France's unwanted Roma

By Henri Astier BBC News, Champs-sur-Marne, France

 

13/02/2014 - France has possibly the harshest policy in Europe towards Roma immigrants. Most live in camps that are regularly demolished by police - and then rebuilt. Every year thousands are deported, but the overall number in the country remains the same.

Before dawn on a winter's morning police came to destroy Alex's home.
"They said: 'Everybody out; we're going to smash this camp.' They gave us half an hour to collect our things," the 18-year-old recalls.

The 15 Roma families living in a wood outside Paris were no match for the 100-odd riot police deployed to evict them.

Diggers swung into action. Within an hour nothing remained of the encampment. Large holes had been dug across the site to stop anyone settling there again.

Asked how it feels to see the hut he had built razed to the ground, Alex shrugs: "Nothing. I've been through this many times."

Like most of the estimated 20,000 ethnic Roma living in France, Alex comes from Romania. And like most, he has been expelled from one squalid camp to the next for years.

Hundreds of thousands of Roma - mostly from Romania and Bulgaria - have moved to Western Europe since the 1990s. Widely perceived as scroungers and thieves, they are rarely made welcome.


But they come under a particular kind of pressure in France. Their illegal camps - such as the one Alex occupied in Champs-sur-Marne, east of Paris - are systematically destroyed by authorities.

Read more on http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/magazine-25419423