Roma baby refused burial in France
Source: BBC
A Roma baby girl has been denied a burial space by a French mayor, sparking outrage among activists.
The girl, who died on Christmas Day, reportedly of sudden infant death syndrome, was refused burial in Champlan, south of Paris.
The mayor said priority had to be given to taxpayers.
The mayor of nearby Wissous, Richard Trinquier, described that decision as "incomprehensible" and said that he would offer a grave.
The girl's family lived in a camp in Champlan.
The mayor of Champlan, Christian Leclerc, was quoted by Le Parisien newspaper as justifying the decision by saying that his town was running out of burial space and that "priority is given to those who pay local taxes".
Read more: http://www.bbc.com/news/world-europe-30670371
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Needle's broke on my outrage meter these days.
The indigent, the transient, the unclaimed and unidentifiable. Prisoners sometimes fall into that category, esp. if from out of state. We used to call them "pauper's graves."
This would be in graveyards in some towns or counties, or the jurisdiction pays for funeral services from a private vendor. This is really the "US" version, where we have municipal (at least sometimes), private, and church-based graveyards.
And it's true, in a lot of places graveyards are filling up. Then you have to worry about getting more land, double burials, or removing the dead and finding another, more compact place for them. The good thing about wood coffins and no formaldehyde is that in some areas after 50 or 100 years the bodies are completely decomposed, or little remains of the skeleton so that they can be repackaged into much smaller volumes. (Personally, I think burials should involve having the deceased "stood to rest"--takes up much less land area per capita, so to speak.)
In some countries they lack the private graveyards. Then it's church or municipal.
This tyke isn't the first person to be refused for burial on various grounds, most often religious. But transients and such are sometimes refused burial, and the reasons given are those from the mayor in the OP. Typically the race/ethnicity of the town, the transient, and the denying official are the same or very similar and it's not an issue.
This being DU, the only time such "horrors" are noticed is when it touches a nerve. When a Muslim is refused burial in a Xian-denominated graveyard (or, in tit-for-tat response, when a Xian is refused burial in a Muslim graveyard), for instance, and "Muslimophobia" is railed against (not such a big deal if it's a Catholic being denied burial in a Lutheran cemetary, "catholophobia" being a virtue for many). Or when a transient, indigent child is refused burial and some domestic political outrage can be cited as the real, underlying problem.
This nails both. Roma aren't Xian, so the churches would bail. And the graveyards of last resort, the municipal ones, often have a preference for the local population that needs to be serviced. (The ultimate problem being, of course, that graveyards are filling up and that small villages typically aren't flush with cash.) So it's easy to ignore what's always there and focus on the racism that must be the real reason: Discrimination against the Roma, who are always innocent victims. It helps when the Rom in question is an infant.
On edit: I'm never sure how to speak about the Roma.
So many advocates use "Roma," but that's really just the endonym some groups with very outspoken and organized advocates, some of which are from those communities and others of which are complete outsiders (some even want "Rroma"
. Others like the UN want "Romani" or "Romany". In France the groups--like "Native American," a larger group identity for the "Roma" has been forged mostly by exposure to the oustide and isn't universally shared by all its members--are Kale and Manouche (or Sinti), with a lot of other subgroups having moved in recently because of open travel policies (with attempts to revert them to their countries of origin fought vehemently--if unemployed and Bulgarian it's okay, but not if you're oppressed).
In other words, I use "Roma" because the use of an exonym is inherently disrespectful. I must think of "Roma" as an endonym because for some it is, even though for this family it's probably an exonym. I get it: Exonyms bad, except when somebody more moral and virtuous than I am authorizes the use of an exonym and says, "Exonyms good."
