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Street roots
Aug. 30, 2013
Roma: A people without a land
Street Roots works with our sister paper in Belgrade to look at the plight o f the Roma people in Europe
BY GRACE BADIK
S T A F F W R IT E R
Before coming to Street Roots in mid-
August for a year of service through Jesuit
Volunteer Corp Northwest, I recently
traveled to Central and Eastern Europe to
research community organizing in post-
Communist European states. Although, not
central to my research, I suddenly found
myself trying to comprehend a difficulty
reality. The Roma people are without an
official homeland, although some groups of
Roma may have lived in Europe for centuries.
During my time in Europe, I witnessed
individuals and families with darker skin who
walked down the street, while others would
walk on the other side of the sidewalk or take
a wide turn around. On the train, people
refused to sit in the same cab with Roma
people. I witnessed blatant discrimination,
which both astounded and outraged me.
I constantly asked the people I was meeting
to explain to me the situation with the Roma.
Here is a group of people who want to
maintain their language, culture and way of
life, but are not accepted by the majority
group.
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Roma people tend to live in isolated
neighborhoods and receive sub-standard
services. They face deep, systemic
discrimination, sometimes perpetuated by
the government itself. The European Roma
Rights Center has documented discriminatory
actions ranging from cutting off water
supplies to Roma camps, to the building of a
wall around a Roma neighborhood in Kosice,
Slovakia.
.
Why are the Roma people being
discriminated against throughout Europe?
What is being done? The first step in ending
discrimination is countering ignorance. In
the United States, the situation with the
Roma is widely unknown. Street Roots’ sister
paper, Liceulice, in Belgrade, Serbia, has
been working with Roma vendors for a
number of years. Nikoleta Kosovac, a
coordinator with the Belgrade street
newspaper provides an insight into the
situation of the Roma people.
G race Badik: Most readers will know very
little about the Roma people and Romani
culture. Can you give a brief history?
N ik o leta K osovac: For more than a
thousand years, Roma people (including
Travellers, Gypsies, Manouches, Ashkali,
Sinti, etc.) have been an integral part of
European civilization. Today, with an
estimated population of 10 to 12 million in
Europe (approximately six million of whom
live in the EU), Roma people are the biggest
ethnic minority in Europe. Most Romani—
about eight to 10 million of them-live in
Europe, where they are that continent’s
biggest minority; in some countries, such as
Bulgaria and Romania, they amount to as
much as 12 percent of the total population. In
addition, there are Romani scattered across
Asia, Africa, North and South America and
Australia as well.
The Romani have been always described as
unique among peoples because they have
never identified themselves with a territory.
They have no tradition of an ancient and
distant homeland from which their ancestors
migrated, nor do they claim the right to
national sovereignty in any of the lands where
they reside. Rather, Romani identity is bound
up with the ideal of freedom expressed, in
part, in having no ties to a homeland. The
absence of traditional origin stories and of a
written history has meant that the origin and
early history of the Romani people was long
an enigma.
Most Roma speak dialects of a language
called Romani, which is based on Sanskrit,
the classical language of India. The language
is largely unwritten, however, because of the
high rates of illiteracy in most Roma
communities.
During the history, Romani were subject to
many sort of restrictions and penalties. Roma
were living in Spain, France, England, and
large parts of what is today Russia and
Eastern Europe by the late 1400s. They
suffered persecution in those countries
ranging from laws against their language and
dress to expulsion. In the beginning of the
15th century, many Roma were forced into
slavery by Hungarian and Romanian nobles
who needed laborers for their large estates.
Roma suffered horrible persecution also
during World War II.
In some ways, the ultimate culmination of
the anti-Romani hatred came during World
War II, when the Nazis decided to exterminate
the Romani people altogether. When the war
ended in 1945, an estimated two million
Romani had perished, including 500,000 who
had been sent to the Nazi death camps. While
exact figures or percentages cannot be
ascertained, historians estimate that the
Germans and their allies killed around 25
percent of all European Roma.
Nowadays, we have the Directive on Racial
Equality that prohibits discrimination on the
grounds of racial or ethnic origin. All EU
countries have transposed the directive into
their own national laws. Yet many Roma are
still victims of prejudice and deep-rooted
social exclusion.
There is room for optimism about the
Romani people’s future. The United Nations,
the European Commission, and other
international organizations have begun
pressuring countries to end their exclusionary
policies and to give the Romani people an
opportunity to participate more fully in
society. In addition, European Romani has
formed organizations such as the Roma
National Congress to represent their
interests and press for change.
N.K.: Roma groups often have similar
occupations, drawing upon traditions of
peripatetic and mobile economies that
exploit niche markets, such as peddling and
trading certain livestock (horses, dogs, and
small birds). Roma artisans have also made
livings from repairing items deemed
“uneconomic” to mend, such as pocket
watches, tea-pots and porcelain dishes - the
originators of what is now described as the
circular economy. Many Roma, Gypsies, and
Travelers are engaged in recycling and have
been for centuries, long before major
environmental concerns.
G.B.: Currently, what is the situation in
Europe for the Roma people?
N.K.: Many Roma live on the edges of
communities or are transient. They suffer
massive discrimination throughout all of
Europe, and are often the victims of forced
evictions, racist attacks and ill-treatment by
police, and are often denied their (basic
human) rights - to housing, employment,
health care and education. In some cases,
Roma are ten times poorer than the majority
population. A recent survey showed that
nearly 80 percent of Roma in Bulgaria and
Romania were living on less than $4 a day. On
average, Roma live 10 to 15 years less than
others.
In 2005, the Decade of Roma Inclusion was
launched, aimed at fighting discrimination,
providing a strategy for integration, improving
the social situation by giving Roma equal
access to education, housing, healthcare and
the EU labor market; over 26 billion have
been made available from EU funds to
Member States for Roma programmes.
With so much attention, one would think
that the days when over 80 percent Roma
G.B.: Commonly, Roma people are labelled lived below the poverty line, 15 percent
as “gypsies” and “travelers,” where did these
See Roma, page 8-10
names originate from?