10


The Roma: between a myth and the future

Dimitrina Petrova*



Who are the Roma? An identity in the making.

UNTIL the early 1990s, few people knew the meaning of the term “Roma,” but almost everybody had
opinions about the “Gypsies.” In the last years, however, the term “Roma,” which is the
ethnocultural self-appellation of many of those perceived by outsiders as “Gypsies,” has come to
dominate the official political discourse, at least in Europe, and has acquired the legitimacy of
political correctness. Not all so-called Gypsies in the world today recognize themselves as Roma,
and it is difficult to predict whether a broader identity will be constituted in the future to
encompass the non-Roma “Gypsies.” But at present, the political construction of the Roma identity
has reached a stage at which the outsider identifications, such as Gypsy and Tsigane, terms still
preferred in much of the historical, anthropological, and ethnographic literature, are considered
undesirable due to the huge baggage of prejudice they carry.

Groups externally identified as Gypsies but not necessarily considering themselves as ethnic Roma
include the Jevgjit in Albania; the Ashlkalija and Egyptians in Kosovo and Macedonia; the Travelers
in Britain and Ireland; and the Rudari and Beyashi in Hungary, Romania, and other countries. The
Sinti, who live in many European countries, particularly Germany, are sometimes subsumed under the
Roma category (e.g., by Hancock, 2002: 34), and sometimes set apart from Roma (e.g., Marushiakova
and Popov, 2003). Speaking the Romani language (Romanes) is not a necessary identity characteristic
either: some communities that consider themselves Roma have actually lost the Romani language (the
majority of today’s Roma in Hungary, for example).

In the Romani language, the word “Roma” means “people” in the plural masculine gender, with a
connotation of “us” as opposed to “them.” Outsiders are referred to by the general term gadje (also
a masculine noun in the plural). It is my impression that calling all “others” by one name,
“gadje,” is a strikingly frequent conversational practice when Roma speak with Roma. This frequent
reference to a generalized “other” is generally not found in any other insider ethnic discourse.
This certainly reflects a high degree of “us/them” opposition that has been historically reinforced
by centuries of internalized oppression and isolation.

At first glance, it is quite amazing and even exceptional that over centuries of exclusion,
marginalization, discrimination, and in some regions slavery and forced assimilation, the Gypsy
groups have preserved strong elements of a common ethnocultural self-consciousness, which serves as
one of the bases for the continuing construction of the Romani identity. In the course of one
millennium, many ethnic identities in Europe have vanished without a trace. But in the Gypsy case,
several factors have created a synergy to preserve the sense of belonging together. These include
late arrival in a continent already populated by settled communities, the high degree of difference
from European culture and society, and the ensuing structural social and political weakness of the
Roma in European history. Attitudes and practices that reproduce the pariah status of the Gypsies
are deeply entrenched anti-Gypsism and the systematic abuse of their human rights in the last few
centuries, including widespread persecution and racial discrimination. These same factors can be
described as the root causes of both anti-Gypsism and the survival of the Roma as one single--but
not yet internally homogeneous--cultural identity.

It is also important to emphasize that, following the end of communism in Central and Eastern
European societies (where the largest numbers of Roma are concentrated), new political dynamics are
at work. In postcommunist countries we have witnessed the rise of racially based discrimination,
exclusion, and marginalization of the Roma at the same time that the opposite forces of an
advancing Roma rights movement are taking shape. These parallel tendencies undoubtedly fuel the
construction and consolidation of a Romani ethnic identity and, more recently, of a “nonterritorial
Roma nation” (Project on Ethnic Relations, 2001).

While the Romani ethnic identity is the basis of present-day emancipatory mobilization, it is
difficult to say to what extent a shared consciousness of belonging together can be ascribed to the
larger group of communities labeled by the external world as Gypsies. For example, in Albania,
while the historic relatedness of the Jevgjit to the Roma is a subject of scholarly debate, the
members of these two groups, seen indiscriminately as Gypsies by the surrounding majority, in fact
consider themselves separate peoples and reveal negative attitudes toward one another. Similarly,
in Kosovo, the Ashkalija reject an association with the Roma; but because they are perceived as
Gypsies by the nationalizing Albanian majority, they were subjected to the same ugly ethnic
cleansing as the Roma in the aftermath of the 1999 NATO war against Yugoslavia and the mass return
of the Kosovo Albanian refugees to their homeland. In the countries of the former Soviet Union,
certain groups are perceived as Gypsies (Tsygane in Russian) who are not Roma. Apart from the more
established Ruska Roma and the other Romani groups who have been in the Russian empire lands for
several centuries, there are also small groups of Sinti who moved eastward from Germany through
Poland at the beginning of the twentieth century; Armenian-speaking Gypsies called Bosha who
identify as Lomavtic; Asian Gypsies known as Karachi from the Caucasus (mainly Azerbaijan); Central
Asian Gypsies called Lyuli (who also use the appellation Mugat) found in Tajikistan but who have
intensely migrated to the large Russian cities in the last decade. In the complex history and
geography of Gypsy identities, still in flux on the territory of the former Soviet Union, the Ruska
Roma make up only one part--albeit the largest--of the Gypsy groups, connected by a common
historical and cultural legacy (for detailed description, see Marushiakova and Popov, 2003; Demeter
et al., 2000: 87-114).

Leaving aside the non-Roma Gypsies, the Roma themselves do not (yet) make up a homogeneous ethnic
group. Rather, the Roma today are a continuum of more or less related subgroups with complex,
flexible, and multilevel identities, with sometimes strangely overlapping and confusing subgroup
names. But in the last decade, as was noted, we have been witnessing a process that has seen the
historic and political consolidation of a unifying Romani identity so that the name “Roma” has now
become preferred by most international and national organizations dealing with various aspects of
the “Roma problem.”[1]


The Abracadabra of Romani Statistics

It is widely accepted that reliable demographic and social statistics on the Roma are nonexistent.
This is evident also in the European Roma Rights Center compilation on absolute numbers of Roma in
European countries (see table 1). Adding numbers regarding the Americas, the Middle East, and the
rest of the world would render an even more complicated picture. The reason for this can be traced
to the Roma and government authorities, both of whom have found it undesirable to collect
Roma-related statistics. Roma have little reason to trust gadje with notebooks and questionnaires
visiting their ghettos. Authorities and the mainstream media have been ambivalent at best: they
have been willing to publicize police data about the allegedly high proportion of Roma crime, but
not about the high proportion of child mortality, illiteracy, or unemployment. At present,
Roma-related statistics are trapped in a set of legal and policy problems, including data
protection laws, constitutional rights to choose freely one’s ethnic identity, and the needs of
ethnically coded disaggregated data for anti-discrimination agendas (for comprehensive country
reports regarding race statistics, see Krizsan, 2001).

It should be noted that Roma in some countries are reluctant to reveal their identity. Of the
countries with large Romani populations, Bulgaria is an example of a country in which the gap
between census data and estimates is relatively small: estimates are only about double the census
data. The Romani community was placed at about 371,000 people (4.7 percent of the general
population) by the 2001 census, while most scholars believe that the real number is about twice
that figure.[2]  In contrast, the Czech Roma present a real statistical puzzle. While both
government and independent sources estimate that approximately a quarter of a million Roma live in
the country, the most recent (2001) census gave the number as 11,716, several times lower than the
figure produced by the official census 10 years earlier.


Clues from History: The Gypsy “Invasion” in Europe

When the Romani migrated out of India is not well established. Some authors zero in on the eleventh
century, while others emphasize that we are dealing with a long and complex historic process of
multiple migrations by different Indian groups leaving their homeland for different reasons at
different times between the seventh and thirteenth centuries. Different hypotheses have also been
offered about the social status or caste in which the migrants belonged before their exodus.
According to German historian Heinrich Grellmann, one of the founders of Gypsy/Romani studies in
eighteenth century, the ancestors of the contemporary Roma were part of the Shudra, the lowest
caste. But others oppose the low-caste ancestors theory and find it more convincing that the Roma
were related to the Rajputs, tribes that conducted a long warfare against Islam and among whose
present-day descendents are the Banjara in northwest India. The Banjara themselves recognize a
connection to the Roma in Europe and have developed links with Romani activists in recent years
(Hancock, 2002: 13).

In earlier literature it had been accepted that the first mention in Byzantium of Gypsies, under
the name atsinganoi is from 1054, in which they are described as sorcerers and evildoers who
visited the Emperor Constantine IX Monomachus (Soulis, 1961: 145), poisoning the wild animals that
were entering the emperor’s gardens by using magic. The emperor then invited them to do the same
with his favorite dog, but a Christian saint intervened and their magic did not work. They were
chased from the royal palace and left in disgrace. Not all authors today, agree that the reference
here is actually to Roma: according to some, a heretic sect with the name atsinganoi existed
between the eighth and eleventh centuries and its name passed erroneously to the Roma, who arrived
in Byzantine lands most probably in the thirteenth century (Demeter et al., 2000: 16; Hancock,
2002: 1). Others date the arrival of the Roma in Byzantine domains several centuries earlier,
accepting that atsinganoi had always designated the Gypsy immigrants in Byzantium (Speck, 1997:
37-51; Marushiakova and Popov, 2000: 14-15). From the Greek atsinganoi, the Bulgarian “Tsigani,”
the French “Tsigane,” the German “Zigeuner,” the Hungarian “Ciganyok,” the Italian “Zingari,” the
Russian “Tsygane,” and the Turkish “Cingene” have stuck as the external appellation of the Romani
people.

