GYPSY CAMP MASSACRE:
LEAVE DALE FARM ALONE

Rally at Basildon, 1 August

Planning Appeals Enquiry opens at Basildon Centre 10.30 am.
Demonstration starts 11am
contact: dale.farm@ntlworld.com

Children from Dale Farm will carry black flags and 32-ft banner bearing a 2,000-name Petition from Dale Farm Residents Committee,

ETHNIC-CLEANSING : PAST AND PRESENT

Rudko Kawczynski, president of the European Roma and Travellers Forum in Strasbourg says: Roma and Travellers across Europe mark August 2 as a day to recall the persecution of our people. We are reminded on this day of what can happen when prejudice and discrimination are not controlled and addressed.

Statement by Richard Sheridan, chair of Dale Farm residents committee:

On the night of August 2 and 3, l944, several thousand of our people were massacred in the Gypsy Camp at Auschwitz. This was just one event in thousands during the murder of 500,000 Roma, Gypsies and Travellers during the Nazi era.

Remembering them today, we must warn of the dangerous rise of racism and increased activity of neo-Nazi groups, bother here and across Europe. We again feel threatened and sometimes terrorised.

Here in Basildon, our district council led by Malcolm Buckley has voted to spend nearly £3 million on the destruction of our homes at Dale Farm; according to his plan, to be carried out by private Gypsy eviction specialists Constant & Co., backed we fear, by Essex riot police, we and our children will be thrown out on the road and driven from the area in an act of brutal ethnic-cleansing. This plan is opposed as "racially tainted" and disproportionate by both Labour and Liberal Party councillors, and by a growing number of local people.

Buckley, together with Tory MP John Baron, want us "cleared" from greenbelt land, though much of Dale Farm was previously a scap-yard licensed by the council. They even oppose our moving to a brownfield site at Pitsea, proposed by the Government.

The Nazis liquidated the Gypsy Camp at Auschwitz on 2 August, 1944.

On 1 August 2005, Buckley intended to destroy Dale Farm. Don't let him try again to bulldoze our homes.