EVERY tourist is likely to go through this mini-adventure sooner or later in Paris. An oddly dressed young woman suddenly stoops down on the sidewalk then straightens up, holding a shiny object between her thumb and index finger.
“This belongs to you?”
Reactions vary. Some smell a rat and distance themselves from the spot. Others threaten to call the police, but in this case two men appear from nowhere and take the woman out of harm’s way.
But in most cases the tourist succumbs to the temptation and admits to be the owner of the found object. The woman then explains through gestures that she hasn’t eaten for two days and would be much grateful for, say, twenty euros.
Not too high a price for a gold ring!
The lady, once paid, quickly disappears from the scene before the tourist realises that the ring is a fake.
Gypsies from Romania and other Eastern European countries abound in major French cities. The young ones pick pockets in metros and buses but cannot be arrested, being minors. Older men lie on mattresses on sidewalks of hitherto chic avenues and beg. They invariably have a dog sitting next to them.
When it rains they wrap up their beddings and take shelter in telephone booths. The police cannot intervene. They are protected by human rights organisations.
You are not supposed to object to their presence or even call them gypsies. A politically correct appellation has been invented to identify them: les Gens du Voyage, or the Travelling Folks.
According to unconfirmed estimates, nearly half a million ‘Travelling Folks’ continually move from one camping ground to another in trucks and mobile-homes. They reject offers for jobs that would oblige them to stay at a fixed address for a long time.
A few years back the ‘Travelling Folks’ were much in the news when a group of them entered a restaurant near the city of Sancerre and had dinner with wine. When asked to pay the bill, they just smashed all the dishes on the floor and left.
The latest incident took place three weeks ago, on Tuesday Aug 25, at Roye in the Somme region north of Paris. A fellow belonging to a ‘Travelling Folks’ family pulled out his gun and shot dead an old man, his daughter, her six-month-old baby, then a policeman who tried to stop him. Other policemen were injured but they arrested the killer.
A number of human rights associations are of the view the police should not have meddled in an internal affair of the ‘Travelling Folks’.
Nevertheless the tragedy took an uglier turn after the arrest of a member of the community. The following weekend, Aug 29-30, was a critical period as this was the end of the summer vacation and many families were returning home by the A1 superhighway, one of the busiest roads in France with an average of seventy thousand vehicles passing through it every day.
The ‘Travelling Folks’ picked up dozens of plastic garbage containers from the area, dropped them at the superhighway entrance, added heaps of car tyres that they had stolen from a garage and set the lot afire. In addition, many trees were sawed and their trunks and branches were thrown into the flames.
TV news showed returning families and children standing by their cars in the middle of the night, helplessly looking at the blaze.
Experts say the cost of rebuilding the burnt-up portion of the superhighway entrance will come up to about half a million euros.
While a number of opposition politicians have bitterly criticised the government’s passive reaction to violence and disorder caused by the ‘Travelling Folks’, the Socialist Home Minister Bernard Cazeneuve has declared that the affair is “absolutely dramatic and has created considerable emotions” …whatever that means!
—The writer is a journalist based in Paris.
Published in Dawn, September 13th, 2015
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