The Roma remained in Byzantium for several centuries (two and a half at a minimum) before some
moved on in the direction of Western Europe. It is inside the Byzantine cultural environment that
the Romani identity and language were perhaps initially constituted. Many Greek words and
grammatical forms were added to the Sanskrit base, and today the Greek influence is still prominent
in the language. Having spent considerable amount of historic time in Byzantine lands, some Roma
moved from the Balkans further on to Central and Western Europe in the fourteenth and fifteenth
centuries, roughly the same time as the conquering Ottoman Turks. During Ottoman rule, much of the
population of Albania and Bosnia, along with other peoples in other parts of the Balkans, including
Roma, converted to Islam. Research has established that the Ottoman policy toward the Roma was in
general more tolerant than Western European treatment during the same time (that is, the sixteenth
to eighteenth centuries) (see Marushiakova and Popov, 2000: 56).

By 1417, Roma had already reached parts of Western Europe. The possible reasons for this movement
westward include the general societal crisis of the Byzantine Empire under the pressure of the
Ottoman Turks, and the demographic rise of the Romani communities; because they were nomadic or
seminomadic service communities occupying a certain niche in the settled economy, they began to
interfere with each other’s area of functioning and thus needed new territories in order to
maintain their sources of income.

The history of the Roma arriving and spreading in Central and Western Europe after 1417 is well
documented, despite some remaining mysteries.[3] However, according to Demeter et al. (2000: 18),
Western scholars have built their interpretation of Romani history chiefly on the basis of the
westward expansion of the Roma in the fifteenth century. The simplest version of this narrative is
that Roma were initially welcome in Western Europe, met as noble pilgrims and provided with
privileges and gifts. When the European cities began, one after another, to fall victim to Gypsy
crime, anti-Gypsy laws were gradually introduced throughout Western Europe, which led to four
centuries of official persecution.


It would seem that this period has long been thoroughly researched, but it is precisely its wrong i
nterpretation that caused all further errors. It is striking that no one asked the main question: W
hat type of Gypsies left for Western Europe in the early fifteenth century? If this most important
question had been at least articulated, current tsiganology would look different. Moreover, it has
been taken for granted that these were ordinary tabors. The core of our heory is the view that the
tabors that rode off in the so-called “great march” were untypical–a conglomerate of persons with a
 propensity for adventure (Demeter et al., 2000: 18).


It is well established that the Roma in Byzantium during the twelfth to fourteenth centuries were
laborers--artisans, craftsmen, metal workers, artists. European documents from the first decades of
the Roma arrival, however, contain no evidence of productive occupations and present Romani
livelihood as based only on begging, robbery, deceit, and fortune-telling and do not mention such
typical Romani professions as animal drill or blacksmithing. The extensively documented criminal
activity of the Roma in Central and Western Europe in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries thus
must have been the catalyst of the lasting image of the Roma as parasitic nomads, fraudulent
fortunetellers, incapable of productive work, abusing the hospitality of those who provide them
with shelter and food, unreliable, and, of course, and most significantly, remorseless thieves.

It is also well documented that, riding throughout the European West, the Roma spread a bizarre
story to account for their appearance. They usually presented themselves as pilgrims from “Little
Egypt,” sentenced by the pope to seven years of wandering as punishment for betraying the Christian
faith following an alleged Muslim conquest. The pope had allegedly also ordered all bishops and
abbots to pay a certain amount of money to them and provide shelter and other necessities (Clebert,
1961: 55-57). It seems that fifteenth-century Roma were trying to make use of the geographic
ignorance and religious zeal of Catholic Europe, thus ensuring safe passage for their tabors. For a
number of decades and despite the growing incidence of complaints against them, they were, overall,
successful in spreading the myth of religious expiation.

A presence of nomadic groups from the enigmatic “Little Egypt” is noted in dozens of medieval
history sources: in the southern Czech lands in 1411, Basel and Hessen in 1414, Zurich in 1418,
Rome in 1422, Augsburg in 1424, Paris in 1427, Barcelona in 1447. In Rome the group led by one
Andreas obtained or forged a papal safe-conduct--much more useful than safe conducts issued to the
Roma by mundane princes that were valid only in the lands under their jurisdiction. Ironically,
“Little Egypt” outlived its usefulness and gave the Roma their condemned misnomer: from the
“Egyptians,” the word “Gypsy” and its derivatives, including Gitanes, Jitanos, Ijito, Gjupci, and
Yiftos, entered European languages. According to one hypothesis, the strangers were in fact
referring to a really existing area, in Peloponnesus or elsewhere, called “Little Egypt,” and since
geography and cartography in medieval Europe were in a nascent state, this place of origin was
identified with Egypt.

In any case, it is a historical fact that initially, the strange-looking pilgrims were met almost
everywhere without hostility. The story of what exactly had caused their wanderings had many
versions. It was even believed that they had been punished for their failure to help the Holy
Family in the flight from Palestine to Egypt. Many rulers in medieval Europe issued safe conducts
to various “Egyptian” chiefs and their company. Nobles and city authorities in France offered warm
and sometimes generous receptions on religious grounds at first. For example, the king of France
granted a safe conduct to Thomas, “count of Little Egypt of Bohemia.” In this bizarre hybrid, the
medieval confusion is most typical, an association with Egypt, while at the same time “Bohemian”
was also gaining ground as a word designating the medieval Roma (Fraser, 1995: 92). In most places
the arrival of the new tribes was soon followed by complaints of thefts, misbehavior, and fraud
related to fortune-telling. In the Rhone region, the practice of paying the “Bohemians” to leave
the vicinity and go elsewhere became established in the second half of the fifteenth century
(Fraser, 1995: 93). Finally, after many attempts to chase away the newcomers and their repeated
return to obtain alms from the faithful, Francis I in 1539 introduced severe measures throughout
his kingdom against “certain unknown persons who call themselves Bohemians” wandering everywhere
“under the guise of a simulated religion or of a certain penitence which they claim to be making
through the world.” He decreed that “henceforth none of the said companies and assemblies of the
above-mentioned Bohemians may enter, pass or stay in our kingdom nor in the countries which are
subject to us” (Fraser, 1995: 94).

In the Holy Roman Empire, during the reign of Emperor Maximilian I, the Imperial Diet issued three
edicts (in 1497, 1498, and 1500) in which Gypsies were accused of espionage and singled out for
expulsion (Fraser, 1995: 86). The accusation of espionage is among the typical charges against the
newcomers, though not so routine as those of robbery. The 1500 decree ordered the Gypsies to leave
German lands by Easter, after which time it was to be no crime to take violent action against them.
These decrees set the tone for further ordinances promulgated by princes, dukes, and other rulers,
especially throughout the German lands, which were preoccupied with alleged espionage of the
Gypsies and ordering their banishment from a growing number of principalities. Overall, these
measures seem to have had little practical effect in the following decades, since new safe-conduct
papers continued to appear in the hands of Romani leaders. For example, in 1512 one such safe
conduct was granted by the Polish Duke Bogislav X, ruling over parts of Pomerania, to Ludwig von
Rothenburg, count of “Little Egypt,” to help him on his way to Gdansk together with his “zyganisch”
company. The Diet issued new expulsion acts in 1544 and 1548, and in 1551 it declared any pass
carried by a Gypsy to be void, and banned all such documents in the future (Fraser, 1995: 88).

Events followed similar patterns in the Swiss regions of the Holy Roman Empire. In 1471 the
Tagsatzung (Diet) in Lucerne ruled that Gypsies were not to be housed or sheltered within the Swiss
Confederation; in 1477 the city-state of Geneva (outside the confederation) expelled a number of
“Saracens.” In 1510, again at Lucerne, after complaints that they stole and were dangerous,
“Zegynen” were banished from the confederation and faced the penalty of hanging if they returned.
Despite this, complaints against them continued; at a Diet at Berne in 1516, instructions were
given to take special care in keeping them out at the frontiers. About the same time, Geneva had
also banned all “Saracens.” These measures did not have much effect, for in 1525 a new banishment
act had to be issued, which was then reissued two years later. Yet at a Diet in Baden in 1530, it
was noted that Gypsies were wandering about everywhere. They were once again outlawed, but then in
1532 the question was back on the agenda, with the same rulings reinstated (Fraser, 1995: 89-90).

Persecution of the Gypsies in Spain and Portugal developed according to similar patterns. In 1499,
seven years after the expulsion of the Jews, a royal decree stated that the “Egyptians” could
either become sedentary and find masters within 60 days or face expulsion (Fraser, 1995: 97).
Similar measures were enacted in the Low Countries and Italy. In Hungary, the Gypsies were treated
with a greater degree of tolerance than was usual for the time, although a form of bondage was
imposed on some of them, especially in Transylvania, where serfdom was not abolished until 1848
(Fraser, 1995: 106). Apart from their metal-working skills, the Gypsies had also begun to acquire a
reputation as musicians in Hungary.

