The Roma and the march of the ugly Right: A deeply troubling dispatch from Paris and Berlin that EVERY British politician must read

Rostas family live in abandoned cars around Paris

'We have nowhere else to go' says 58-year-old Toma

National Front 'riding high in the polls'

No one could envy the Rostas family. They live in three broken-down cars with flat tyres on a patch of mud beside a disused factory hidden away on the outskirts of Paris.



Every night at eight o’clock the French police turn up, check the names of the 11 members of the family and then tell them to leave France. ‘Go back to Romania,’ say the officers. ‘You are not welcome here.’



Now, the Rostas have their final marching orders. The police have given them a deadline to pack their few miserable belongings, including the battered pushchairs of the two children, a girl called Diana, five, and a ten-month-old boy, Armando.



This weekend, the cars they live in — a Renault, Citroen and Suzuki — will have been towed away by the Paris authorities and the Rostas will be homeless.



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Evicted: Roma familes are being evicted from illegal campsites around Paris. The Rostas family (pictured left to right, sitting on roof, 25-year-old Victor with his niece, middle row Alin, 22, his wife Cirasela, 16, Bobby, 22, Eugen, 29, Toma, 58 and Maria, 52. Sitting on chair, Angele, 25, and five-year-old child) live in abandoned cars

‘We are frightened because we will have nowhere else to go. We came here to feed our children, to get a better life,’ says the head of the family, 58-year-old Toma, in a frayed check shirt.



‘In Romania, we are squashed together in a house with two rooms, no water, no heating, no toilet and no work. Now we are not wanted in France.’



Toma could not have spoken a truer word. He is one of 20,000 Eastern European gipsies or Roma (the vast majority from Romania and Bulgaria and half living in Paris) who have descended on France over the past three years, only to be met by a wave of hostility.



Even the Left-wing President, Francois Hollande, has remained tight-lipped as scores of illegal Roma squatter camps in Paris are pulled down by police, who then send the inhabitants fleeing or put them on paid-for flights and bus-rides back home.



Recent opinion polls show that 83 per cent of the French — whatever their political outlook — approve of the mass destruction of the gipsy camps. And 70 per cent are so worried about the Roma influx that they put it higher on their list of worries than the fragile economy and housing problems.

Squalor: The Romas are living in tents like this one pictured on the Peripherique Road. Scores of illegal squatter camps have been pulled down by police

A firecracker has been hurled into this powder keg by French Interior Minister Manuel Valls, an immigrant from Catalonia in Spain. Valls said the forced evacuation of Roma from squatter camps was vital — and polls showed three-quarters of the French supported him.



The gipsies, he pronounced, deserved to be thrown out of France because they failed to integrate, bringing crime and mafia-style gangs with them.



A few days after Vall’s pronouncement last month, five Eastern Europeans were captured in a £1 million jewellery raid on a watchmaker’s store in the French capital. Police believe a Roma gipsy gang was behind the robbery, stoking more hostility against the newcomers.

The crackdown even led to the arrest of a Roma schoolgirl as an illegal immigrant while she was on a school trip and the removal of her family back to Kosovo — sparking student protests yesterday as teenagers erected barricades on streets outside their school and marched through Paris.



The students considered the treatment of the girl a step too far, saying it betrayed France’s image as a champion of human rights.



Many suspect that Vall’s hardline stance has a cynical edge to it and is designed to divert votes from France’s Right-wing parties in municipal and EU elections next year.



Polls: Roma women pictured outside Paris Gare Du Nord railway station. Recent opinion polls show that 83 per cent of the French - whatever their political outlook - approve of the mass destruction of the gipsy camps

A Roma child is seen at a window of a caravan at an encampment of Roma families in Triel-sur-Seine, near Paris

The National Front, campaigning on anti-EU and anti-immigration policies, is riding high in the polls.



Last weekend, it won a local county council seat in the South of France, with a former boxer securing 53.9 per cent of the vote. It came as a seismic shock to the country’s mainstream parties on the Left and Right.



Yet Minister Vall’s ambition of ridding France of Roma immigrants is, surely, a pipe-dream. Indeed, bowing to what many suspect is the inevitable, the Prime Minister of France this week caused outrage among his Cabinet colleagues by backing a plan by Left-leaning Parisian officials to set up a gipsy camp in one of the most affluent districts of the capital.



A traditional socialist, Premier Jean-Marc Ayrault said he could see no obstacle to the idea. It could lead to thousands of Roma living around a very chic area of the 16th arrondissement, which includes the Bois de Boulogne, and has caused outrage among residents there.



As things stand, the people of Romania and Bulgaria can spend up to 90 days at a stretch in other EU countries without needing visas.



But from January, when EU controls on their borders controversially come tumbling down, they will be allowed ‘free movement’ across Europe.



