Romengo Dives, Konengo Dives? Why I will no longer celebrate April 8th
(April 2021)
For many years the so-called Mashkerthemutno Dives e Romengo (International Day of the Roma) has been held on April 8th and is recognised by the United Nations. But why that day? What are we celebrating?
The so-called “national day” was instituted by IRU, the “International Romani Union”, to celebrate its inception on that date in 1971. This is the only case in modern history where a national day has been set based upon an NGO, and the history of the IRU is disturbing, to say the least. So let us look at IRU...
IRU did not spring into existence ex nihilo in 1971; in fact it simply renamed itself, having existed for several years previously under the name Comité Internationale Tzigane (CIT) and under the direction of a self-styled “Romano Voievod” who called himself Vanko Rouda. However, this immediately raises the question of why the exonym “tzigane” (which is simply a French version of the Romanian word țigan, with all the attendant overtones of slavery and racism) was used, and not our endonym “Roma”.
A little research uncovers the explanation. “Vanko Rouda” was not Rom. He was a white, non-Romani-speaking Frenchman named Jacques Dauvergne, who was falsely claiming Roma identity, and who did not know that we have called ourselves Roma since long before we left India, believing instead the common misconception that Roma means “from Romania” (for more details, see Why Are Roma Called Roma?).
Although genuine Roma were invited to the inaugural meeting of IRU, they were in a small minority and invited only to legitimize the biggest appropriation of identity in history. Most of the attendees were dromale (non-Roma “Gypsies”) and most of the leadership were gàdje.
Among some of the most notorious of those self-appointed leaders we find Ian Hancock, a gàdjo who has made millions by writing false histories about Roma and who has been proven to have committed academic fraud (see A Forged Poster About the Sale of Gypsy Slaves); Hancock went on public record at the 1971 meeting claiming to be Lovaro Rom, which he most certainly is not; he also claimed to have a PhD in Romani language even though he can't conduct a conversation in the language, and to be a professor of Romani at Texas University – both claims are false according to London University's School of Oriental and African Studies, who granted his PhD in African languages, and Texas University states that he is professor of English.
We also find Grattan Puxon, who is of Irish origin, a dromalo, but who has claimed repeatedly to be Rom. Donald Kenrick and Thomas Acton, both gàdje “gypsyologists” who, like Hancock, became rich at our expense; and a great many other non-Roma. Finally, actor Yul Brynner was presented to the conference as a “celebrity Rom” despite the fact that, according to his own biography, he was gàdjo – though he was known to be rather an accomplished liar and prone to self-aggrandizement.
At that conference it was resolved to “re-brand” non-Roma groups such as Pavees (Irish Travellers), other dromale, and non-Roma ex-slave groups such as the Rudari as “Roma”, under the spurious claim that all travelling people were one and the same – which is demonstrably nonsensical since Roma are a specific ethnic group of Indian origin with our own language, closely related to Hindi and Punjabi, and in any case even as of 1971, more than 90% of Europe's Roma lived a sedentary life; living pirales, nomadically, has never been either a prerequisite or a defining feature of Roma identity.
As part of that “rebranding” exercise it was decided – by these non-Roma leaders – that all of the thousands of intriguing and different Romani dialects should be replaced by an artificial standard dialect of Romani which we would be forced to use, alongside a plan mooted by Puxon to use compensation money from the millions of Roma lives lost in the Holocaust to purchase land either in Africa or India to which we would be moved. It is unclear what actually happened regarding the compensation money, since no land was ever purchased and IRU officials refuse to disclose what happened.
Subsequent IRU Congresses – again of course, not led by Roma – accepted the nonsensical “standard” dialect invented by the two gàdje, Marcel Courthiade and Gheorghe Sarău (which is literally incomprehensible to genuine Romani speakers) and its accompanying nonsensical alphabet, which is commonly referred to as the Warsaw Alphabet after the IRU congress in that city in 1991, at which a committee of some twenty people voted to mandate that alphabet as the “Right and Only Way” to write our language. However, of that committee, only one member was a Rom – and he voted against the acceptance of the alphabet. The steamroller of language standardisation rolls on, to the extreme detriment of our real dialects (see Language Standardisation: An Attack on Our Culture).
IRU also became recognised as the “official voice of the Roma at the United Nations” when we were recognised as a non-territorial nation at the beginning of the 21st century – represented not by real Roma but by outsiders like Hancock.
Moving forward in time, in recent years, thanks largely to the advent of the Internet, more and more Roma have become aware that, far from being a benign representative of our interests, IRU is a scam, a cynical and systematic attempt to steal our identity and to benefit its own “insiders”. This led to a catastrophic loss of respect for IRU and a strong groundswell of anti-IRU sentiment in Roma communities, as a result of which, around four years ago IRU launched a so-called “democratic transition” project in order that it could try to claim that it actually represented us. Needless to say, that went nowhere and IRU remains to this day just as undemocratic, unrepresentative and disconnected from the lives and issues of real Roma as it has ever been.
And that is why I will not be celebrating the 8th of April; I do not wish to celebrate the theft and attempted destruction of my culture and my mother tongue by crooks and charlatans.