GRIGNY, France, 12/07/2014 - 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 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 that it is encouraging harassment of Europe’s poorest minority group in hopes that 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.
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.
Read more on http://www.washingtonpost.com/world/europe/comatose-boy-roma-evictions-up-pressure-on-france/2014/07/12/31e67b0e-09b0-11e4-85e4-3143dddacfe9_story.html
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