The authorities in Britain are already struggling with the numbers who have arrived and are making futile attempts to persuade them to return home.



Cramped: Rostas family members, Victor, 25, with wife Angele, 25, with their daughter in the abandoned car they sleep and live in. This weekend, the cars the family live in will be towed away

A girl leans on a school back pack outside a caravan at an encampment of Roma families in Triel-sur-Seine, near Paris

'We came here to feed out children': Three children play in front of their caravans at an encampment of Roma families in Triel-sur-Seine, near Paris

A group of 60 East European gipsies who set up camp in Hyde Park this summer were given temporary housing, food and shelter.



Twenty received state-funded flight tickets back to Romania. But many of the 20 are back and sleeping rough again in the capital while begging on the streets.



Nickie Aiken, Westminster council’s cabinet member for community protection, called it an ‘expensive farce’.



‘What we are witnessing is a carousel for career beggars who go home for a short holiday and then return at the UK taxpayers’ expense,’ he says.

The Europe-wide police force, Europol, says begging by new arrivals is the tip of a very large iceberg.



A hard core of thieves, credit-card fraudsters and pickpockets from the two former Communist countries buy cheap tickets on no-frills flights to commute in and out of Western Europe on a daily basis.



‘They come on low-cost airlines, do a few hits in one city and get back to Eastern Europe in time for tea. It’s very difficult for local police to respond,’ says Europol’s chief, Rob Wainwright.



The arrival of Roma migrants is causing deep social and economic tensions across western Europe, which can only worsen when the EU allows migration by Romanians and Bulgarians on January 1.



'Better life': Victor Rosta, 25, and daughter, looking for scrap metal and other ways to make money. Roma families came to France for a fresh start but say 'we are not wanted'

Caravans at an encampment of Roma families in Triel-sur-Seine, near Paris. At this encampment, one of the approximately 400 such camps spread throughout France, people say they want to work in France and become integrated because they have no prospects in Romania

Influx: Caravans in Triel-sur-Seine, near Paris. 70 per cent of French people are so worried about the Roma influx that they put it higher on their list of worries than the fragile economy and housing problems

New figures show 600,000 non- working EU migrants have settled in Britain, costing the NHS £1.5 billion a year and putting a tremendous drain on the benefits system.



At the moment, however, it is the movement of Roma gipsies that is coming under particular scrutiny, and not just in France and Britain.



In Germany, too, I found rising numbers of Roma arrivals provoking anger — as well as a backlash against the gipsies.



We found Monica outside a supermarket by the Berlin canal in the early evening. The 30-year-old gipsy was begging for a few euros from after-work shoppers before going home for the night to her apartment, four children and husband, in the city’s immigrant quarter of Neukolln.



She came from the Romanian town of Craiova early this summer, joining 25,000 other Eastern European gipsies who have settled in Berlin in the past three years.



Already, the city’s state schools overflow with new pupils, most of whom don’t speak German and are illiterate in their own language.



The tall Victorian houses of Neukolln are crammed full of Roma families in squalid flats, with live electric wires poking out of the walls and washing hanging from the windows.



Caravans: A Romanian woman sweeps the area in front of her caravan. Police send inhabitants of illegal camps fleeing or put them on flights or buses home

Outskirts: A member of the Roma community poses at a camp in Ivry-sur-Seine, in the suburbs of Paris

'Deserve to be thrown out of France': The French interior minister Manuel Valls said forced evacuation of Roma from camps was 'vital'

Nearly two-thirds of Roma households don’t have a toilet and many are reduced to using a hole in the ground in the garden.

A third don’t have a fridge and a quarter are without a heating stove, so resort in winter to wood fires in their front rooms.



To raise the money to pay the rents, the Roma send their womenfolk out begging and their young men scrounging for scrap metal. Police say that many of the children take to pick-pocketing.



Young Roma girls have been found working as prostitutes in the sleazy strip bars and streets of Berlin’s redlight district.



And every week more gipsies come to try their luck. On Harzer Street, a main avenue in Neukolln, there are 500 people from just one Romanian village, Fantanele.



The huge scale of this mass migration, said a leaked report from Germany’s interior ministry earlier this year, posed a risk to social peace by stoking anti-gipsy sentiment among Berliners.



Gita Anisuara, 36, a Roma woman, breaks metal to extract copper in front of caravans at an encampment of Roma families in Triel-sur-Seine, near Paris

Gipsy camp: A member of the Roma community eats at a camp on in Ivry-sur-Seine, in the suburbs of Paris.

Scrap metal at a camp in Ivry-sur-Seine, in the suburbs of Paris. 20,000 Eastern European gipsies or Roma have descended on France over the past three years, only to be met by a wave of hostility

The crisis has not been helped by a controversial book written by the outspoken Mayor of Neukolln, Heinz Buschkowsky, about the culture clash.



