Medecins du Monde (Doctors of the World) highlighted this fact and complained to the authorities about this but to no avail.
A feeling of deja vu overcomes me every time when big sports events are taking place for, each and every time now, Gypsies are going to be the victims, it would seem as their shantytowns, settlements and encampments seem to need to be sanitized away to make the areas acceptable to the visitors and competing teams. It seems that so far it has occurred at every Olympic Games in the last couple of decades and also other such events and now this is happening at the Rugby World Cup in France.
In the area of Saint-Dennis, north of Paris, some 400 Romani persons were evicted and removed from encampments there and some 80 others from a camp is Venissieux, near the city of Lyon.
In London with view to the 2012 Olympic Games the same is happening and a large number of Romanichals and Travellers are loosing their plots that they have occupied for decades and do not adequate new facilities. Those that have had their own places in the London area of the Olympic Park, such as businesses and residents, as in the case of Gypsy-owned transport companies, scrap metal yards, and the like, they have been told that the plots of land to compensate them are well out of London, around Barking and such in Essex.
It would appear that, as previously stated, our People will be the victims and targets now on every occasion of any such sporting event (and other events, no doubt, such as large trade fairs, etc.).
And where are the outcries of the great Gypsy “leaders”, such as the self-proclaimed government of the Romani in Europe, the ERTF? Their silence, yet again, speaks volumes. When will the People realize that none of them will ever work on their behalf and will only take the money that is intended to do things for them and put it into their pockets?
Awake, Romanies, Awake!
© M V Smith, September 7, 2007
