Special Investigation: As France expels its gipsies, is this a chilling echo of the Nazis... or just a desperate attempt to tackle crime?



Dawn breaks over the outskirts of Paris, its arrival marked by the banging of fists on the locked door of a caravan.



The noise wakes 30-year-old Dana from her sleep, and when she pulls back the curtains to see what is causing the commotion, she finds a dozen uniformed

riot police, batons in hand.



‘Get up,’ one yells at her.



‘You’ve got half an hour to leave.’



Thrown out: A Roma girl sits with her family's luggage on a street in Bucharest after they were deported from France

By now her two children — girls aged three and seven — are crying, so her husband goes outside to ask what is going on. He is pushed to the ground. Clearly, there is to be no discussion.



So the young family does as they are ordered, packs what they can into plastic bags and quickly joins a growing line of men, women and children standing, heads bowed, beside the road.



They are all Roma gipsies and must now make a ‘choice’ — sleep rough or be deported back to their native Romania.



Across France this month, similar scenes have been unfolding on an almost daily basis as police execute the orders of Nicolas Sarkozy, the French President.



He has pledged to destroy 300 gipsy camps nationwide by the end of the year, deporting thousands.



Sarkozy makes no bones about this no-nonsense approach. He claims that the Roma, many of whom arrived in France after Romania and Bulgaria joined the EU in 2007, are responsible for an outbreak of crime.



His solution? Raze their camps, round up their inhabitants and then stick them on a plane home. As a sweetener, there’s a payment of £245 per adult and £80 per child.



Sad times: A gipsy child waits for his parents shortly after arriving from Lyon at the Baneasa international airport, Bucharest

As a policy it could hardly be more simple. But, as Sarkozy must have known, the route he has embarked upon is one fraught with controversy.



And as it is revealed that immigration swelled the UK population by 196,000 during Labour’s last year in power, it is a problem we, too, may one day face.



Images of Roma families being bused to airports have provoked condemnation

not just in France but across Europe. Sarkozy has been accused of ethnic cleansing and of fanning racism.



Indeed, Jean-Pierre Grand, a deputy in Sarkozy’s Union for a Popular Movement (UMP), compared the President’s policy to Vichy France’s round-up of Jews during World War II.



Collaborating with the Nazis during the occupation, the French authorities deported 76,000 Jews — and thousands of gipsies. Many were killed in Nazi concentration camps.



Even the Pope has added his voice to the chorus of criticism — pointedly telling French pilgrims to accept ‘legitimate human diversity’ and asking parents to ‘educate your children about universal brotherhood’.



Others point out the futility of what Sarkozy is doing. Because those deported are EU citizens, they have a right to return to France should they choose.



Back home: A Romanian gypsy exits the airport building carrying their luggage shortly after arriving in Bucharest

A budget-airline ticket from Bucharest to Paris costs just £60 — and, as the Daily Mail has learned, many of those sent home have vowed to use the money given to them by the French government to fund their journey back.



But Sarkozy is not for turning. He made his reputation as a hardline politician and now in the top job is desperate to bolster his standing among the electorate.



With two years to go before the next election, his ratings have slumped. Getting tough on law and order and immigration plays well with the Right.



And anyway, ask his supporters, what exactly is so wrong with what he is doing? After all, they point out, the immigrants he is sending home live in squalor and cannot support themselves.



Forget the legal niceties and liberal sensitivities, that is the reality on the ground.



‘As usual, Sarkozyism is out of step with the elites,’ claims the President’s forthright Interior Minister, Brice Hortefeux, ‘but in step with society.’



It was on the morning of August 16 that the squalid camp inhabited by Dana and her family was, in the words of Mr Sarkozy, ‘evacuated’ by police.



'Police faced a riot after a young gipsy was shot dead.'

Situated in the southern Paris suburb of Choisy-le-Roi, it was typical of hundreds across France. It was on wasteland on the outskirts of the city, had no electricity, and the only water available was that taken from the nearby canal.



Seventy people lived there, their homes a collection of ramshackle caravans. The vast majority had arrived following the accession of Romania to the EU.



And they were not alone. It is estimated that in the three years since then 20,000 Roma have set up home in France.



Like the French residents of Choisy-le-Roi, few among the new arrivals have been able to find work — even on the black market.



Instead, they scrape a living by busking or begging, their bedraggled children taken along to further pluck at the heart strings of passers-by.



Of course, France — like the rest of Europe — is no stranger to mass immigration. In the past decade, the numbers seeking asylum there have outstripped even Britain.



But the action taken against the Roma represents a step-change in what has gone before.



Whereas immigration was previously viewed and managed as a largely logistical problem (30,000 immigrants without permission to stay in France were deported last year), it is now being portrayed as the cause of France’s social ills, particularly

crime.



Shameful: A gipsy child cries in its mother's arms - Sarkozy's policy has been described as 'shameful' by former prime minister Dominique de Villepin

As figures show Roma crime has risen 140 per cent in Paris each year since 2007, Sarkozy labelled the camps as ‘sources of illegal trafficking, of profoundly

shocking living standards, of exploitation of children for begging, of prostitution and crime’.

The trigger for that rhetoric was a mass attack in July on a police station in the normally idyllic Loire Valley town of Saint-Aignan, 150 miles south of Paris.



A 400-strong mob of Roma armed with iron bars and baseball bats set fire to cars and threatened officers.



The riot had been sparked by the fatal shooting by a gendarme of a 22-year-old gipsy who was being investigated for burglary.



Following the disturbance, Sarkozy immediately called an emergency cabinet meeting and then ordered the ‘systematic evacuation’ of all the illegal camps and squats.