Despite examples of initial welcoming policies in England, anti-Gypsy legislation began to appear
toward the end of the reign of Henry VIII. The measures extended well beyond the Gypsies to
vagrancy generally, which in Tudor England was a pressing problem. “Vagabondage” had been growing
for years as a result of enclosure and the break up of the old system of farming, which put
thousands of agricultural workers out on the roads. Vagrants were persecuted as a matter of
national priority, for, at a time when the able-bodied poor were supposed to have masters, this
large and growing unemployed and landless population appeared to the dominant classes to be a major
threat. The most draconian Tudor statute against vagrants was that of 1547, in the first year of
Edward VI, when the prospect of a lengthy period of rule before maturity by the boy-king brought
with it the possibility of factional feuds and made any increase in the size of the vagrant classes
appear highly dangerous (Fraser, 1995: 114). According to a 1554 law, Gypsy nomad males had to be
killed, and Elizabeth I introduced the death penalty also for anyone who befriended “Egyptians.” In
1577, eight English were hanged under this law. In 1541 in Scotland an Order in Council revoked all
letters of protection, safe conduct, and other privileges and banished Gypsies from the kingdom
within 30 days, on pain of death.

In Scandinavia, the Roma were first thought to be Tartars. “Tattare” remained the most widespread
designation for the Roma in Sweden until the seventeenth century, when “zigenare,” under the
influence of German, also came into use (Fraser, 1995: 120). Anti-Gypsy laws in Sweden (1637)
provided for the hanging of males. Danish tolerance also came to an end a little more than 30 years
after the first appearance of the Roma. In 1536, and again in 1554, Christian III of Denmark and
Norway ordered all Gypsies to leave his kingdom within three months; because the enforcement
failed, his son Frederick II renewed the ban and stiffened the penalties in 1561.

Approximately 148 anti-Gypsy laws were passed in German lands between fifteenth and eighteenth
centuries. Mainz in 1714 passed a law mandating death for all Romani males and beating and branding
of females and children (Kenrick and Grattan, 1972: 42-45).

Most authors agree that the anti-Gypsy laws were not enforced expeditiously and that it took quite
a long time for repression to become the rule in the European treatment of the nomadic Gypsies. The
same decrees had to be reissued many times in the course of decades before they began to be
eventually implemented. In France, for example, anti-Gypsy laws banishing the “bohemians” and
providing penalties if they were caught inside the kingdom were promulgated in 1504, 1510, 1522,
1534, 1539, 1561, 1606, 1647, 1660, and 1666. This delay may be the combination of a general
negligence toward the Gypsies as a nonimportant and nonurgent issue, a nuisance rather than a
threat to society, which resulted in a low-intensity terror that allowed the Roma to survive in
Western Europe (Demeter et al., 2000: 27). Apart from the lack of high alert when it came to the
Gypsies, slow and weak implementation of repressive measures in the fifteenth century was perhaps
also the result of the feudal fragmentation of Europe, making law enforcement dependent exclusively
on local lords.

With time, however, repression strengthened and anti-Gypsy laws began to be implemented more
strictly and uniformly across the territory of sovereigns, in line with the process of nation
building in modern Europe. Some of the Roma, specifically those in Germany, were forced back
eastward to escape further victimization, crossing Poland and making inroads in Russia during the
seventeenth century.

The root causes for the negative turn in European hospitality and the growth of repression against
the Roma are not so much the harm caused by Romani crime (although this perhaps played a role) as
the general change in the European cultural climate, driven by the rise of Protestantism.
Anti-Gypsy laws and other persecution of the Roma are best understood in the context of the fight
against vagrancy and other forms of idleness that surged in sixteenth-century Europe. Ethnicity
played a lesser role. Antivagrancy moods were directed against the huge variety of traveling groups
in medieval Europe that were protected by religious and mundane powers: crowds of pilgrims that had
to be hosted as a matter of religious duty, minstrels, troubadours, knights, actors, and traveling
indigent monks (such as the Franciscans) living off alms. The Roma became victims of this new
historic tide of Protestant work ethics that denounced clerical ceremonial luxury and greed but
together with it purged patience for beggars and the like, condemning all forms of life that seemed
nonproductive. The process of enclosures in England also added to the antivagrancy sentiment. Even
in the countries that remained Catholic, the influence of the Protestant worldview could be felt.

The Roma were swept along by this wave, since it was particularly difficult for them to adapt to
the new cultural norms. Due to their distinct physical appearance, and the survival strategies
consolidating their difference at the community level, it was much more difficult for them to find
regular work and blend into the surrounding population. Internal kinship patterns and a distinct
tradition also played a role. Additionally, integration was impeded by certain inertia in the
nonproductive way of life in the first 100 years of their presence in Western Europe and especially
by the real or perceived propensity for petty stealing from individual owners, which, in Europe,
had long been treated as both sinful and criminal. Ultimately, the main difference that set the
Roma apart was that they were the only ethnically distinct nomadic communities in a civilization
that had been non-nomadic for centuries.

While Western Europe was trying with growing hostility to drive the Roma out, the Byzantine and
later the Ottoman civilizations surrounded them with detached resentment but never tried to expel
them. The negative stereotype similar to that in the West was in place. But the Roma were not
subjected to official persecution and some categories (depending on religion, occupation, and
geographic region) were even somewhat privileged in terms of taxation. Some were apparently
regarded as useful service providers, especially blacksmiths and other types of metal workers.
Gypsy craftsmen, for example, had privileges in Peloponnesus already in 1378 and Crete in 1386, as
well as in the following centuries throughout the Ottoman Empire (Marushiakova and Popov, 2000).

Enslavement of the Roma in the vassal principalities of Wallachia and Moldavia during Ottoman rule
of the Balkans lasted for almost five centuries and had a devastating effect on the prospects for
societal integration. Specific forms of slave-like dependency (domestic serfs, serfs belonging to
churches and monasteries, and nomadic serfs with fixed occupations) began to emerge in the
fourteenth century as a result of the increasingly strict measures taken by the landlords, the
aristocracy, and the monasteries to prevent their skilled and precious Romani labor force from
leaving their domains (Hancock, 2002: 18). Slavery, which had deprived between 200,000 and 600,000
Roma of their civil rights, was officially abolished by the Moldavian and Wallachian parliaments in
1855 and 1856, respectively, but complete legal freedom was established only in 1864, two years
after the creation of Romania as an independent unitary state. Mihail Kogalniceanu, the leader of
the new nation, introduced a land reform redistributing the land to the former serfs as free
peasants.[4] During the second half of the nineteenth and the beginning of the twentieth centuries,
large groups of Vlax Roma migrated from Romanian lands to many parts of the world, including
Russia, Ukraine, and the Americas.

For the Roma who live today in countries that were once part of the Habsburg Austro-Hungarian
Empire, the forced assimilation policies of Maria Theresa, the empress of Austria, have left a
lasting legacy. In late eighteenth century, speaking the Romani language and use of Romani names
were criminalized and many Romani children were taken away from their parents to be socialized in
non-Romani families. Because of the assimilation pressure, most Roma in Hungary today have lost
their traditions and language. They have been affected in less tangible ways, too, by over two
centuries of corrupting co-optation of their leaders and the inculcation of cultural attitudes that
value cooperation and discourage protest.

In Russia, around the time of the 1917 October Revolution, the Roma living in the central and
northern parts of the country were mainly horse-trading nomads or seminomads, renting village homes
in winter but traveling during the warmer season. A relatively smaller number was settled and among
them the musicians were the aristocracy. At the same time, in Ukraine and south Russia, the Roma
were craftsmen (particularly blacksmiths) and many Romani women were fortune-tellers. The older
Russian stereotype of Roma is dominated by the perception of Roma as dealers in horses and horse
thieves; during the Soviet era this stereotype transformed, with the Roma seen as dealers in cars
and car thieves.

It is not possible to fully explain the European majority stereotypes about the Roma on the basis
of history alone. However, the cursory glance into the history of the Roma offered earlier suggests
that the formative historical event that forged the core of the anti-Gypsy stereotype is the
fifteenth-century encounter of the nomadic Roma with Western European civilization. It was in
fifteenth-century Western Europe that the poisonous tincture of anti-Gypsism was concocted. Later
developments, both in Western Europe and in other regions where Roma were seen, served to spread
the primal image and to vary it with local specificities related to their predominant occupation.
When the Roma completed their journey from East to West, an opposite journey began, that of the
fictional Gypsies from the West to everywhere.


Anti-Gypsism: Understanding Is Not Excusing

Understanding anti-Gypsy prejudice is deceptively easy. But, even though much has been said in the
literature as well as by the anti-racism movements, a strong sense of dissatisfaction remains. What
is it that makes the Roma such an eternal target for the racists? Why are Roma so universally
despised? Why is the negative sentiment so entrenched? Why do the Roma remain Europe’s most
persecuted minority, even after so much energy has been poured into eradicating anti-Gypsism? Will
the Roma ever become equal members of society? Everyone who has watched Roma-related developments
over the years has experienced moments of confusion and despair at the magnitude of these
questions.

