Roma NGOs: With friends like them, who needs enemies? / Romane ONGi: Akasave malensa, konenge trubul dushmane?

 (January 2022)

As my regular followers will probably know, for very many years I (as well as various other activists within my extended family) have been doing battle against the corruption of both governmental and non-governmental attempts to “help” the Roma, on the basis of their blatant corruption as well as the problems of representation explored in the article What is done in the name of the Roma, but without the Roma, is done against the Roma. This article draws together more egregious examples of the abuses that we experience under the guise of “helping” us.

 

Probably the biggest problem of all is that we have a plethora of so-called “Roma support” organisations which are quite simply not run by Roma, but by Gàdje (non Roma people). The most notorious of these is undoubtedly IRU, the supposed “International Romani Union”, whose corruption is so extensive as to warrant an article of its own: Romengo Dives, Konengo Dives? Why I will no longer celebrate April 8th. But IRU is unfortunately far from being unique in its corruption or for not being led by Roma.

 

For some years, the European Union has given enormous sums of money to national governments and NGOs for the supposed improvement of life for the Roma minority, and sadly, literally not a cent of that money has actually reached the Roma living in poverty. This problem has occurred widely across Eastern Europe; just one example may be found in this article, https://www.occrp.org/en/daily/4959-romania-lawmakers-suspected-in-eu-roma-fund-fraud – this is a classic case of two supposedly-Roma parliamentarians who in truth are Gàdje but have claimed falsely to be Roma to facilitate their crimes. And, when one considers that Roma are ethnically North Indian, and that the Romani language is a sister language of Punjabi, it is remarkable that so many white Europeans appear to get away with falsely claiming Roma ethnicity. 

 

Then we have numerous NGOs that purport to be Roma-led but are anything but. The “Gypsy Council” of the UK is one example, and has for decades been trying to promote the falsehood that “Gypsies, Roma and Travellers” (GRT) are all the same thing and that a bunch of dromale can speak for Roma – and worse, they have been seeking to steal the Sàrmudaripen (Roma Holocaust) from us for reasons of political power and monetary gain: Hands Off Our Holocaust, Dromale!

 

Another egregious example is the “Roma Support Group” in the UK, which is led by an assortment of non-Roma Țigani (ex-slaves) and Gàdje. This organisation recently caused a great deal of bad feeling when it issued a video guide, supposedly to “teach Roma women what is required of them as mothers in the UK”. This video promoted all the most heinous stereotypes, claiming that Roma women are not clean and do not want their children educated (nothing could be further from the truth: we have very stringent ritual hygiene rules and the entire reason that most Roma families came to the UK is to give their children better life chances), was appallingly patronising, and perhaps worst of all, this message was delivered by a group of non-Roma men.

 

Similar examples can be found across Europe and indeed the world. Another particularly bad example is the “Western Canadian Romani Alliance”, founded by two people of English dromalo ancestry who falsely claimed to be Roma, and who had convinced the Canadian government to pay them to “assess the Romanipen” of would-be refugees seeking to enter Canada. Not only does Romanipen not work like that (there is no central authority to “award” it, recognition is informal and collective, based on blood, culture and language) but two white Europeans most certainly cannot pass such a judgment. When someone's Romanipen is challenged (which can occur if they are accused of committing some sufficiently awful offence against Roma tribal law: being stripped of Romanipen is a recognised punishment) the matter is decided by a Kris, a traditional Roma tribal court. The arrangement between the WCRA and Canadian government is manifestly in breach of the United Nations rules on minority identity, but it's “a nice little earner” for the corrupt Gàdje behind it and a convenient way of evading any responsibility for helping Roma refugees on the part of the government.

 

I could continue writing this article for literally days, listing every example of corruption, misappropriation of funds and identity theft across the NGO and governmental sectors, not to mention the supposed “cultural” organisations however such as Centrul Național de Cultura a Romilor in Romania and the especially offensive “Rromani Language Faculty” at Bucharest University, run by the Gàdjo, Gheorghe Sarău, and which teaches a totally fake version of our language and history, made up by Sarău, and with the connivance of the Education Ministry forces Roma children to learn this false language and false cultural history and punishes them for speaking their natural dialects. However, I hope that the article as it stands has demonstrated the scale of the problem that we face. Emancipation, integration and equal life chances for Roma will only come when these governmental and NGO enemies of ours are eliminated and we are able to represent ourselves, through genuine Roma community leaders with a popular mandate from their communities.