He wrote of the ‘daily powerlessness of living in a world where someone walks into a supermarket, picks products from the shelves, goes past the cash desk without paying and makes clear to the cashier what he or she would risk by calling the police.



‘Where a gang of five youths can walk down the pavement and everyone else has to get out of the way, and where Coca-Cola is poured on the head of a bus driver if he wants to see a ticket.’



The book, Neukolln Is Everywhere, has become a bestseller amid the inevitable accusations that the mayor is a racist.



Germany, of course, has an appalling history when it comes to the Roma. Before and during World War II, Hitler tried to wipe them out.



Catalin Feraru pictured with his family in the apartment block where he and dozens of other Ronamy families are living. Pictured with him are his wife Crenguta, youngest son Alex (five), oldest son Derek (11), and middle son Elisei, in red (nine)

A Roma earning a living washing car windscreens at traffic lights on Karl Marx Allee in central Berlin

30 year old Monica Marin Ramon begs for money outside a supermarket in the Neuklln district of Berlin

One chilling protocol, approved by Propaganda Minister Joseph Goebbels in 1942, declared: ‘Gipsies are to be exterminated. The idea of extermination by work is best.’

This horrific diktat is printed on a wall at the entrance to a monument opened last year by Chancellor Angela Merkel at Berlin’s Parliament building, the Reichstag, in memory of the 500,000 Roma massacred in gas chambers and work camps during the Holocaust.



Merkel’s gesture to the Roma comes at a time when 41 per cent of the German population admit they would ‘have a problem’ with gipsies in their area.



A quarter say they should be ‘banished’ from the inner city areas such as Neukolln, and 68 per cent say they would not want a gipsy family living next door.



The massive exodus from Romania to Germany has been staggering, particularly from Fantanele.

A third of the villagers have moved to Berlin, and the children left back in Fantanele have so many relatives in the capital that they greet each other in German even though they have never stepped foot outside their home country.



Argentinia and Amar Mirzescu (left) are pictured with friends Monica Marin Ramon and five year old Alex Feraru and his father Catalin

One of the large apartment blocks in the Neuklln district of Berlin, housing large populations of Roma from Romania and Bulgaria who are often at the mercy of slum landlords

Unable to stop this influx, in desperation Berlin has introduced an ‘integration plan’.



Of the 65 schools in Neukolln, nearly half have ‘welcome classes’ for Roma gipsy children where German is taught before they enter the main schools.



Every month a new welcome class opens because of the demand. Roma women are given language lessons and the men are allowed to register as self-employed so they can work as cleaners or metal workers while qualifying for housing and child benefits.



‘We had an emergency situation and had to act quickly,’ says Dilek Kolat, a Berlin senator. ‘There were Roma people sleeping rough in the parks and annoying local residents who felt threatened. We saw people in rags begging for money on the streets and at traffic lights.’

The integration of the Roma has been underpinned by a report published by the Neukolln authorities, which states clearly: ‘The German state bears a special responsibility to support those who have arrived in our midst and to enable their successful participation in society.’



A Romanian prostitute works the streets of Berlin in the Kurfurstendamm area of the city

Prostitutes, many of them Roma, works the streets of Berlin in the Kurfurstendamm area of the city

A Romanian prostitute is pictured talking to Sue Reid (right) through a translator (centre)

It adds, tellingly: ‘Immigration can only be partially controlled in a borderless Europe and that is a fact.’



Back in France, they would agree with that wholeheartedly. The French Foreign Minister Laurent Fabius has just called for emergency restrictions to stop Romanians and Bulgarians travelling around Europe freely when the borders open next year.



Whether he gets his way or not, you have only to look at the plight of the Rostas family — and thousands of other Roma gipsies living rough in Paris — to realise that a potential human tragedy is unfolding across Europe.



The Rostas scrape together a few euros each week by sending out Toma’s two sons — Alin, 22, and Victor, 25 — to forage in rubbish bins. They come home with bits and pieces to eat or sell and clothes for their own backs carried in prams attached to old bicycles.



Another Roma prostitute speaks to a man through his car window in Berlin

The family live in the suburb of Montreuil, four miles from the centre of Paris and just outside the city’s ring road.



It is a multi-cultural place: there is a famous flea market and the streets are full of African migrants from the former French colonies who arrived as cheap-to-pay workers in the capital half a century ago.



It is the sort of area in which you would think the Rostas might feel at home.



Yet even the settled migrants have spat at the Rostas in the streets. I watched in horror as one African drove by fast in his car, swerving to try to knock Victor and Alin off their bicycles and into the gutter.



‘Everyone hates us gipsy people here in Paris, just like they hate us in the rest of Europe,’ said Victor to me sadly afterwards.



His words do not breed hope for peace and harmony when our borders are thrown open to all- comers from Romania and Bulgaria in less than three months’ time.







