Anti-Roma Racism: Europe Revives the Spirit of the 1930s and Nazism / O Nevo Rasismo e Evropate: Pàpale ushtela o Nazismo
(July 2019)
It has long been said that “antiziganism (racism against Roma) is the last acceptable racism”, and even in the most progressive countries the entrenched bigotry and violent hatred expressed against the Roma by many Gàdje never did die out – and now, as a swing towards right-wing populism affects all of the western world, the situation is becoming rapidly worse.
A Bit of History
Ever since our arrival from India, which happened in several waves of migration of which the earliest arrived around 800 years ago, there has been distrust, prejudice and outright hatred against us, in the beginning because of our different appearance (the first real non-white people most Europeans had seen), nomadic culture, non-Christian belief system, a language incomprehensible to Europeans, which meant that the dominant Christian-feudalist system perceived us as a threat to their domination and control of society. That established a pattern which has not changed even in modern days where Christianity has become common (though by no means the only faith) among Roma.
Many towns and states passed increasingly draconian laws against Roma. For example in the “Holy Roman Empire” (roughly, modern Germany) in the 16th century, a law declared us to be non-human and encouraged Gàdje to hunt and kill us for sport. In England in 1530, the King passed a law that all Roma must leave forthwith on pain of prison and confiscation of all assets, and this was upgraded to summary execution in 1554. Meanwhile, the Romanian Orthodox Church and land-owning Boyars enslaved Roma systematically, emancipation not coming until 1856.
There were many systematic attempts also to destroy our culture and to forcibly assimilate us into gàdjikani society. For example in Spain under Ferdinand and Isabella, and similarly in the Habsburg Empire under Empress Maria Theresa, Roma were banned from speaking our language or following our culture, with severe penalties.
The worst evil of all came with the Nazis, who committed genocide upon us on such a vast scale that around three-quarters of all Europe's Roma were murdered and entire tribes and dialects of our language were eliminated. Even today the scale of that genocide is deliberately downplayed for political reasons – and Nazi-inspired abused continued after the Nazi era, such as forcible sterilization of Roma women which continued well into the 21st century in some central European countries. And during the Yugoslav wars of the 1990s, various warring factions used the chaos as an opportunity to commit another genocide on the Roma: even though tens of thousands were killed and hundreds of thousands displaced, few people outside our own communities seem to know or care about this particular chapter in the horrors of the Yugoslav wars.
Throughout all of our history there has been an unbroken pattern of injustice, whereby Roma have suffered massive abuses at the hands of Gàdje who have gone unpunished, while Roma have often been victimized unjustly, and often murdered, by “law enforcement” officials. Police brutality and denial of the most basic human rights of Roma is almost universal throughout Europe.
The Situation Today: Some Examples
This list covers just a few examples of abuse and injustices against Roma people. It is by no means exhaustive.
One of the most pervasive problems all across Europe is statelessness: many Roma are unable to obtain any citizenship and this makes it especially easy for their rights to be denied. Another very widespread problem is segregation in education, where Roma are denied outright to go to normal schools and placed into “mentally handicapped” schools which are in fact nothing but dumping-grounds created for Roma children of perfectly normal intelligence but whom the states do not regard as worthy of education (Hungary is the worst offender in this respect). This leads to generational illiteracy, social exclusion and poverty, made worse by the fact that even when some Roma manage, against the odds, to achieve a good education they typically find it very hard to obtain employment because of simple racism. Additionally, Roma in many countries are denied access to healthcare or welfare and banned from living in “white” areas – this results in ghettoization and further deprivation: many such ghettos have no electricity, clean water or even basic sanitation. In numerous states including Albania and Czech Republic, civil authorities have been found guilty of deliberately denying a water supply to Roma communities. Very often it seems clear that such denials of fundamental rights that Gàdje take for granted even in the poorest parts of Europe is nothing more than a crude attempt to force Roma to “go somewhere else and become someone else's problem” – even though the “problem” is created entirely by the discrimination against us.
Ukraine is an example of a country where many Roma live in terror. In recent years there have been numerous pogroms by far-right groups such as the notorious “C14” in which Roma have been injured, their settlements destroyed, and in many cases murdered – with proven police complicity. In one particularly egregious case, Roma families were invited to come to a meeting with civil authorities in order to discuss problems with discrimination – and were then shot en masse by those same civil authorities. Similar events have been reported in Romania.
Hungary has demonstrated a particularly severe “lurch to the right” in recent years and outright hate speech has come repeatedly from government ministers. This year the UN Committee on the Elimination of Racial Discrimination (UNCERD) published a damning report on the hate speech, segregation and structural discrimination faced by Roma, with particular reference to the systematic violence by openly neo-Nazi paramilitaries which seem to operate with total impunity, including the now-defunct Magyar Gárda and the newly-formed and equally extreme Nemzeti Légió.
Bulgaria is in a similar situation. With an overtly far-right government, outrageous attacks on Roma are commonplace and there even exist “bounty hunters” or vigilantes, such as the notorious Petar Nizamov, who prey on Roma. Perhaps most notorious of all is the truly objectionable MEP, Angel Džambazki, who one-upped politician Boyko Borissov's call for all Roma to be forcibly deported to India by saying on national TV that that was too good for us and they should send us all to gas chambers. Naturally, with such people in high government office, violent fascist groups operate with impunity. And despite mass protests to the EU Parliamentary authorities about Džambazki's conduct, he has not been sanctioned in any way – even though the EUP has an established history of punishing members who express racism against any other race, homophobia or sexism.
