“What is done in the name of the Roma, but without the Roma, is done against the Roma!” / “So kerdo se e navesa e Romenge, numa bi e Romender, kerdo se muial e Romende”

(June 2019)

We Roma have a problem. All across Europe there exist groups of non-Roma travelling people and/or ex-slaves, who are commonly confused with us. In the English-speaking countries above all, though also in much of western Europe, there are large groups of non-Roma travelling people, while nowadays probably 95% of Roma have adopted a settled lifestyle.

Some of these people are entirely white Europeans, while others did share an origin with us, more than 500 years ago, but long ago lost the language and much of the culture, and intermarried extensively with non-Roma people, so that they have become a population in their own right. Many of their own activists reject any link, even an ancestral one, with the Roma – and recently they have created their own flag so as to assert their separate identity. All of which is absolutely fine, of course, and they have a right to assert their own identity, separate from the Roma, and to campaign for their own issues. We agree that their history makes them separate from us and fully uphold their right to assert that.

But... the problem we have is that some of these non-Roma groups are appropriating the right to speak for us, and taking money donated (especially by the EU and national governments) for Roma integration and using it for their own purposes. And being Roma is a question of ethnicity, of language and culture, it is not and cannot be a matter of lifestyle or of choice; for centuries our law has stated that “anyone who doesn't know the Romani language, learned at home, isn't Roma”. In our culture we have the concept of Romanipen, culturally accepted Roma-ness, which depends on heredity, language and culture. Anyone who doesn't have Romanipen isn't Roma.

In Britain, June has been designated “Gypsy, Roma and Traveller History Month” by the Gypsy Council and its affiliates, all of them groups which are not led by Roma but by dromale or non-Roma travelling people, and all of their publications, activism and campaigns are orientated towards the needs of the dromale. None of the events are orientated towards Roma, still less run by Roma, and enquiries within the Roma community in Britain have shown that almost none of us even know of this supposed “history month”, even those who have lived here for many years. It is a classic case of using our name but excluding us.

Naturally, as a minority group who has suffered a great deal of persecution since we arrived in Europe from India, we sympathise with the dromale and support their right to self-determination, but we object very strongly to our name being appropriated for their campaigning, and we object to them claiming the right to speak for us. The two groups, dromale and Roma, have radically different problems and needs: dromale in Britain are invariably native speakers of English, citizens of Britain or Ireland, whose needs centre around their nomadic lifestyle; whereas the great majority of the Roma in Britain and Ireland are recent immigrants from other parts of Europe, who have migrated to escape the deeply-entrenched racism and poverty there, and to try to build a better life for their children in Britain. The great majority do not have citizenship, and are not native English speakers – and virtually 100% of us are no longer nomadic, and in many cases have lived settled for generations. Our needs centre around education, work, and assistance to make a life in a new country, as well as the maintenance of our own language and culture. No matter how much we sympathise with each other's situation, the two groups, dromale and Roma, are totally distinct from each other and have entirely different needs – and above all, each group needs to speak for itself.

A particular case in point is the issue of the Sàrmudaripen, or Roma Holocaust. During the Nazi era, around three-quarters of all of Europe's Roma were murdered by the Nazis and their puppet regimes, an estimated 7 to 8 million people. The majority of Roma alive today lost family members, many families were displaced and/or thrown into poverty, and the consequences of the Sàrmudaripen are still very much felt today, though the facts of that event are little known outside of our own communities. Many, probably all, Roma activists feel that this part of our history needs to be widely known and commemorated, and the ongoing problems that resulted from it need to be acknowledged.

However, the Gypsy Council is attempting to steal our identity and speak on our behalf on this matter, even to get their own people into the Holocaust Commission (which has no Roma members). This in spite of the fact that the dromale were never targeted by the Nazis and remained safely in the British Isles while we faced genocide – and even if the British Isles had been invaded, they would have been safe from persecution since they are white English-speakers and as such were not on the Nazis' racially-based “hit-list”.

Connected with this is the word poraimos, which they are using to mean the Sàrmudaripen and pushing for it to be used officially. This word was introduced by a dromalo who does not natively speak Romani, claiming that it meant “devouring” – but the word is extremely offensive because it doesn't mean “devouring” at all; in many dialects of Romani it actually means rape and the word is seen as extremely unclean.

Also on the subject of terminology is the issue of the word “Gypsy”. Most of the dromale happily embrace the word, calling themselves, for example, “Gypsy Travellers”. Naturally it is their right if they wish to call themselves that, but for us, the word Gypsy and its equivalents in other languages are associated with centuries of slavery, genocide and oppression. “Gypsy” does not properly mean “nomad” but is a specific racial epithet for Roma, which came about because the medieval Europeans incorrectly presumed us to be Egyptians based on our dark skin and non-European style of dress. The English word “gypsy”, French “gitan”, Spanish “gitano”, Greek “gyftos (Γυφτος)” and others came from this misconception, while the word “cigan/Цыган” in the Slavic languages, “Zigeuner” in German, “țigan” in Romanian, “tzigane” in French, “tsinganos (Τσιγγανος)” in Greek, and others came ultimately from a confusion between Roma and Athinganoi, a middle-eastern group – but in medieval Romania the word became used to mean “slave” (of any ethnicity). Across all of Europe, both word-forms have for centuries been associated with the offensive stereotypes of us as thieves, scroungers and parasites, and in many countries merely being a “Gypsy” carried heavy penalties, often execution or mutilation. As a result, for most of us, the words “Gypsy” or “Cigan” have much the same connotations as the N-word has for African Americans, and so we reject them absolutely. For thousands of years – long before we left India – we have called ourselves Roma, which derives directly from the Sanskrit caste designation डोम. Refusing to use our own endonym and instead applying an exonym to us that has long association with persecution and racism is in itself a racist act against us.

In Romania and those parts of eastern Europe which were once under Romanian control, we experience a similar problem with the hijacking of our identity: because nine or ten other ethnicities besides Roma were enslaved, made into țigani, ​the distinction between Roma and non-Roma “Gypsies” has become blurred in the popular conception, and there have been systematic attempts by the non-Roma țigani to “re-brand” themselves as Roma in order to appropriate the funds given by the EU and humanitarian organisations to assist the Roma who live in abject poverty and social exclusion. Without exception, the “Roma” NGOs in Romania, as well as governmental organisations supposedly set up to assist the Roma and preserve our culture, are run by people who are not Roma. A recent assessment found that of 50 billion Euros given by the EU, all of it had been misappropriated, and nothing whatsoever had been done to assist the Roma living in poverty.

Consider, if you will, the parallels between ourselves and African Americans: ex-slaves, subject to severe social exclusion and racism based on our skin colour, and victims of centuries of attempts to erase our language and culture. And now, we have people who are not Roma, white Europeans in the main, appropriating our identity and claiming to represent us. When this has been attempted with the African Americans, they have very justifiably objected, and they are now just beginning to be able to reclaim and record their own history – though there is still a very long way to go before they attain real equality with white Americans. We Roma need to raise similar objections and protests, whether it is against dromale appropriating our identity to further their own agenda, or gàdje (non-Roma) academics setting themselves up as supposed experts on our history, culture and language and excluding our own experts for fear that their mistakes and lies will be exposed; we also need to fight for equality with white Europeans, which in much of Europe is still a long way from being reality. We have a saying in Romani which translates as “what is done in the name of the Roma, but without the Roma, is done against the Roma”. We need to make our voices heard, loudly and clearly, that we demand the right to speak for ourselves.