UAF supporters will be demonstrating outside the French embassy on Saturday 4 September against the brutal expulsion of hundreds of Roma people by the French government.
Demonstrate
Assemble 1pm, Saturday 4 September
French Embassy, 58 Knightsbridge, London (Knightsbridge tube)
The demonstration is part of coordinated protests across Europe, organised by the European Network Against Racism.
Roma people across Europe are being made scapegoats for the problems of the economic crisis. In August, the French government began deporting Roma people, including babies and children.
Scores of Roma camps have been broken up by police, and President Sarkozy has vowed that there will be 300 dismantled within three months.
‘Round-ups’
In France, many antiracists have attacked this brutal policy, rightly describing the treatment of Roma and other Travellers as disgraceful. One MP from Sarkozy’s own party used the term “rafles” – the French word for “roundups” – to bring home what the policy means. The word is associated with the Second World War roundup of Jews by French police on behalf of the occupying Nazis.
The new attacks on the Roma carry a frightening echo of the Holocaust, when around half a million Roma people were murdered by the Nazis alongside six million Jewish victims.
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