The single most important concept that helps explain anti-Gypsy prejudice is weakness. To put it
simply, Roma would not have been ignored, resented, insulted, humiliated, and repressed if they had
power. Looking at the historic experience of the Roma, and comparing the Roma with other ethnic
groups, suggests that the uniqueness of the Roma consists in an extraordinary historically rooted
structural weakness. Because of their late arrival in Europe and strong cultural difference, the
Roma have failed to use the quintessential empowerment strategy available to other groups: building
a nation-state. Inhabitants of the margins and alien to political passions, the Roma have not used
the sanctioning potential of the vote, either.

The fatal combination of a strong “otherness” and a historically very late arrival in a settled
(non-nomadic) Europe impeded not only state building, but also integration, assimilation, and even
extermination of the Roma. Otherness was physical as well as cultural: very dark skin (it is
believed that the Roma were darker when they first reached European lands), distinct non-European
features (again, it is alleged that their appearance was less European seven centuries ago than it
is today); “odd” clothes and language; unintelligible and inaccessible customs that seemed even
more alien because the Roma preferred to keep apart from the gadje. The visible cultural
difference, especially the nomadic way of life, created a bias against the moral values of the
Roma. The fact that the tabor is here today and gone tomorrow does not contribute to a reputation
for responsibility. The departed are ideal suspects for all kinds of crime in the settled
community. At times, in northern Europe, particularly in Scandinavia, Roma were also seen as a
threat to Christendom and often confused with Turks or Tartars. Their religious life, too, has
never been treated by the outside world without suspicion. Their alleged involvement with magic
made their religious practices, whether Christian Orthodox, Protestant, Catholic, or Muslim, appear
to be a hypocritical cover up for an esoteric spirituality or an irreligious cynicism.

History contains clues but they do not explain the longevity and the profoundness of anti-Gypsism.
What cannot be grasped through historical interpretation can perhaps be elucidated from the point
of view of the place of the Roma in the structure of twentieth-century European societies. The Roma
continue to occupy a pariah place in twentieth-century and present-day European societies and
remain a target for hate accumulation, as well as a perfect scapegoat.

If the key to understanding anti-Gypsism in a historic perspective is in the Weberian link between
Protestant ethics and the spirit of capitalism, the perceived Roma noninvolvement (or very weak
involvement) with modern industrial and postindustrial capitalism in Western Europe in the
nineteenth and twentieth centuries is key to understanding the longevity of the prejudice. The Nazi
extermination of the Roma during World War II was undoubtedly the greatest catastrophe in the
history of this people. Nazi racist pseudoscience defined the Gypsies of mixed, impure origin as an
inferior race (despite ascribing “Aryan” ancestors to those Roma who had remained uncontaminated by
racial mixing). The Nazis killed between 500,000 and 1.5 million Roma, according to different
authors who are contributing to the growing body of literature on the Porajmos (the somewhat
controversial Romani word that is becoming established as the Romani analogue of the Shoah; see
Hancock, 2002: 34-51; Lewy, 2000; Kenrick and Puxton, 1972). Space constraints preclude even
beginning a discussion of this most horrible chapter in the history of the Roma. But we should
emphasize that, following World War II, anti-Gypsism, very much like anti-Semitism, did not
disappear from European societies. Yet the attention the Roma Porajmos received in Western society
and literature in the last few decades is not commensurate with the attention given the destruction
of the European Jewry. This fact itself is symptomatic: it is one of the most revealing signs of
the continuing political weakness of the Roma. At the level of racist prejudice, the core of the
anti-Gypsist stereotype remained more or less the same: Roma continue to be seen, even after the
Nazi genocide, as parasitic elements, alien to the principle of productivity and its underlying
values.

But if the destiny of the Roma in the capitalist world after World War II can be seen as a
continuation of their profound incompatibility with capitalist rationalization, what was the
destiny of the much larger Romani communities that lived under communism? If the Gypsies were not
fit for capitalism, did they not fit into a radically different social and political system?

The Soviet government created Gypsy production cooperatives, which enabled some of the Roma,
notably Kalderara, to settle in big cities. In rural areas, Gypsy cooperative farms (kolkhozy) were
also established. Both forms of collectivization, however, existed for a short time and disappeared
toward the end of the 1930s. Only around 3 percent of the Gypsies were involved in the experiment.
In the difficult postwar period, many Roma in the Soviet Union who had been already settled
reverted to a nomadic lifestyle and stayed in large groups (tabors) in the suburbs of big cities.
In 1956, a decree issued by the Soviet government outlawed vagrancy and ordered coercive
sedentarization of the Gypsies. Measures enforcing mandatory settling of the Gypsies duly followed
throughout the communist countries of Eastern Europe and were based on similar decrees. As
Marushiakova and Popov explain (2003: 8), these have to date been evaluated in ideological terms.
From a communist point of view, they have been described as integration into the “socialist way of
life,” while the West has seen them as violations of Roma human rights. In fact, the antinomadism
measures mandating the inclusion of the Gypsies in the socialist labor force are better understood,
at least in the Soviet Union, as recognition of the failure of preceding state policy regarding
this minority. The Soviet 1956 decree made the Roma obey laws and norms that had been mandatory for
everyone else in the Soviet society since the 1920s.

The Brezhnev era of economic stagnation is remembered today by the Roma in the former Soviet
countries as an affluent, prosperous time. In the shortage economy of that period, people had money
but there were permanent deficits of basic goods that shifted from item to item and from region to
region, and deficit commodities appearing irrationally at some place immediately produced queues
and speculation. This status quo was a result of the (inefficient) central planning system. It
provided the highly mobile and flexible Roma with better opportunities to fill the niches of
mediators and distributors in a parallel, unofficial economy of redistribution through what had
been illegal commercial activities. The Roma bought in one place and sold many hundreds of miles
away a variety of goods, from chewing gum to electronics smuggled from abroad. At the same time, in
the non-Soviet communist camp, the Roma, though faithfully married to a pariah image, were well on
their way to occupying the lowest strata of the working class.

A paradoxical situation thus emerged during the Cold War. In Western Europe, many Roma, whose
numbers were considerably lower than in the east, preserved a nomadic way of life. Roma remained
more distinct in cultural terms while almost invisible politically, and had no place, at the level
of public imagination, in the productive classes contributing to the community. At the same time,
under communism, they were too “capitalist,” often punished for “speculation” and illegal trading.
Crime associated with the Roma also displaced them from the world of socialist productive labor.
The Gypsies did not fit on either side of the Iron Curtain. On both sides, they were despised as
parasites, but for opposite reasons regarding what constitutes a valuable contribution to society.
In both worlds, they occupied social spaces not captured by the dominant discipline, whether that
of capitalist enterprise or socialist labor.

In recent years, it has become fashionable to underscore the deep difference between the social and
political background of Roma in Eastern as opposed to Western Europe and North America. This is why
it is important here, especially when trying to understand the ubiquitous nature of the anti-Romani
bias, to grasp the essential element of anti-Gypsism that Western and Eastern European public
opinions have in common: the perception of the Roma’s parasitic existence and, hence, the
deep-seated attitude that the Gypsies are subhuman.

It can be argued (as I do elsewhere: see Petrova, 2000) that the denial of racism is gradually
becoming the most typical expression of racist attitudes. “Denial of racism” is meant in the sense
that a) the suffering of victims of racism, b) the existence of attitudes in oneself or society
that makes this suffering possible, and c) the existence of practices and institutions of racism,
are denied.

The denial of racism is a reaction to the post-World War II sanction of racism. In my view,
racism’s presence is denied more vehemently in those cultures, which, following the Second World
War, have done more to limit racism and related intolerance. Denial is a manifestation of a certain
level of accomplishment in implementing a human rights and antiracism agenda in a society. In
Western democratic societies, for example, most people who share racist opinions and act
accordingly, would deny that they are racist, since racism is officially and culturally condemned,
while tolerance, racial equality, and human rights are dominant ideological values. Thus, at
present racism is rarely a self-description; increasingly, and under the influence of Western
democracies and the international antiracism movement, it is becoming a label applied to groups or
individuals as perceived by others. Although explicitly racist groups and parties exist, the larger
part of today’s racists, who hold people of certain ethnic background in contempt or hostility, at
the same time oppose being described as racists. Austria’s Freedom Party experienced a dramatic
rise in popularity following a change of leadership in the mid-1980s, which brought the demagogic,
charismatic Jorg Haider to its head and with him a newly invigorated populist, antiforeigner
language, together with a renewed belittling of Austria’s complicity in the racist crimes of the
Third Reich. Nevertheless, most of the party members and supporters deny its racist character.

