http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Romani_people
By DAN BILEFSKY
Published: October 19, 2013
PARIS — THE cluster of Roma, handcuffed and caged-in behind glass walls, listened in silence as prosecutors accused them in court of selling child brides for up to about $270,000 in cash, valuing them based on their ability to steal. In a case that has riveted France, the prosecutors accused three family clans from Croatia of grooming girls and boys as young as 11 to steal as part of a gang that committed 100 robberies in France, Belgium and Germany in 2011.
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Editorial: Scapegoating the Roma, Again (October 18, 2013)
One 20-year-old witness told the court he had stolen about $600,000 in cash and jewels for his parents, or more than $7,000 a month, since age 13. Less skilled thieves could face punishment, including beatings by Roma elders.
All but one of the 27 accused were convicted on Oct. 11 in Nancy, in eastern France, of forcing the children to steal, and received sentences from two to eight years. At the top of the network was a 66-year-old grandmother.
The case highlighted an increasingly rancorous debate here and across Europe about what some politicians call, rather ominously, the “Roma question,” a reference to the nomadic people, also known as Gypsies, who came from India to Europe centuries ago. An estimated 11 million are scattered across Europe.
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At a time of fiscal austerity, policy makers are raising a thorny question: after centuries of persecution and living on the fringes of society, can the Roma ever integrate into Western Europe?
Contemporary Roma Housing
(in the context of "missing" Gypsy girl)
http://www.mirror.co.uk/news/world-news/pictured-house-stolen-blonde-girl-2470384
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This month’s trial only intensified that debate when members of the defense team offered an unusual legal defense: rather than focusing on the argument that the Roma are forced to resort to crime because of poverty and discrimination, it claimed that in some cases they were simply following age-old Roma traditions and generally operate outside the norms of society in “the style of the Middle Ages.”
In France, as elsewhere in Europe, the Roma issue is linked to difficult questions of ethnicity, race, social exclusion and political gamesmanship. Last week, highly publicized protests erupted in Paris and several other French cities following reports that police officers had detained a 15-year-old Roma girl in front of her school friends and deported her to Kosovo with her family, who had been living in the Doubs region of eastern France as illegal immigrants for five years. The government has pledged to investigate the circumstances of their expulsion.
Last month, the interior minister, Manuel Valls, a Socialist, caused a furor by saying only a minority of Roma could fit into French society, implicitly suggesting they should leave. Many of the country’s roughly 20,000 noncitizen Roma from Romania and Bulgaria live in squalid encampments on the outskirts of French cities.
The far right National Front has warned of Roma flooding the country and has made them a key issue in advance of municipal elections in March. This summer, its founder,Jean-Marie Le Pen, called the Roma community in Nice “smelly” and “rash-inducing.”
In the Marais district of Paris, where young Roma gangs brazenly target tourists and locals at metros and bank machines, one pregnant girl said begging was her only lifeline. “We have no papers, we can’t work, what else are we supposed to do?” she asked, hastily adding: “We are Europeans, too."
Against this volatile backdrop, the defense offered in the case in Nancy was particularly striking.
“It is very difficult to interpret their behavior based on our own 20th-century standards,” Alain Behr, a defense lawyer who represented two of the accused clan chiefs, explained by telephone from Nancy. “This community crosses time and space with its traditions, and we in Europe have trouble to integrate them. Yet they have preserved their tradition, which is one of survival.”
While not condoning the thievery, Mr. Behr said that what prosecutors had characterized as the practice of selling child brides was, in fact, part of a centuries-old tradition of Roma dowry.
But Gregory Weill, the prosecutor, dismissed cultural explanations. He noted that when investigators descended on the ringleaders’ hometown in Croatia, they discovered the family’s imposing marble houses. In the clan’s caravans in northern France, he said, police officers found Mercedeses, Dolce & Gabbana sunglasses and Louis Vuitton purses.
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Dan Bilefsky is a Paris-based reporter for The New York Times.
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