MISSION

The Advocacy Project seeks to help community-based advocates produce, disseminate and use information, and so become more effective advocates for human rights and social justice.

Buckley's Christmas Gift is to Bulldoze Village

Ustiben Report

By Grattan Puxon

December 16, 2007: “This is Malcolm Buckley’s Christmas gift - a new promise to bulldoze our homes,” says Kathleen McCarthy, scanning a local newspaper report that affirms the vow by Tory-led Basildon council to destroy the Gypsy village at Dale Farm.

The final decision taken this week by a council committee to go ahead with the largest yet eviction has brought nearer not only a confrontation with Britain’s Gypsy minority but with Prime Minister Gordon Brown’s government.

The Labour government says repeatedly that every child matters. Then is Brown willing to overrule racially tainted local councils bent on ethnic-cleansing? It seems Dale Farm could be the fulcrum in the tense political debate over the treatment of Gypsies not only in Britain but across Europe.

Forty years ago, Travellers made a now legendary stand against eviction in Ireland. But at Cherry Orchard camp they owned neither land nor houses. As the Washington-based Advocacy Project says the present defence of Dale Farm, by the grandchildren of Cherry Orchard families, is a litmus test of the larger housing crisis afflicting most of Europe’s ten million Roma.

Similar to recent clearances in Italy, Greece and Russia, eviction squads, assisted by riot police, have so far been allowed a free hand to demolish Gypsy homes in Britain, evicting families onto the road with nowhere to go. This rough process is well illustrated in a short documentary.

“The bailiffs break every safety rule,” commented McCarthy, who is vice-chair of the Dale Farm Housing Association. “They crush homes with heavy machinery and burn property. A child will be killed if we don’t stop them.”

Dale Farm residents are mounting a challenge through a report being prepared for the UK Health & Safety Executive, which investigates safety issues. They say bulldozing of their village would be a demolition operation requiring safety fencing and a complete evacuation of the settlement before work commenced.

A blue-print for the eviction submitted to Basildon council by Gypsy-eviction specialists Constant & Co makes no mention of fencing off Dale Farm prior to sending in heavy machinery. But it does envisage the seizure of chalets, mobile-homes and caravans, and their removal to a storage compound, probably in another county.

This will leave up to a hundred families with no homes and no-where legally to stay.

The DFHA has appealed to Brown’s government to help it develop an alternative settlement at nearby Pitsea, on a site first proposed by former Deputy Prime Minister John Prescott. A public inquiry into this scheme is expected next year. It is bitterly opposed by local Tory MP John Baron, who has helped compile an anti-Gypsy petition with 5,000 signatures on it, including the names of neo-fascist British National Party supporters.

With no hope of completing accommodation at Pitsea before Buckley’s bulldozers’ arrive, the DFHA has asked the Red Cross to assist in the setting up of an emergency tent city next to Dale Farm. Tents are already being stockpiled to meet what McCarthy calls a manmade disaster.

She wants Basildon council, which itself is unwilling to shelter those made homeless, to grant a permit for the tent city. Travellers would then be able to reclaim seized mobile-homes and caravans and bring them to the Red Cross camp. They could later vacate the greenbelt zone for the permanent brownfield site at Pitsea.

“Surely Basildon can show some goodwill and let us have temporary accommodation like refugees and flood victims get,” said McCarthy. “I can’t believe at Christmas they all have hearts of stone.”

Support Save Dale Farm Campaign!

• attend Dale Farm meeting, 2 Feb
• rally outside High Court, 11 Feb
• help set up Tent City
• join Human Rights’ Monitoring Team
• Email for details: dale.farm@btinternet.com

The Advocacy Project
1326 14th Street NW
Washington DC 20005
phone: +1 202-332-3900
fax: +1 202-332-4600