Anti-Gypsism, a powerful form of present-day racism, is also frequently manifested in the rhetoric
of denial. Examples of the rhetoric of denial include:


·              Arguing that race/ethnicity problems are social and economic problems: Government
officials from Eastern Europe have said, in effect, that “We are not racist, and do not
discriminate. We have no problem with the race or ethnicity of the Roma, but this group is
economically and socially weak. The fact that its members are of the same, namely Romani ethnicity,
is unimportant (irrelevant, accidental, etc.).” In this case, the government has an excuse for not
dealing with race discrimination as an urgent issue;

·              Posing the “equality before the law” argument: This argument lays stress on existing
allegedly equal protection by the law. The claim is that “Roma are equal before the law, and
therefore do not suffer discrimination in my country; anything that would favor them over others is
unfair.”

·              Raising the “equal opportunity” (meritocratic) argument: “The members of the Roma
ethnic group enjoy equal opportunities with everyone else in our society. How they use these
opportunities is up to them. The fact that they do not make good use of their opportunities is not
our fault. People ultimately get what they deserve.”

·              Blaming the victims: “The Roma must have done something wrong, if not the current
generation then previous; otherwise they would not have ended up in such misery/in prison/on the
street.”

·              Recasting race difference as mental disability: “Romani children are not ready for
general public schools.”

·              Recasting race difference as a behavioral disorder.

·              Emphasizing duties as a precondition for the enjoyment of rights: “If the Roma do
not fulfill their duty X, they cannot claim their right Y.”

·              Engaging in denial with the “positive example” argument: “Look at those Roma who
made it to the top of society, the company, etc.”

·              Engaging in denial by disclaimer: “Some of my best friends are Roma”; or “I am not
racist, because in my building there lived a Romani family, and I had a very good relationship with
them.”

·              Employing the romanticizing stereotype: The romantic stereotype of Roma includes
elements such as musical and dancing talent, capability of passionate love and other strong
emotions, spontaneity, free and spiritual character, magical relatedness to nature, ability to
enjoy themselves.


Almost none of these rhetorical forms of racist denial, taken in isolation, would be sufficient to
describe a racist attitude. Racist statements are contextual. It is also noteworthy that most forms
of denial are characterized by easy availability, comments on the causes of racially based
disadvantage that, at the level of non-reflective everyday discourse, are never in short supply
(for example, “Roma drop out of school because they are poor”). Yet, the person making this
statement will say a moment later, “They are poor because they don’t study well.” Being “logical”
is not among the qualities of “ideological” thoughts. Only upon reflection is it revealed that
racist rationalizations are not rational and often form a vicious circle.

Even leaders of human rights NGOs tend to deny that Roma are victims of systematic, racially
motivated violence. Despite dozens of cases of racially motivated violent crimes committed by law
enforcement officials and nonstate actors, documented and broadly publicized by the European Roma
Rights Center (ERRC) (see ERRC, July 1998), Human Rights Watch, and others, the chair of the
premier human rights NGO in Macedonia could still write in 2002 on the treatment of the Roma: “The
lack of an open discriminatory approach, violent behavior or attempts for forced assimilation is
characteristic for Macedonia. There have been no cases of violence that had been caused by ethnic
motivations or which would have elements of organized intolerance towards the Roma as a distinct
ethnic group” (Najcevska, 2002: 84).

I would suggest interpreting anti-Gypsism as a set of misconceptions and myths, both expressing and
reproducing the sociopolitical weakness of the Romani community. Misconceptions are false ideas
about the Roma as they are today, even though misconceptions may have started in the past from some
elements of truth. Myths, on the other hand, are not untruths: they are practical truths one can
take as assumptions and reach pragmatic results, when acting upon these assumptions. But myths are
not truths either: they would cease to be truths as soon as people cease to believe them.


Misconceptions about the Roma

The Misconception of Nomadism

Only some Roma in a few Western European countries (France, Ireland, Netherlands, the United
Kingdom) are still nomadic, with large caravans having long ago replaced horse carts. The
overwhelming majority of the Roma throughout the world have been settled for decades--some for
centuries. But the association of Roma with nomadism nevertheless remains strong (on the
manipulative misconception of official Italian policy, for example, see ERRC, October 2000: 8-12).
As Fraser wrote, “Settled people, on the whole, do not trust nomads; and in a European society
where the majority were pressed into a life of piety, serfdom and drudgery, Gypsies represented a
blatant negation of all the essential values and premises on which the dominant morality was based”
(Fraser, 1995: 126). On the other hand, in the European mind the nomad is wrapped in a cloud of
romantic fantasy--a perception of freedom understood as carelessness.[5]  An intrinsic element of
this fantasy is the unrepressed Gypsy woman—“Carmen” or “Esmeralda” dancing in harmony with nature.
In this context one can also see the economic element of the stereotype, encompassing the Gypsy
attitude to money and accumulation of wealth. Roma are still believed to be uninterested in
long-term security and to regard wealth as a means to show their status in the community. Their
consumption patterns have also been explained as hand-to-mouth attitudes bordering on
irresponsibility. The lack of saving strategies, which is caused by elementary poverty and
discriminatory rejection by the official credit institutions, is misunderstood as a conscious
choice.


The Misconception of Romani Crime

Historic sources do support the view that some of the Roma–those moving into Western
Europe–resorted to stealing as a means of subsistence. Fortune telling and other forms of
mystification, such as forging safe conducts, or the legend of the religious pilgrimage used by the
Roma in Western Europe to ensure safety and extort privileges, money, and other benefits, helped
congeal their reputation as a people with low sense of morals. But the construction of this
reputation took place five or six centuries ago. Yet today, the Gypsies remain married to crime in
the public mind. Crime is a form of social control. Different societies have different ideas of
what constitutes a higher danger to their existence. Those actions and practices that are seen as
dangerous are arranged in a hierarchy of crimes. Crime statistics in some countries have revealed a
pattern of overrepresentation of Roma in several types of crime, notably petty stealing. But it
should be remembered that crime statistics necessarily contain distortions. They are based on
reported crime, and do not necessarily reflect the entire picture of committed offences. Robbery is
a crime that has a high degree of reporting, while many other crimes, including corruption,
fraudulent financial schemes such as pyramids, or domestic violence, go unreported. An act of petty
robbery typically leaves behind one victim, while an act of financial fraud can destroy hundreds.
Thus the visibility of robbery and of its individual perpetrators is much higher, while other, not
less dangerous forms of crime lie below the surface of society. Roma are overrepresented in crime
statistics especially when figures are not broken down by type of offence. Also, because of the
kinds of crime reported to the police, the crimes in which Roma are suspects are investigated more
vigorously. Of all pretrial investigations, those in which Roma are suspects are more likely to
reach the court room; and of all court trials, those in which Roma are defendants are more likely
to result in convictions. The convicted Roma are more likely to receive longer prison terms, with
the result that they are significantly overrepresented in the prison population. Thus, it is
misleading to claim the Roma have a “criminal propensity” based on crime statistics and the number
of Roma in prison.

Still, one cannot deny the existence of Roma crime, as righteous proponents of the “Romani cause”
sometimes do. It is more important to understand its nature and also to realize that Roma are also
victims, not only of ordinary crime but of crimes with racial animus as well.

The Romani crime stereotype includes other elements of prejudice, especially the bizarre and
thoroughly unfounded “stealing of children” legend that has metamorphosed into the current public
misperception that Roma are exploiting their own children by making them engage in begging; it is a
fast growing belief that Roma are involved in trafficking in children and women. In the last few
years, and especially in the aftermath of September 11, 2001, Roma migration has slipped into the
realm of crime in public discourse.


The Misconception of the Roma’s Unwillingness to Integrate

Scores of politicians, experts, and lawmakers have reiterated the widespread belief that the Romani
minority’s problems stem from their unwillingness to integrate into mainstream society. Is there
anything true in this view? Undeniably, the Romani culture has historically been relatively closed
and inaccessible to outsiders (Hancock, 2002: 67-68), which would be expected from a community
constantly at risk. The period of persecution based on anti-Gypsy law in Western and Central Europe
(sixteenth to eighteenth centuries) had immense consequences for later Romani history. It served to
conserve a nomadic way of life for large groups of Roma in Western Europe and consolidated the
Romani ethnic community on the basis of a victim mentality. While in Eastern Europe Roma were in
the twentieth century well on their way to losing their traditions and becoming almost entirely
sedentary, Western European Roma still remain more inward looking and protective of their
tradition. This is most typical of the Sinti groups, which still express a strong preference to
remain separate. However, the closed character of the Romani culture is no more. Research has
consistently demonstrated that, given the choice, Roma prefer to integrate, rather than live in a
segregated, parallel society. Roma today are struggling for equal and just participation in
mainstream society, while wishing to preserve their unique culture.


The Misconception of the Romani Attitude to Education

As recently as 2002, scholarly articles continued to repeat--together with governmental officials
and various educators–that “Roma parents frequently do not regard education as necessary and do not
encourage their children to stay in school” (Friedrich Ebert Schtiftung, 2002: 19). This is,
perhaps, the most dangerous myth, since it hinders efforts of critical importance for the
advancement of the Roma–namely, ensuring access to quality education for the current generation of
Romani children.

Many other misconceptions are related to the Roma. European society needs to acknowledge these and
develop a better understanding of the fact that Roma are our contemporaries and fellow citizens,
defined primarily by their link to the society in which they live, not those of nineteenth-century
literary fiction.


