Park Lane Roma camp evicted

THEY NUMBERED at most around 60. The headlines spoke only of "beggars", the comments of "freeloaders" and "thieves", but the accordions in the pictures showed that at least some of these people were busking to earn a living on London's streets.

But over the past year, the few dozen Romanian Roma encamped on London's Park Lane had become a symbol of British worries about immigration from Romania and Bulgaria.

Last Thursday at dawn, Metropolitan Police swept in to break up the camp and send the Romani people on their way.

Following last month's eviction of Roma encamped at north London's Hendon football ground, the images of uniformed officers looking on as people with bin liners full of possessions slope away are becoming as familiar in the UK as they have become in France and Italy.

The camp at Park Lane has inspired particular disgust in the right wing press. The Telegraph described the group as a "gang", while reporter Amy Jones pulled fewer punches when she wrote in The Sun of "one of the poshest postcodes in Britain, yet just a Champagne cork’s pop away is a squalid, stinking gypsy camp".

The headline said the "gypsies" were "defiling Park Lane".

The Daily Mail carried the most regular coverage, stretching from reports last year of an "invasion" by a "ragtag army" to happier reports as the Roma were "sent packing" from the street.

In this last article, the group were also described as "travellers", a term usually reserved by the press for caravan dwellers.

Protests against the evictions are being organised by the Romani rights group 8 April Movement, scheduled to take place on Friday, 2 August.

"At 3pm protests are being held outside the embassies of the Czech Republic and Slovakia demanding an end to neo-Nazi attacks and wide-spread apartheid in education," say organisers Toma Mladenov, Ladislav Balaz and Grattan Puxon.

"You are also welcome to participate in the Roma Genocide Commemoration taking place at 5pm at the Hyde Park Holocaust Memorial in memory of the 500,000 Roma murdered by the Nazis.

"A samba band will lead a march to Marble Arch, scene of the last ethnic-cleansing operation," they said.

At 6.30 pm the protest will gather outside the French Embassy, 58 Knightsbridge Road, SW1X 7JT (Knightsbridge Tube).