How to crush a gypsy camp French-style: It took us 10 years to clear Dale Farm but France's ruling have smashed six Roma camps in as many weeks. Guess where the gypsies want to come next

• Hundreds of police have been launching dawn raids on camps throughout France
  
• Nearly 1,000 Roma have been deported following at least six raids in recent weeks
  
• In the most recent raid, Roma families ordered to leave as 500 officers entered an illegal camp near Lyon
• Police arrest 180 people who now face being deported back to Romania
• After gypsies are evicted, officers smash up caravans with diggers
• New Socialist government escalating crackdown that began under Sarkozy
  

By Steve Bird for the Daily Mail

Published: 08:20 EDT, 28 August 2012 | Updated: 20:57 EDT, 28 August 2012

Sitting on a patch of parched grass by a roadside on a dusty industrial estate, Ljupco, a father of five, grins to reveal two shining gold teeth. ‘All Roma gypsies have them - it’s a tradition that goes back to our great, great-grandparents in Romania,’ the 34-year-old gypsy says.

As his wife and children tear up stale bread by a spluttering gas stove, their own gold incisors glint in the midday sun as they chat and giggle in their Romany language.

Nearby, their ramshackle caravan is filled with dirty clothes and threadbare teddy bears. The caravan looks anything but roadworthy as it leans precariously to one side due to a flat tyre and broken rusty axle.

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Grab and smash: French police use a digger to destroy caravans after evicting Roma families from an illegal camp in Saint-Priest, near Lyon, Southeastern France

Exit: A Gypsy family leaves on foot and face deportation after being expelled by around 500 police officers

Expelled: Gypsies grab as many od their possessions while being escorted from the site by police officers

This family in Lyon is one of hundreds of Roma gypsy families being forcibly sent from France back to their countries of origin in Romania and Bulgaria.

Almost every day now, hundreds of police armed with truncheons, shields, smoke grenades and dogs have been launching dawn raids on camps throughout the country. The raids are as ruthlessly efficient as they are controversial.

Yesterday, in the latest eviction, 500 officers moved in on the biggest Roma camp in the eastern Lyon suburb of Saint-Priest.

They broke into caravans and moved them off the site, either towing them or using mechanical diggers to crush and lift them. They smashed up makeshift huts, ripped down tarpaulin and plastic sheeting being used as tents, and rounded up around 180 Roma, including 50 young children and babies.

The fate of these gypsies has yet to be decided.

But, in the past, those evicted from camps in France have been herded together under the watchful eye of CRS officers (the French equivalent of the riot police) wearing military-style blue outfits and black leather boots, then taken to airports and put on flights to their home countries. On Monday, in a similarly ruthless operation, police evicted 70 gypsies, including 19 children, from their camp in a suburb of Paris.

The French are so determined to move on the Roma that they offer them financial incentives. In addition to covering the cost of the trip home, the French government pays 300 euros (£235) to every expelled Roma adult and 100 euros (£80) for every child. For Ljupco, his wife and five children, this will come to 1,100 euros (£865) when their time comes.

Escape: A gypsy family try and push the care out and leave the camp after being threatened with arrest

Trudging out: A Roma child carries his tent as he is followed by a police officer during the latest crackdown

Pushed out: Officers give one gypsy man a helping hand to push his caravan out of the illegal camp

Warning: A Roma man is told he must leave the camp during the crackdown this morning

Problem: The wheel comes off one caravan during what the French are calling an 'evacuation'

‘The police have said we will be forcibly removed, too,’ he says.

‘We are just waiting for it to happen.What will happen then? Will Ljupco simply return to France? 

‘The social benefits here in France are very good,’ he admits. ‘My children can go to school and we can get some health care. It is much better than Romania.’

The eviction money he receives from the French government will mean he’ll be able to afford cheap fares back to Paris for the whole family, with plenty of cash to spare.

More likely, however, is a life in Britain. The intensity of the French campaign to move on Roma gypsies is deterring many from continuing to live in France. There is no such campaign in Britain, which makes it an attractive alternative.

‘My wife and I have talked about going to the United Kingdom,’ says Ljupco. ‘It is a very well-off country. We have heard stories of people who have gone there. The United Kingdom has a good social welfare system, too.’

Not wanted: Evicted gypsies are among a community of 14,00 in France blamed with thefts in cities

Leaving: A mother carries her child while another downcast-looking woman follows her out of the camp

Ljupco is not alone in seeing Britain as a safe haven. Increasing numbers of Roma in France are considering moving to the UK, in part because, in addition to the eviction campaign, the French government discourages companies from employing the 15,000-strong itinerant Roma population.

‘I am a stone mason, but no one will employ me,’ Ljupco says. ‘Perhaps if we went to London I could find work.’

Another factor that might encourage him to head to Britain is the backlash from local people that gypsies face in Lyon as a result of the ‘work’ they are doing.

Reports of Romanian gangs perpetrating organised crime, such as cashpoint fraud, are common in France — as in the rest of Europe — and this only serves to whip-up anti-Roma sentiment.

Meanwhile, up and down Lyon’s High Street, along the banks of the Rhone which runs through the city, and outside train and bus stations, Roma mothers holding infants are out in force begging. Older children plead for money as they roam  from table to table at the rows of Lyonnaise pavement restaurants, cafes and bars.