From the Gypsy Myth to Romani Reality

It is tempting to formulate a series of negations that express the weakness of the Roma when
compared with other ethnocultural groups: Roma lack that which most other nations have. They have
no state, no history, no army, no language, no religion, no ethnicity, and no spirit of solidarity.
Let us look briefly at each of these composite parts of the contemporary Gypsy myth.

No state: Roma are thought not to have a sense of a common country of origin. Only in the last few
decades has it become established that they originate from India. But there are even today many
Roma who do not know this. Even more significant, Roma never attempted to establish statehood in
Europe and are believed to have no territorial aspirations.

No history: Roma have no history in the sense of an official and institutionalized nationalistic,
Romacentric grand narrative, complete with national heroes and a shared historic consciousness.

No military force: It is widely believed that Roma have never been involved in military activities,
nor have they been freedom fighters taking up arms to achieve their collective goals.

No language: The language spoken by Roma is viewed as a set of dialects that do not allow fluent
communication across geographic space. It is stressed that there is no normative vocabulary or
grammar and no sufficient institutional framework by which to develop them.

No religion: The Roma usually adopt the confession of the surrounding majority, while some
underlying beliefs and magic-related customs vary widely across their communities. Unlike Jews, for
example, Roma have no sacred book to act as a unifying device.

No ethnicity: It is commonly believed throughout Europe that Gypsies are not a separate ethnic
group at all, but a mix of people made up of the marginalized fringes of many different societies.
Hancock (2002: 31) even quotes a nineteenth-century belief that the Gypsies deliberately stain
their faces with green nutshell to increase their ugliness and more easily induce naive people to
believe that they come from the Orient. In 1633, the Spanish King Philip IV considered the Roma to
be Spanish rogues who had made up an artificial language.

No solidarity: A frequently repeated observation refers to the fragmentation of Romani political
efforts, resulting in a predictable inefficiency. "Gypsy work" in many languages is synonymous with
quarrel, irrational communication, lack of trust among the participants, badmouthing and stabbing
in the back, and ultimately, utter incompetence in handling any endeavor.

All these are elements of a myth. Romani nationhood (if not a territorial statehood), official
history, armed power potential, normative language, solid ethnocultural identity, religion, and
group solidarity are all possibilities, with each having reached a certain stage of its
realization. However, at this time the myth is still a practical truth that participates in
reproducing the weakness of the Roma in sociopolitical terms. The elements of the Gypsy myth spell
out the non-Romani majority idea of what constitutes the power of a people.

Let us note, however, that the classical nationalistic idea of power is increasingly anachronistic.
Nonclassical resources of negotiating and sanctioning power are developing in the world and the
Roma have the chance to tap into them. Indeed, this is exactly what is happening with the advancing
Romani movement: it is reaching out to economic, political, and cultural actors and alliances other
than those existing in the context of a classical nation-state. Paradoxically, exactly because the
Roma are latecomers to the nation-state universe, they may be the forerunners of new forms of the
exercise of power and power participation.

Even the simple mention of the aforementioned absences as specific elements of the Romani
experience is likely to be met with resistance by Roma themselves. For example, group solidarity is
growing in the Romani movement and has become inherent in the rules of the struggle for power
inside the community and in representing the Roma to the outside world. The building of a Romani
ethnocultural identity is under way. And we observe both internal homogenization and fortification
of the borders of the Romani identity. The standardization of Romani language is also taking place.
It is not historically accurate that Roma have never fought in armies. For example, in Sweden
during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, in Russia and in other areas, Roma males served in
the army and their families were sustained by the military as well (Etzler, n.d.: 83-84). There is
no ground to believe that Roma are immune to the option of resorting to violent armed struggle only
because no major uprising has taken place in the past. Romani historiography as well will soon
progress to the point that a certain canon will prevail and the white spots will be included and
encapsulated. Finally, self-determination has been the subject of recent discussions among Romani
elites (Project on Ethnic Relations, 2003: 4). The controversial idea, launched in July 2000 by the
International Romani Union, that Roma should be internationally recognized as an exterritorial
nation and as a subject of public international law, is being debated among Roma. The prospect of
Romani statehood seems utterly unrealistic, of course, yet a statist thinking pattern whose
teleology is a state-like formation can be read between the lines of the Romani struggle for power.

Roma Rights: A Counterpoint to Anti-Gypsism

Roma rights discourse, which was triggered in 1996 with the formation of the European Roma Rights
Center, has identified racism, intolerance, discrimination, and exclusion as the daily reality of
the Roma in Europe. The Roma rights discourse is developing according to the standards of
international human rights discourse. It is a bridge to reality in the sense that its
conceptualizations are seeking to deconstruct the Gypsy myth and, with minimal concessions to
political correctness or other ideological censorship, point in the direction of a world in which
being Roma is not in any way a reduction from general humanity. For example, if a full-time Romani
employee does not come to her office for a number of days for no reason and if her supervisor
pretends not to notice, in the name of affirmative action or political correctness, or for fear of
being seen as racist, we have in place of the real person another myth: the righteous Romani victim
of discrimination. In activist organizations employing Roma or working with Roma, this occurs
frequently. One day, a supervisor who is not a racist will treat an abusive Romani employee without
prejudice and act exactly the same as if the person in question were not Romani. At this point,
"Roma" will at last cease being an ideology and will become reality. (The example is somewhat
artificial to make the point that Roma rights is a discourse and not a reality; it is a much more
likely scenario, in Eastern Europe at least, that a racially biased boss would happily fire a
Romani employee who failed to make the necessary excuses for not coming to work.)

The Roma, however, remain a pariah minority almost everywhere. In many countries they are not
officially recognized as a minority at all. In some countries, such as Greece and Turkey, the
problem of the Roma status is compounded by the low level of recognition, within society, of its
multicultural reality. Some states explicitly recognize the Roma as a national or ethnic minority
(Hungary, Macedonia, Romania) or as a culturally autonomous nation (Russia), but there is no
successful model of either autonomous self-government or equal participation in mainstream
institutions.

The economic situation of the Roma deteriorated during the first decade of postcommunism at a speed
that dwarfed that of any other ethnic group. Analysts who have described communist societies in
terms of social equality, full employment, and obligatory education, as well as ethnic homogeneity,
have stressed that the rapid unraveling of the economic status of the Roma in the 1990s is due
exclusively to the new forces of nationalism, racism, xenophobia, and other forms of intolerance
specific to postcommunism. Anti-Gypsism features prominently among the new hate ideologies. A very
large part of the Roma at present expresses nostalgic appreciation of the communist past and a
tendency to divide the blame for their current economic disadvantage between capitalism and racial
discrimination.

While both are indeed part of the root causes of today’s Romani poverty, there is another factor
less frequently invoked, namely, the disadvantaged starting position of the Roma at the threshold
of the new system around 1990. Social equality never existed in the societies of "real socialism."
The Roma in Central and Eastern Europe occupied the lowest strata of the working classes. They had
the lowest levels of education and income, were mainly employed as unskilled workers in industry,
construction, forestry, and in some unattractive occupations, such as garbage collection and
slaughterhouse personnel. Thus, there was nothing close to an equal start for the Roma in the
postcommunist economy.

This explanation, however, is inaccurate regarding the Roma and similar Gypsy groups in Russia,
Ukraine, and arguably other former Soviet republics. Unlike Central and Eastern Europe, in the
countries of the former Soviet Union the Gypsies, including the Roma, were never fully
proletarianized. They largely remained outside the social engineering projects of the central
authorities. As was mentioned earlier, they occupied the niches of unofficial intermediaries in the
informal sector, profiting from their role as unregulated merchants and distributors in the
shortage economy. This role was made possible by a preservation of a higher degree of mobility and
self-reliance than was the case in Central and Eastern Europe. While the Roma in Hungary or
Bulgaria were the poorest members of the communist labor force, those in the Soviet Union were
relatively prosperous. Their rapid decline after the fall of communism is the result of a different
dynamic. In the Brezhnev era, large sections of the Roma community were part of the socioeconomic
elites, their living standards higher than the Soviet average, because of their positions as
profitable mediators in a shortage economy. After the end of communism, the Roma in the 1990s found
the stores filled with a variety of goods and a market that quickly developed services at the same
time that the average consumer lost her purchasing power. The need for mediation between money
holders and commodities disappeared, and Roma were set on a path to economic decline. Most tried to
legalize their business activities, but regardless of whether they operated legally, semilegally,
or illegally, the Roma simply lost their competitive edge in the face of the new financial
oligarchy and its numerous mafia-like branches (Marushiakova and Popov, 2003). Still, many Romani
families in the former Soviet Union retain to date their economically stronger position, as
compared with the Roma of Central and Eastern Europe, for whom rampant poverty is the rule.

Although reliable economic statistics on the Roma’s situation in these countries are not available,
abundant evidence can be found that the image of the Roma is increasingly worsening. Anti-Gypsism
appears to be extremely high in the former Soviet countries as well, judging from the increasing
number of racist attacks targeting the Roma in Russia and Ukraine, and the yet unchallenged
portrayal of Roma in the media as bandits, drug dealers, and traffickers.

