PARIS – France expelled nearly 100 Gypsies, or Roma, to their native Romania on Thursday as part of a very public effort by conservative President Nicolas Sarkozy to dismantle Roma camps and sweep them out of the country, the Immigration Ministry said.
France chartered a flight to Bucharest, which left from the southeastern city of Lyon with 79 Roma aboard, Immigration Ministry officials said. However, Romanian border police official Cristian Ene, at Bucharest's Aurel Vlaicu airport, said only 61 people were aboard. The French Immigration Ministry was unable to immediately explain the discrepancy.
Fourteen other people were repatriated to Romania aboard a commercial flight from the Paris region earlier in the day, the French officials said, adding that another Romania-bound repatriation flight was expected Friday. Additional flights were scheduled for later this month and September, Romania's Foreign Ministry said.
Those repatriated Thursday left "on a voluntary basis" and were given small sums of money — euro300 ($386) for each adult and euro100 for children — to help them get back on their feet in their home country, a standard French practice, officials said.
Roma advocates countered that the repatriations were hardly voluntary, claiming that those who refused the deal would end up in holding centers and eventually be sent home without funds.
Alexandre Le Cleve, a spokesman for Rom Europe, said the expulsions were pointless because nothing prevented those sent back from immediately returning to France, as many have done in the past.
"For those who left this morning, they can certainly take a plane as early as tonight and come back to France. There's nothing to prevent this," Le Cleve told Associated Press Television News in an interview. "Obviously, these people come back, they are brought to the Romanian border, then come back to France, can leave again and so on. There are some Roma people who have been sent back seven or eight times, each time receiving the famous euro300."
Adrian Paraipan, a 37-year-old who was aboard the Lyon flight along with his wife and three children, said he planned to return to France.