Home | Friday 8th April 2011 | Issue 766
ZERO EVICTION DAY
With Basildon Council expected to deliver the 28 day eviction notice any day to the Dale Farm travellers site in Essex (see SchNEWS 763), International Romani movement activists from Spain, Holland, Germany and former Yugoslavia will be there this weekend to meet residents and human rights monitors as the fight to defend Dale Farm becomes international. This Saturday (9th) will be Zero Eviction Day, marking the 40th year of the World Romani Congress, which celebrates Roma Nation Day on April 8th.
What began as a localised dispute with a parochial racist council trying to push through another violent, ethnic-cleansing Gypsy eviction, this time a potential eviction operation would happen with a level of international attention and public opposition not seen at previous removals – sure to cramp the style of rent-a-thug bailiffs Constant & Co. The site is now heavily defended with scaffold towers, barbed-wire, chicane-barriers, an array of supporters on the ground and more sure to come. Gypsy spokesperson Grattan Puxon claims that journalists from CNN, Al Jazeera, France 24, as well as local television stations are expected to be embedded behind the barricades should an eviction happen.
Potentially the biggest eviction in British history, the attention of the world’s media, international human rights scrutiny, a direct action defence of the site, the nonsense of paying £8 million (plus potentially another £10 million for policing) when it would be far cheaper to simply let the residents stay or give them another site - have the Basildon Council and their baying hounds Constant & Co bitten off more than they can chew?
* Zero Eviction Day – April 9th, 11am, food at 1.30pm, at Dale Farm, CM11 2YJ, Basildon, Essex (nearest train Wickford station). 07888699256
* Dale Farm Solidarity meet every Sunday at 2pm at Freedom Bookshop, 84b Whitechapel High Street, London E1 7QX
* Pledge to spend a night at Dale Farm in case of eviction www.facebook.com/event.php?eid=170414852985935
