Nicolas Sarkozy evokes memories of Gestapo by rounding up Roma for expulsion
TWO boys stood in a gymnasium in an eastern Paris suburb yesterday and pondered their future. "I want to be a mechanic and a footballer," said Benjamin, 14.
"First, I’d like to go to school," he added.
His companion, who has also never been to school, wanted to be a journalist.
The boys’ immediate future is fairly certain. The French police will pack them off to Eastern Europe, along with other foreign Roma whom President Sarkozy plans to expel in a clampdown on illegal immigration and crime.
Mr Sarkozy’s offensive against France’s 15,000-strong population of Romanian and Bulgarian "Roms" is popular, according to polls. However, it is so harsh that some MPs in his centre-right camp have rebelled, with one calling it a return to the Nazi round-up of Gypsies and Jews.
Last week a United Nations antiracism panel in Geneva deplored the anti-Roma campaign and talked of "a significant resurgence of racism" in France. Daniel Cohn-Bendit, a senior Green Party figure and famed former student revolutionary, accused Mr Sarkozy of "taking the French for fools" with his current campaign that links immigrants and crime.
The operation against the Roma is part of a clampdown that began last month after ethnic riots in Grenoble and an attack by 400 Gypsies on a police station 240km south of Paris. In the face of a left-wing outcry Brice Hortefeux, the Interior Minister and chief enforcer for the President, is standing firm. He has given up his holiday to lead police in a drive to dismantle 300 illegal Roma camps. By last weekend they had demolished 40 and ordered 700 adults and their children to leave France.