Recent economic and social statistics testify to the overall low status of the Roma in European
societies. For example, over 40 percent of Roma in Bulgaria, the Czech Republic, Hungary, Romania,
and Slovakia are unemployed (UNDP, 2002: 2), compared with one-digit unemployment figures for the
general population. Only 10 percent of Romani schoolchildren in Croatia eventually finish
elementary school (Radakovic, 2002: 57). In Yugoslavia, the Roma are the ethnic group with the
highest illiteracy rate, 34.8 percent, and the largest percentage of people who have not finished
elementary school, 78.7 percent. The share of Roma who have graduated from college is just 0.4
percent (Mitrovic, 2000: 161.) According to a survey on the health conditions of the Roma in Borsod
County in northeast Hungary, published in November 2002 (Czene, 2002), the life expectancy of the
Romani population is approximately 10 years lower than that of other groups. Ninety percent of
Romani households in the county are without natural gas and between 40 and 50 percent are without
water. One-quarter of the Roma between the ages of 19 and 39 have not graduated from primary
school. According to this Hungarian survey, 75 percent of Romani men and 90 percent of Romani women
in the county are permanently unemployed. The survey reveals that a substantial portion of the
Romani population suffers from illnesses that can be traced back to their extremely poor living
conditions. The prevalence of tuberculosis among the Roma is 10 times higher than the national
average. The incidence of malignant tumors is also higher. According to the survey, iron-deficiency
abscess, said to be a typical disease in developing countries, afflicts the Roma 10 times more
often than the national average. Approximately 8 percent of the Romani population suffers from
illnesses of psychological origin (stress, despair). Since, in general, drugs are too expensive,
Roma tend to use cheap organic dissolvents and other psychoactive substances. As a result of this,
drug-related illnesses are four times more frequent among the Roma than the rest of society. This
could be a snapshot of the economic and social disadvantage of Roma in almost any corner of any
country where Roma live.

Roma are more likely to have suffered the consequences of natural disaster, especially floods and
fires, because their settlements and homes are cheap and unsafe. The floods in the Czech Republic
in the summer of 2002 left many Roma homeless, and the authorities were slow to provide decent
accommodation, thus adding to the pattern of disproportionate disaster outcomes from flooding of
Roma settlements in the entire Central and Eastern European region.

The documentation on Roma human rights has grown to fill dozens of volumes. The European Roma
Rights Center has been the catalyst for this documentation (see the ERRC report rifles listed in
the references). This paper has invoked the Roma rights paradigm not in an attempt to present a
complete picture of rights abuses, but to identify those patterns of human rights violations of
which Roma are the typical and almost exclusive victims in today’s Europe, and in which anti-Gypsy
prejudice is clearly a major factor. These are not isolated cases of human rights violations but
widespread social practices that may or may not be a result of adopted official policy. School and
housing segregation, evictions, coercive sterilization, police raids and identity checks, police
harassment, and collective deportation are broadly reported.


Racially Motivated Violence

In general, many reports confirm observations that Roma, together with immigrants, are particularly
at risk of abuses at the hands of law enforcement officials. In Greece, for example, “the pattern
is sufficiently clear to leave little room for doubt that xenophobia and racial profiling have
played a part in the human rights violations suffered by members of these groups, whose complaints
have sometimes included specific allegations of racist verbal abuse by police officers” (Amnesty
International and International Helsinki Federation for Human Rights, 2002: 6).


Evictions

A randomly chosen piece of news from the ERRC database illustrates that Roma are unwelcome
neighbors and therefore can be subjected to forced eviction, abusive police raids for identity
checks, and police harassment:


   On September 24, 2002, the local police force evicted around three hundred Roma from their tempo
rary settlement in an abandoned pensioner home in a Sarajevo neighborhood in Bosnia, according to t
he Banjaluka daily Nezavisne novine of the same date. The Roma had lived in the building for around
 two years, and most of them were internally displaced persons who had come to Sarajevo from the re
gions of Republika Srpska or parts of the Federation of Bosnia and Herzegovina. Apparently, the evi
ction took place as a result of a meeting of canton and municipal authorities acting upon complaint
s of "noise and disorder" that the Roma allegedly created.


The inhabitants of this settlement had been subjected to an abusive police raid several months
earlier. On June 29, 2002 the Sarajevo daily Dnevni avaz reported that, late in the evening on June
27, 2002, 76 police officers from Sarajevo Canton raided the pensioner home. Police reportedly
surrounded the temporary settlement and performed an intensive identification check on the
approximately three hundred Roma living in the settlement. The police violently searched through
the belongings of Roma living there. The police were wearing masks and did not provide an
explanation for the search. On July 27, 2002, the Bosnian radio station Radio BORAM reported that
the police claimed the search had been conducted following reports of drug trafficking in the
settlement. However, according to Dnevni avaz, the police stated that no drugs had been found
during the search. Just before the raid, on June 25, an unspecified number of police officers from
the Ilidja police station visited the pensioner home to “warn” the Roma. According to the Sarajevo
daily Oslobodjenje of June 26, 2002, the Ilidja municipality police had sent a detailed report on
the Romani settlement to the Ministry of Interior of the Sarajevo Canton, urging that the Romani
inhabitants be moved to another location, due to noticed “criminal activity of the Roma and their
jeopardizing of the local traffic through begging.”


Fortress Europe Policies

As Central and Eastern European countries with the largest Romani minorities are negotiating their
way into the European Union, Roma are being demoralized by the hypocrisy and double standards of
the Western democracies when they attempt to travel to the West. The inclusion of respect for Roma
rights in the political conditionality of EU membership has served as a powerful leverage for
addressing if not significantly improving the situation of the Roma. Yet the message coming from
the West has a shamelessly racist twist: although Roma are admittedly frequent victims of racist
persecution, they are expected to stay at home and not attempt to move to Western Europe, Canada,
or the United States. To those coming from EU candidate countries that are nearing accession, even
a consideration of asylum claims is being denied. Hundreds of Roma were deported from Western
Europe to Eastern European candidate states in 2002 by the immigration authorities of Belgium,
France, Italy, Norway, Spain, Switzerland, and the United Kingdom. The Roma are subject to
humiliating forms of discrimination in accessing their right to travel abroad, no matter for what
purposes.

The European Roma Rights Center has brought a lawsuit against the United Kingdom Home Office
because of the British immigration checks at Prague airport that discriminate against Czech Roma
trying to travel to the United Kingdom. Pre-check in clearance was installed in July 2001 as part
of a special arrangement with the Czech government, allowing British immigration officials to turn
back passengers before they even reached the plane to travel to Britain.[6] In October 2002,
Justice Burton ruled at London High Court that the 1951 Geneva Convention on Refugees did not
prevent United Kingdom authorities “from taking steps to prevent a potential refugee from
approaching [the UK] border in order to be in a position to claim asylum, or [making it] more
difficult for them to do so” (Travis, 2002). He said that the existence of an “anti-Roma diatribe”
and other criticism in the Czech press did not amount to evidence of racial discrimination. The
ERRC immediately lodged an appeal, and in January 2003 was granted leave to appeal.

Coercive returns of refugees from the former Yugoslavia have been under way since the mid-1990s.
Recently, German police began to break into the flats of Yugoslav Roma who had been seeking asylum
in Germany during the last 12 years in order to deport them to their homeland. According to the
testimonies of returnees, German police, shouting that they are a fire brigade, break into flats of
Romani families in the middle of the night; they then show the occupants a recent agreement on the
readmission of Yugoslav citizens from Western Europe, and give them 25 minutes to pack that which
they want to take with them. The families are taken to the nearest airport, and deported to
Belgrade with Yugoslav Airlines charter flights.


Segregation

Like numerous ethnic minorities around the world, Roma live in considerably segregated housing and
most attend separate schools. In the case of contemporary Roma, the separation is not their choice.
Evidence suggests that most Roma want to live, study, and work together with the rest of society,
but are vehemently rejected. Segregated settlements, schools, and hospital rooms are not just
physically separate--they are generally much poorer in quality. In the case of the Roma, these
facts, seen in the context of entrenched and harsh racist attitudes toward this pariah minority,
define a case of racial segregation: a particularly egregious form of racial discrimination, an
assault on human dignity condemned by international human rights law.

Racial segregation of the Roma in education exists in a variety of forms. The various types of
segregated schooling in Europe can be divided into two main patterns: 1) Roma attending “special
schools” or classes for the mentally retarded, where the official curricula are based on inferior
academic standards; 2) Roma attending separate or predominantly Romani schools or classes, where
the official curricula are based on the same academic standards as in the rest of the national
school system, but the quality of education is nonetheless lower. In the second case, residential
segregation of Roma is one of the factors in school segregation, but is not sufficient to explain
its existence (Surdu, 2002: 11). Both forms of segregation are an expression of a large social
distance and constitute racial segregation, in violation of international antidiscrimination law.