France has for several years been illegally deporting East European Roma who have come there quite legitimately to search for work, arbitrarily and illegally destroying informal camps with all belongings, denying Roma children the right to access education, and in some cases even stripping Roma whose families have lived in France for generations of their citizenship. The European Parliament ordered France to stop these abuses – but were absolutely ignored. All of this wave of abuse was unleashed under a most transparent pretext: a young, and unarmed, Manouche (French Roma) man was shot dead, illegally and without justification, by armed police in 2010 and the ensuing protests by his people were held to be proof of a “Gypsy menace” warranting such repressive measures.
Italy has a relatively new far-right government and the echoes of the 1930s are plain to see. From 2008 onwards, systematic destruction of encampments and expulsion of Roma has been ongoing, but the situation has escalated rapidly, with minister Matteo Salvini calling for “registration” of all Roma including Italian citizens and calling for a purge. In this environment, far-right thugs such as the notorious Casa Pound organisation feel that they have carte-blanche to commit violent assaults and persecution against Roma families. There have been a number of recent racist murders and destruction by fascist mobs of Roma homes (whether informal camps, caravans or houses) and public calls for actual genocide.
Belgium too has a serious problem in spite of its claims to civilisation and the rule of law and its hosting most of the central institutions of the European Union. The worst example took place in May of 2019 when, again on a highly questionable pretext, simultaneous raids were launched on 19 locations, every person found was arrested indiscriminately, and all of their belongings including caravans, food and medicines, and their bank accounts also seized. None of the seized belongings have yet been returned, and most of those arrested were released without charge and found themselves on the streets with literally nothing. This is a clearly illegal instance of mass arrest without due process of law, totally illegal under both Belgian and EU law.
Representation
Of course, it is obvious that in order to even begin to improve the situation, we need representation: people who can speak for all Roma communities in the political and legal world, who can organise effective protests and campaigns, and who can bring together our communities to fight for our rights.
However, here too we have a serious problem. The “powers that be” are demonstrably reluctant to engage with Roma communities, preferring instead to engage with self-appointed “experts” who almost universally are not Roma, lack expertise or commitment, and merely reflect the long-standing prejudices against us. Additionally, it happens very often that non-Roma groups usurp the right to speak for us, and in so doing gain advantage for their own causes by using our name and steal money and resources intended for the betterment of the lives of poverty-stricken Roma. This is particularly a problem in Britain, where there is a considerable population of dromale (non-Roma travelling people) who control the “Gypsy Council” and purport to speak for us while in fact pursuing entirely their own agenda – the problems and needs of Roma and of dromale are entirely different, but since immigrant Roma now greatly outnumber the local dromale, there is a large advantage for them in usurping our name and claiming to represent us. Likewise in Romania (which has one of the largest Roma populations in Europe), all of the “Roma” organisations, even CNCR (Centrul Național de Cultură a Romilor – The National Romani Cultural Centre) are run by non-Roma, in the case of Romania they are either Gàdje or non-Roma Țigani, ex-slaves (in Romania, nine or ten ethnicities besides Roma were enslaved; the word Țigan in Romanian does not refer to Roma but to a social stratum of slavery, so only about 20% of Țigani are Roma). Because of extreme poverty of Romanian Roma, the EU has in recent years donated some 50 billion Euros – of which all was stolen by these organisations and an unconcealed campaign was mounted to “re-brand” (in the words of its creator, the self-confessed non-Roma Țigan leader Nicolae Gheorghe) the Țigani as Roma in order to obtain political power and money.
Even among genuine Roma, we have problems with self-appointed “leaders” and “kings” who have no popular mandate and are more interested in their own status, power and wealth than in helping their people – and who often have shady pasts and no pativ (honour). Often the two problems combine, for example in organisations such as IRU (International Romani Union), WRO (World Romani Organisation – which in fact exists only in Serbia!) and WRF (World Romani Federation – which is American): all of these were set up, and are operated, by combinations of non-Roma who wish to steal our identity, and corrupt self-appointed “Roma leaders” who care only about themselves.
Conclusion
This brief list of examples of abuses against Roma is very far from comprehensive and barely scratches the surface of the abuses that occur on a daily basis all across Europe – but we hope that it serves a purpose in illustrating the long-established and systematic nature of antiziganism in Europe, a problem which is simply not being effectively addressed, and indeed which is being deliberately worsened in many cases, by local, national and supranational governments.
We need a concerted effort between Gàdje authorities (especially supranational ones such as the European Union) who sincerely wish to curb the abuses and correct the injustices, and who are willing to listen to and engage with genuine Roma representatives instead of non-Roma “experts” – as well as Roma representatives who really do represent the Roma people, sincerely, honourably and with a public mandate. We also need to educate the general public in order to correct the absurd and racist prejudices and stereotypes that have become entrenched over a timespan of centuries and, in doing so, to acquire allies who will recognise that antiziganism is no more tolerable in a civilised world than any other form of racism and needs to be fought at every opportunity.