severely punished," and that the "the problems created by the behavior of certain Travelers and Roma" would be addressed once and for all. The ensuing measures, Sarkozy continued, would be part of the "implacable struggle the government is leading against crime" and the "veritable war" being waged against those "delinquents" threatening France's ordre publique. Pierre Lellouche, France's Minister for Europe, concurred: "we are faced with a real problem and the time has come to deal with it." It was not long before French ministers were considering corrective measures ranging from the tightening of immigration controls to the systematic evacuation and dismantling of illegal encampments, the better to deal with the "sources of illegal trafficking, of profoundly shocking living standards, of exploitation of children for begging, of prostitution and of crime."
Such rhetoric in reaction to the events in Saint-Aignan was altogether predictable, given the emphasis placed on matters of law and order by France's governing Union pour un Mouvement Populaire (with Sarkozy himself having made international headlines with his 2005 comments about the need to "hose down" lawless estates and root out criminal "scum"), but in this case it cannot be said that the French government was engaging in mere posturing for popular consumption. Some three hundred Roma camps were quickly targeted for demolition, and on August 12, Interior Minister Brice Hortefeux announced that some 850 Roma would be systematically deported to Romania and Bulgaria (albeit each with 300 euros in hand). The first repatriations followed two weeks later, with more planned for the month of September. A lawyer for the Roma leadership, Henri Braun, cautioned that the government was "preparing to open a blighted page in the history of France," but Sarkozy's administration may in fact be setting a continental precedent. On August 21, the Italian Interior Minister, Roberto Maroni, told the daily Corriere della Sera that "if anything, it's time to go a step further," calling for outright "expulsions just like those for illegal immigrants, not assisted or voluntary repatriations."
For the various itinerant communities of France -- the tsiganes, the manouches, the gitanes, the Roma, and the Sinti -- the ongoing crackdown occurring in France, and now threatened elsewhere, is only the most recent chapter in a centuries-old story of tribulation and alienation. The zhalvini gilyi, or dirges, of the Roma folk tradition invariably stress the pitfalls of a peripatetic life on the lungo drom, the "long road." "Oh Lord," bemoaned Bronisława Wajs, the mid-twentieth century Polish-Romani poet, "Where can I go? What can I do?" now that "time of the wandering Gypsies has long passed." A Transylvanian dirge laments: "God, oh God! How you have thrashed me,/Perhaps nobody more than me," before concluding "Oh, what can I do, all alone?" The dislocation and unfocused nostalgia that are part and parcel of the itinerant lifestyle, coupled with centuries of persecution, in turn led to widespread fatalism, with one Serbian Gypsy song resignedly foreseeing that "The crack of Doom/is coming soon./Let it come,/it doesn't matter."
For the Roma and other Travelers, the "crack of Doom" has indeed sounded out with some frequency over the years, as European anti-ziganism is of considerable vintage. Anti-Gypsy sentiment, long a feature of the European social landscape, was first institutionalized in early modern Central Europe, with the Holy Roman Emperor Maximilian I outlawing the community in 1500, and with Ferdinand I expelling the scapegoated Roma from Prague after an unexplained 1541 fire. By 1548 the Diet of Augsburg had declared that "whosoever kills a Gypsy, shall be guilty of no murder," and by 1710 the Holy Roman Emperor Joseph I would go a step further, demanding "that all adult [Roma] males were to be hanged without trial, whereas women and young males were to be flogged and banished forever." Thirty-nine years later the Spanish monarch Philip V was still taking aim at "this multitude of infamous and noxious people" that needed to be "contained and corrected"; round-ups occurred in Spain and France up through the Napoleonic period. The situation for the Roma, Sinti, and Lalleri was even worse in the east, and it would not be until 1856 that the outright enslavement of Gypsies was abolished in Moldavia and Wallachia.
The 20th century would bring no respite...