Eeva Nordstrom, "Second Zone Citizens"

During the two day session on Rrom communities, I was surprised to see that France was still treating a group of people as “outsiders”. The cultural denial of Romanipen and the legal status of Rrom immigrants and “Gens du voyage” struck me. Thus, in the first part of this post I will overview their legal status and its evolution and in the second part I will look at the difficulty Rrom children have to access education, one of the basic French constitutional rights.

In Marcel Courthiade’s article, he points out that the Rroma population has encountered hostility starting from 1600’s to 1700’s. Indeed, for various reasons such as competing traditions with the church or attempt by centralized royal power to destroy mercenaries, partly composed of Rroms, laws were passed that gave the right to kill, torture and enslave Rroms, simply due to their ethnicity.

Unsurprisingly, as the stigmatization of the Rroma people grew, in 1912, France passed a law that obliged “nomads” to have a “carnet anthropologique” which would help French security forces to locate them. During the Second World War, these “carnets” were used to find Rroms and send them into concentration/work camps.

After the Nazi horror, the French government took time to release Rroma people. As we have seen in the documentary “Des Français sans Histoire”; some camps were released only a year or two after the end of the war. The reason given, was the fear that the reintegration of Rroma people would be more difficult as they might have great hostility towards the French government. Moreover, as they had different traditions and customs and did not follow the mainstream of society, the French government feared an anarchist upheaval.

In 1969 a law was passed that tried to balance the 1912 law by attempting to avoid ethnic categorization of the community using terms such as “people with no permanent residence”. The 1972 law followed this trend by instituting the “gens du voyage” term. Also the “carnet anthropoligique” is replaced by a “livret de circulation” still in place today though some changes have been brought to it.

I find it particularly interesting that France as a jocobinist country as Sahra Carmona pointed out, still distinguishes its citizens and simply considers that using neutral and general terms will be sufficient to overcome the contradiction. We talked earlier in the program about the theoretical “colour blindness” in France. The way France treats its citizens who simply have different values pushes me to think of a “culture blindness”, the consequence of which is the stigmatization and segregation of gens du voyage and the new immigration wave of Rroms from Eastern countries.

In 2012 the French Constitutional Council repealed some of the measures of 1969 law such as one of the identity documents the gens du voyage had to carry with them, with the obligation of having it stamped every three months and the obligation to be assigned to a municipality for three years to be able to vote. Nevertheless, the “livret de circulation” that has to be stamped every year is still in place and represents institutionalized discrimination.

Finally, in 2000 the Besson law was passed and made compulsory the creation of “aires d’accueil” in municipalities with more than 5000 inhabitants. Several problems can be pointed out when mentioning these “welcoming areas”. Firstly they are institutionalized as welcoming “gens du voyage” in a more general and loose term, but in reality they welcome Rroma people, not Rroms from Eastern Europe and not any citizen who is traveling. Secondly, as Ghislaine Durand pointed out, these plots of land are involved in political financing and it appeared from her speech that she strongly believed in the fact that they perpetuated segregation. Finally, the main issue is that Xavier Pousset, on the other hand, seemed to strongly support the building of welcoming areas, as they are a positive response to the needs of gens du voyage, providing minimum necessities such as water and electricity. Thus, this shows the strong division between people fighting for the same cause.

Although these welcoming areas are a response to some of the problems, their overall effect is very weak, as their location is outside city and hard to access (HIA had to rent Minibuses as there was no way to access these areas by public transport). Thus, issues arise as to basic rights such as education.

The presentation given by Sahra Thomas gave us the possibility to understand some of the difficulties faced by Rroma people in relation to putting their children to school. Indeed, she worked as a teacher for an all-Rroma children class in Saint-Fons with children aged 6 to 12 years old. These conditions are far from acceptable and show the lack of willingness from authorities to integrate Rroma people into French society. How can one possibly expect a child to learn French when he is not even given the possibility to speak in a French teaching environment. From personal experience, I learned French at the age of 9, not because my teacher would spend hours teaching me words but because of the interaction I had with other kids.

The location of the welcoming areas is not aiding the accessibility Rroma children to schools. The Rroma from Eastern Europe face several additional issues such as precatory living conditions, transitory measures in European Union such as limited access to certain jobs, the possibility to stay for only 3 months without employment and finally the discrimination of Rroma from Eastern Europe by other Rroma people. This makes their access to some basic rights such as education of their children and habitation even more difficult. Moreover, they still face a very harsh expulsion policy from the government.

Eeva