Desperate: A father pushes a buggy piled with all his belonging while being following by a young boy

Despair: A mother and her young son look on as they are ordered to leave their caravan home

Lamiita, 24, was among those repatriated during a series of dawn raids in Lyon. The day before the police arrived at her squat, she explained how she would consider abandoning France to go to another affluent country, such as Britain.

She was sitting in a small room with boarded-up windows and ripped-up floorboards that she shares with her husband and two children.

‘It is comfortable here,’ she says. ‘Sometimes we eat, sometimes we don’t. We have a shower from a broken water pipe.

‘The building is listed for destruction — so, the police will come, we know that.

‘When they do, we will be sent home. But we can’t stay in Romania, and will move on again elsewhere.’

Nicu Milosh, one of a 200-strong Roma community that settled at a disused garage in the east of Lyon three years ago, tells graphically of the depth of feeling against gypsies in this area of France.

One night, a petrol bomb was hurled at their caravans. ‘We were troubling nobody, but the night-time bomb showed how hated we are,’ the 34-year-old father-of-four says.

‘People were literally trying to burn down the places where we were sleeping. Roma draw opposition wherever they go, but the ferocity of anger being unleashed on us in France is terrifying.’

Police, council and medical staff have now cleared the garage site, offering housing to about half of its inhabitants, while the rest have been repatriated. Builders have bricked up the entrance to the garage to prevent any more encampments being established.

In total, nearly 1,000 Roma have been deported following at least six raids in recent weeks. The exact figures are hard to establish because the French authorities are not allowed to define those they have ejected as ‘Roma’, because this would suggest that their actions are potentially racist and therefore illegal under EU law.

Moving on: A girl carries a tent beside her two young siblings while others trudge behind them

Hounded out: A family leave with their belongings during the biggest crackdown yet on France's gypsy camps

With an estimated population of about 15,000 Roma in France, and the government seemingly determined to expel as many as it can, the raids are expected to go on for months.

Only the vulnerable — pregnant women, the frail and the elderly — are given housing by the French social services.

However, healthy young men have been seen fleeing into nearby woods, or through the streets to avoid being rounded up.

Marine David, mayor in Saint-Priest, admits the French authorities are playing a game of ‘ping-pong’ with the gypsies.

‘We are going round and round in circles,’ she says. ‘We can’t offer them a permanent housing solution, and I know there’s a risk they will just set up another camp. We just don’t have the means to deal with this kind of situation.’

This game of human ‘ping-pong’ began under the previous president, Nicolas Sarkozy, who ordered the ejection of around 9,000 gypsies, only for many of them to return. He introduced the deportation crackdown in 2010 after linking the Roma community to begging, prostitution and petty street crime.

Despite promising tolerance and humanitarian assistance if elected, Sarkozy’s successor, Socialist President Francois Hollande also approved the eviction programme after he and interior minister Manuel Valls said the camps were adversely affecting the lives of the French working class living near to them.

Local councils’ court orders to destroy camps are all approved by the national government.

Tough treatment: French police stonily look on as a mother and her children walk past them

Brushed aside: A family leaves as officers put on gloves for the job of dismantling the camp

The swift and brutal action against the camps could not be more different from the protracted and costly legal battles that have preceded attempts to evict travellers  in England.

Before the Dale Farm camp in Essex was eventually pulled down last year, legal wrangling had been going on for a decade.

At its height, Dale Farm, in Crays Hill, was the largest traveller community in the UK, with about 1,000 people and 34 legal pitches. But, in 2001, illegal settlements were built as more and more travellers moved in.

Basildon District Council issued its first enforcement notice to remove the illegal plots that year. The travellers immediately brought in their own lawyers, triggering one of the longest legal planning disputes in modern times. 

Such a drawn-out eviction  process will only encourage France’s gypsies to head north to Channel ports near the Eurotunnel in the hope of starting a new life in Britain.

Already some have found their way there — camping under flyovers on the motorway to Calais or near the Eurostar rail tracks that lead  to London.

It is not surprising, therefore, that the British Government is watching to see how successful France is in repatriating Roma in the face of the EU’s commitment to the  freedom of movement of all of its citizens.

Hitting the road: A van piled with mattresses joins a convoy of other gypsies leaving the camp

Hard act: President Francois Hollande and Interior Minister Manuel Valls, right, have cracked down on gypsies

Romania joined the EU in 2007, and its people have the right to move freely within its borders.

But the French government and its people are determined that the expulsions should succeed. 

Maryvonne Girard, deputy mayor of Villeneuve d’Ascq (a town near one of the camps), explains: ‘The tensions with local residents had become untenable.’

Last month, some 300 Roma and Serbian families were removed from a site they had set up near Aix-en-Provence in the South, while other camps have been torn down in the Loire Valley.

Some police raids were carried out this month in Marseille, and  in a poor suburb of Paris, which  as a city is believed to have 4,000 Roma.

The crackdown began with Sarkozy’s measures to prevent Romanians and Bulgarians from claiming social security.

They are also subject to special ‘transitory’ measures adopted by a number of EU countries and  which make permanent residence more difficult.

Back on the industrial estate outside Lyon, Ljupco prepares his caravan to move on to try  to avoid the police finding him and his family.

‘I know they will get us. It’s just a matter of time. But at least we get some money to be able to consider our options,’ he says, a broad smile spreading across his face.

VIDEO: More Roma Gypsies are evacuated in France...