EDITORIAL

Is our President right to have an ambiguous response to a problem as difficult as the Italians' decision to fingerprint our gypsies? He is right for several reasons. But given his typical elegance, he hasn't explained it t journalists, asking that they should do their homework.

So such problematic matter, such elegant attitude. What could he say? As President of Romania, he has got all reasons to be angry. Unfortunately, when thousands of gypsies are fingerprinted in Italy, it is not the ethnic community they are in that is targeted, which would have been discrimination and Fascist conduct. What is at stake is the urgent registration of people who have got Romanian passports and identity cards. In legal terms, they are Romanian citizens. This is why Romania is a straight target in the first stage of a complex European project that is a must, which opinion public has to be clearly informed about. After all, we and our gypsies are a bless at very problematic times, when citizens are to be explained why is the second stage, that is biometric passports, must necessarily be adopted. After talks with the US, such passports are to include full data about a person and even offer access to very personal information so far thought to be of strictly private nature.

There has been tough opposition to this, opposition claiming this would be the start of absolute, Orwellian surveillance. But the present reply is relying on an invocation of the Romanian case. And President Basescu knows something about it and things are even more problematic because - this is something he can't say yet - the fingerprinting of the gypsies is just the first move in the European scenario, actually an immediate response to the emergency situation in Italy. And not only in Italy, for clues on identical despair are coming from more states: Norway, Spain, France, Switzerland, Ireland... But it was not enough for the start the big demonstration of how useful the biometric identification is.

The second stage is being prepared right now and it is much more important. It is to target all the illegal workers detected in the EU and then, given the law adopted, of all the persons proved to live in EU states illegally. The measure is now being debated in all the interior ministries and departments for foreigners, as response not only to security imperatives in th global war against terrorism. This was once upon a time and it was the reasonable beginning of a measure acquiring new meanings (and much more far-reaching dimensions), in the context of an economic crisis and a job crisis affecting more and more European states more and more visibly. It is those very states that just a few years ago closed their eyes at the influx of unqualified manpower from the East. Just like the "migrants" from Romania, they were desperate to go there, they would put up with humiliating work, hopeful they could send some man back home and maybe get a life in what looked like paradise.

Traian Basescu is very aware of what will follow and he is also aware that, at a certain time, the reflux of our economic immigration would effect those who will have to return home very quickly, and not only with the expected benefits. But if he says this, how will it effect on next autumn's elections in electoral terms? The Romanian communities in Spain and Italy would have anyway shown Romanian papers when going voting and I don't thin the embassy staff would have been directed (and they will never be, for obvious reasons) to ask to see their work or residence permits too for check. They aren't taking the risk. Therefore one problem is emerging: with whom will those who are fingerprinted now and in the future be dissatisfied?

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