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| ROMANIA AND BULGARIA IN EUROPE 24/09/2010 |
| (2010-09-24) |
| Last updated: 2010-09-27 19:37 EET |
Romania and Bulgaria broke free of their communist dictatorship in the same year, 1989, joined NATO together in 2004, and joined the European Union in the same year, 2007.
The two countries hope to join the Schengen area in 2011. The Romanian President Traian Basescu went to Sofia, invited by his counterpart, Gheorghi Pyrvanov. The Romanian president insisted that Romania must not be set conditions relating to any issue extraneous to the subject, such as the situation of the Roma, as long as it complies to the terms of accession. The day before this statement, European Human Rights Commissioner Thomas Hammerberg joined other voices accusing Bucharest of failing to do its part to integrate the gypsy minority.
The scandal surrounding crimes perpetrated by Roma coming from Romania exploded into the press in Italy roughly two years ago. Recently, the scandal shifted into France, a country that opted for heavy-handed measures to deal with the problem. A former minister of internal affairs who ran for president on a public order platform, French president Sarkozy dismantled hundreds of nomad camps and repatriated their inhabitants, mostly Roma from Romania and Bulgaria. The camps were seen as a health hazard and sources of crime, and French citizens were getting increasingly impatient with the situation, leading to the authorities taking action.
The move was not exactly altruistic, say political analysts, because, like Silvio Berlusconi before him, Sarkozy wants to gain electoral clout with this campaign against the gypsies. These repatriations, though presented as voluntary, with individuals offered sums of 300 Euro per adult and 100 Euro per child, were condemned as being similar to deportations. Caught in the middle, president Basescu said that infringing on the freedom of movement of Romanian citizens was unacceptable, but conceded that they, in turn, should obey the law. Here is the president speaking on the subject:
“Romania is in favor of designing a strategy to integrate the Roma at a European level. Considering that every European citizen has the right to move freely on the territory of the Union, we consider that the problem of the nomadic Roma is not exclusively the problem of their country of origin. At the same time, we call for doing away with hypocrisy. Of course we defend our citizens. At the same time, Romanian citizens, including those or Roma ethnicity of the nomadic category have to obey the laws of the state on whose territory they are”.
Romanian foreign minister Teodor Baconschi pleaded for a European strategy to integrate the Roma, financed from structural funds.
“These funds have been allocated, but are not being taken advantage of, and we have to improve our capacity to attract money from Brussels”, Baconschi admitted.
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