France’s government has been branded conniving and heartless after a 15-year-old Kosovar girl whose deportation has dominated French airwaves and newspapers in the past week was invited back subject to the condition she abandons her family.
Leonarda Dibrani was removed by border police from a school trip in front of her shocked teacher and classmates, and then expelled with her mother and five siblings. France’s President François Hollande’s answer to the resulting furore turned scandal into bleak farce. To the dismay and even disbelief of many, he publicly invited her to return to France to continue her education but without her family. Sections of the French media have suggested that he reduced an already embarrassing episode to fiasco. Leonarda, now in the Kosovo city of Mitrovica, told Reuters she would not return alone and accused Mr Hollande of “having no heart”.
Critics of the decision say Mr Hollande is relying on the fact few 15-year-olds and their families would voluntarily separate. The French left, including some ministers from Mr Hollande’s ruling socialist government, have condemned the girl’s expulsion. Even the administration’s Moroccan-born official spokeswoman, Najat Vallaud-Belkacem, acknowledged the circumstances were “shocking”.
Leonarda was removed from a school bus on October 9 as she was about to go on a class outing the day after her father had been detained elsewhere in France and deported. Police realised she was missing when they arrived at the reception centre where the family was living in Levier, eastern France. The teacher accompanying the children was contacted and ordered to stop the bus, which she did with reluctance. A local socialist politician suggested in vain that he should take her back to rejoin her family.
The left-of-centre Libération newspaper quoted the teacher as saying she badgered officers into parking away from the vehicle to avoid the tearful schoolgirl being seen getting into their vehicle “humiliated in front of her friends”. She is reported to speak excellent French and to have successfully immersed herself in school life, at odds with the stereotype of immigrants failing to integrate.
However, with the far right, anti-immigration Front National (FN) posing an increasing threat to the mainstream “republican” parties, Mr Hollande is anxious not to antagonise an electorate disillusioned with his presidency and hostile to the influx of foreigners. His hardline interior minister Manuel Valls, though himself born in Spain, has adopted a heavy-handed immigration policy, suggesting that most Roma, moving from one encampment to another in France, lived lives “extremely different from and clearly in conflict with” those of the French and should return to Romania or Bulgaria.
Mr Valls insists no error was committed by the authorities in Leonarda’s case. He told Le Journal du Dimanche that the family’s request for asylum had been rejected at all seven stages of its process since their arrival in France in 2009.
While presenting himself as conscious of the “situation of this young girl”, he said emotion was not the only factor to influence policy. He made the limited admission that police showed a “lack of discretion” but otherwise insisted that the law had been correctly applied, adding: “The president’s gesture is an act of generosity towards Leonarda, but her family are not coming back.”