' Even if Sarko has done something wrong it will take ages before the EU takes any action — and by then the Roma will have gone, so why worry?’

Those removed from the camps were to be offered money to go home. In practice, those who refused that offer would be deported anyway. (When Romania and Bulgaria joined the EU, it was agreed that their citizens would face special restrictions in France, allowing their deportation after three months if they did not have a job or means of supporting themselves.)



And so it was that earlier this month the process of closing the camps and dispersing their occupants began.



But unlike previous deportations of Roma — 8,000 are said to have left France already this year — this time it was clear they were to be targeted, aggressively, en masse.



Condemnation swiftly followed.



Critics argue that as his popularity wanes so Sarkozy needs to shore up the support of Far Right voters, the natural supporters of Jean-Marie Le Pen’s National Front party,

whose backing in the last hustings was crucial to his election.



‘This is a shameful policy,’ Dominique de Villepin, the former French prime minister, said.

‘It’s an electoral strategy. This will contribute nothing to the security of French people.’



Arnaud Montebourg, of France’s Socialist opposition, accused the State of instigating ‘a kind of official racism that says, “These people are the cause of all our woes, please have a go at them and forget our own failure in the fight against crime.” ’



That the 55-year-old conservative president needs to bolster his position is in no doubt.



His approval ratings hover just above 30 per cent and, like many European governments, cash-strapped France is trying to push through unpopular

cost-cutting measures — among them, lifting the retirement age from 60 to 62.



Amid all the discontent, a poll published this week suggested that more than half of the French want to see the Left win the 2012 presidential race.



And so Sarkozy has turned his attention to law and order. As well as the deportation of the Roma, he is also proposing legislation that will strip French citizenship from ‘people of foreign origin’ if they threaten the lives of police, commit polygamy or carry out female circumcision.



According to a poll, more than 80 per cent support that proposal.



Euro support: Italy's interior minister Roberto Maroni has backed the French deportations

Support for the expulsion of the Roma has been put, variously, at between 40 and 79 per cent.



In other words, Sarkozy’s actions are not playing badly with the French public. Polling further suggests that they are unconcerned about whether the mass deportations might infringe European law.



As one commentator pointed out: ‘Even if Sarko has done something wrong it will take ages before the EU takes any action — and by then the Roma will have gone, so why

worry?’.



In Italy, which has 60,000 non-Italian Roma, the government declared a ‘gipsy emergency’ in 2008, leading to expulsions as part of a security package.



Elements of the package were subsequently found to be incompatible with EU law, but by then it was largely irrelevant as the expulsions had taken place.



Italy’s interior minister, Roberto Maroni, has backed the French deportations, adding that he believes a host nation should be able to expel any EU citizen who does not meet minimum requirements.



Strong: Supporters of Nicholas Sarkozy believe the measures send a strong message back to Romania and Bulgaria

Supporters of Sarkozy also believe the measures send a message back to Romania and Bulgaria that may deter others from making the journey.



But they also want to know what on earth has happened to all the EU money that has been pumped into Romania — £3.5 billion a year — to improve the lot of the Roma

community there.



The evidence on the ground suggests that little has improved — and that, as quickly as the Roma are sent back, they will return.



It is a point emphasised by the experience of the Cojocaru family.



They were kicked out of France last week. Yesterday, the Mail tracked them down to the town of Roman, in eastern Romania, where they have been staying with friends since they were deported.



They revealed that despite being handed a total of £740 by the French government in exchange for leaving, they intend to return at the first possible opportunity.



Mother- of - three Argent ina Cojocaru, 35, explained: 'We left Romania a year ago for a better life. We could not afford to live here. It is so poor. We could not survive.



'In Romania we never had any opportunities to work, but we thought in France we would at least have a chance of a better life.'



Life in France, however, is little better. Unable to find work, they ended up begging on the streets of St Etienne. Home was a hut in a camp occupied by other Roma. But despite the hardships, they say it was an improvement on their previous lives.



'Even though we had no jobs in France, we were in a better situation than others back in Romania,' said husband Valentin, 40.



'When we were made to leave, we were forced to say that we would not return. But we will wait until the situation dies down - and then we will return.'



It is a view shared by Dana. After being thrown out of the camp in Choisy-le-Roi, she and 50 others were offered shelter by the local council in a school gymnasium. There they sleep on mattresses on the floor, eating provisions provided by local residents.



But their time is running out. When the school term begins in ten days' time, they will have to find somewhere else to live or agree to deportation.



Dana is desperate to stay. 'I studied a bit of French at school and always wanted to come here,' she says.



'There's nothing for any of us back home apart from poverty. Anybody who wants to make something of their lives has to move abroad. All we want is to earn money to eat, no more. But now we are being treated like animals - nothing less. It is pure racism.'



'There's nothing for us in Romania except poverty.'

She adds: 'We are all European citizens. We have our rights, but Sarkozy is ignoring them. He is a tyrant. He is so cruel.'



Those words will not bother Sarkozy nor halt the policy of camp clearances and deportations.



On Thursday, a further 283 Roma were bused to airports in Paris and Lyon and then placed on flights back to Romania.



As they touched down in Bucharest, the deportees made it clear that while the French might want to push them out, the pull of economics will be hard to resist.



Alin, 24, boasted that he had spent his three months in Bordeaux begging.



'Life was much better there - we made €40 a day and that was more than we make in Romania in a month,' he said.



Another woman, Maria, said she, too, had supported her children by begging and that she had only left France because she had been given no other choice.



Her youngest daughter, aged ten, added: 'France is my home, but it is a long way away now.



'But my mum says we will go back and that when we go we can get the train.'



Just what welcome she will receive at Paris's Gare de l'Est, only the coming weeks and months will tell.