The “special schools” for Roma are most obvious in the Czech Republic, Hungary, and Slovakia, but
can be found in a number of other countries as well. In the Czech Republic, more than 70 percent of
all Romani children of school age go to inferior “special schools” and are stigmatized for life as
mentally handicapped (European Roma Rights Center, June 1999). In the Czech “special schools”
system, the educational standards for a given school grade correspond to those of two grades lower:
a pupil who has graduated from fourth grade in the “special school” is expected to demonstrate the
scholastic achievement of a second grader in a normal school. There is less emphasis in the
curriculum on mathematics, science, and language, and more on music and applied art. The situation
in Slovakia is similar. A Romani mother from Letanovce told the ERRC in October 2002 that “My
daughter was transferred to special school after the 1st grade–she is there already for 2 years and
doesn’t even recognise the letters of the alphabet–if she were in the normal primary school, I am
sure she would already have learned that.”

In Hungary, the ERRC has documented cases of abuse of parental consent in allocating Romani
children to “special schools.” On September 13, 2002, a Romani mother told the ERRC that:


   My daughter started primary school in a normal class, but she felt that she received no attentio
n from teachers as compared to her non-Romani classmates. Due to the negligence of the teacher she
failed one time. She was taken to the remedial special class immediately. I was not even asked or i
nformed about it in time, only after the transfer. They said that she could not keep up with the ot
hers, so they transferred her. I suffered because my child felt very bad. She was labeled stupid, a
lthough she might have just needed some more attention.


Nor is the testing procedure for special schools racially neutral. A non-Romani teacher in a
remedial “special school” in Budapest stated to the ERRC on November 18, 2002: “Romani children are
usually enrolled in remedial special school without seeing the normal school. The transfer, in
fact, is often based on the single opinion from the 30-minute long examination of the expert
committee. Non-Romani children usually get two or three chances and have already failed the second
or third year of the school several times when they are transferred to a remedial special school.
Many Roma are placed there immediately.”

Unlike the special schools, the “normal” segregated schools, in which Roma are either
over-represented or constitute the only ethnic group educated there, follow the same mandatory
national curricula and in theory should apply the same standards of academic achievement. But it is
the case that they provide a poorer education because of poorly qualified and motivated teacher
body, crowded classrooms, inadequate materials, and racist prejudice about Roma attitudes to
education. Teachers often blame Roma pupils for this result, exploiting the myth of alleged low
interest in school performance. The vice director of a school in Alexandria, Romania, told the
ERRC: “We have to simplify very much the school program for Romani pupils so that they understand.
Usually they are only taught the main ideas in the lessons. And still this is sometimes too much
for them.”

It is unclear whether the emerging political will in Bulgaria and Hungary to desegregate the
schools will continue, and whether desegregation has a chance to become official policy in the
region. It is still less clear whether European courts will one day agree with the reasoning of the
United States Supreme Court in 1954 when it decided the case of Brown v. Board of Education and
ruled that “separate but equal” is not “equal.”

In the case of Romani ghetto schools, however, it cannot be said that the physical facilities and
other “tangible” factors are equal with mainstream schools. The following excerpt illustrates the
inferiority to which there are rarely any exceptions in Central and Eastern Europe (and those
exception are a couple of elite Romani ethnic schools in Hungary and the Czech Republic):


October 11, 2002. We visited Gura Vaii, outside of Onesti. All of the Roma in Gura Vaii live on Mor
ii Street, away from the Romanians in the town. The roads were dirt, and due to morning rain, were
very muddy. This settlement was not among the poorest that we saw.... The school that the Romani ch
ildren attend was in the middle of the settlement. We entered the school, which had to be opened by
 one of the teachers after repeated knocking because it was locked from the inside. There were only
 two rooms in the school. In one room, there was seating for twenty-two children, and in the other,
 there were twenty-fours seats. It was a cold day, and there was no heat in the school, although th
ere was a wood stove in the corner of one of the classrooms. There were no lights in either of the
rooms or the entrance, and in fact, no electricity in the school. The Romani children were in class
 while we were in the school, and there were no books in either of the rooms. There were no textboo
ks for the children that I saw, no notebooks in front of any of the children, no pencils, no pens o
r any school supplies of any kind. There was no sign of a learning environment. One of the teachers
, who would not give her name, told us that one hundred and sixty children were registered in the s
chool. She also told us that there were four teachers. At around 2:00 PM when we went in the school
, it was already dark inside and hard to see. From the outside, there was glass in all the windows,
 but I could see up under the roof the structure was not solid. This would likely allow much cold a
ir in during the winter months.

We also visited the school that the Romanian children in Gura Vaii attend. The school was much larg
er, with at least four classrooms. The school had electricity and heating and the children were not
 forced to sit in their jackets to stay warm as in the Romani school. There were no Romani children
, although the Mayor had said that there were some. The classroom was large, the desks were in much
 better condition than those in the Romani school. The children in this school all had textbooks, n
otebooks, pens and pencils in front of them. There were plants all around and artwork that the stud
ents had produced, as opposed to the barren walls in the Romani school. There was a playground in t
he schoolyard (there was no yard at the Romani school) with soccer and basketball nets. There was a
lso a caretaker for the school. (From ERRC archives: Report from field trip to Romania, filed Octob
er 2002).

Sterilization

From the 1970s until 1990, the Czechoslovak government sterilized Romani women as part of a policy
aimed at reducing the “high, unhealthy” birthrate of Romani women. The policy was condemned by the
Czechoslovak dissident group Charter 77, and documented in the late 1980s by dissidents Zbenek
Andrs and Ruben Pellar. Human Rights Watch addressed the issue in a comprehensive 1993 report on
the situation of Roma in Czechoslovakia, concluding that the practice had ended in mid-1990.
Criminal complaints filed with Czech and Slovak prosecutors on behalf of groups of sterilized
Romani women in each republic were dismissed in 1992 and 1993.

Throughout the late 1990s, there have been periodic indications that the practice may be
continuing. In Slovakia in particular, the purported high birthrate of Roma is a regular feature in
public discourse on the Roma, frequently in the context of right-wing rhetoric warning that “they
will outnumber us by 2050.” We believe Slovakia is allowing contraceptive sterilizations of Romani
women absent acceptable--and in many cases even rudimentary--standards of informed consent. Our
findings indicate that women are often coerced by doctors and nurses to give consent to
sterilization. In Slovakia, women who give birth through a caesarian operation for a second or
third time are offered to exercise their right to contraceptive sterilization, based on the
outdated theory that a third or fourth caesarian will lead to grave harm to or even the death of
the woman or the fetus. We found many cases of women who underwent their second or third caesarian
section and were sterilized because of the purported “risks” involved in another pregnancy. The
Slovakian sterilization law supports this practice by listing consecutive c-sections as a medical
indication for sterilization. In the case of abusive sterilizations, we believe we are looking at a
very wide variety of factual issues, broadly within the following parameters: 1) cases in which
consent has been secured, and such consent meets medical, ethical, and legal standards of full and
informed consent; we believe such cases constitute approximately 10 to 20 percent of the cases we
have seen; 2) at the other end of the spectrum, cases in which there may be criminal malpractice: a
woman has been sterilized, although she has not given any form of consent; 3) cases in which some
form of consent has been given for sterilization, but that consent has not been “informed”:
misinformation, manipulative information, pressure, tricks, bluster, etc., have been applied so
authorities can secure “consent,” or clear and understandable information has not been provided to
patient prior to seeking her consent. The overwhelming majority of the cases we have recorded fall
into this “grey zone.” On the basis of preliminary research, we believe similar concerns can be
raised in the Czech Republic and Hungary.




Lack of Personal Documents

Roma in the countries of the former Yugoslavia face significant difficulties in obtaining basic
personal documents, such as birth certificates, identity cards, local residence permits, documents
related to (in most cases, state-provided) health insurance, marriage certificates, work booklets,
death certificates, passports, internally displaced person and refugee registration documents.
Exclusionary obstacles created by a lack of documents can be daunting and in many instances, the
lack of one document can lead to a “chain reaction” in which the individual at issue is unable to
secure a number of other documents. In an extreme case, a Romani person without a birth certificate
may face complete exclusion from the exercise of basic rights: precluded access to basic health
care, freedom of movement hindered (including the right to leave one’s own country), denial of the
right to vote, exclusion from state housing provided to persons from socially weak groups, and
denial of access to other rights and services crucial for basic human dignity.[7]


Conclusion: The Romani Movement

Although in several countries Roma cannot formally create political organizations based on
ethnicity (Albania, Bulgaria, Russia, Turkey), Roma political organizing is developing. In Bulgaria
the courts effectively ignore the constitutional limitation and allow the registration of Romani
parties. Almost everywhere, numerous Roma groups are emerging at all levels, at the grassroots as
well as the national. International umbrella organizations are also taking shape.

In the last few years, the Romani movement in Central and Eastern Europe has entered a period of
consciousness building along identity lines, aimed at mass mobilization and political participation
(see “The Romani movement,” 2001). But as with other identity movements in other times and places,
we have observed the disturbing characteristic trends: an emphasis on ideological tenets, a
construction of cults of personality, and conversely, creation of “enemies of the struggle.” The
“ideology” emerging within the Romani movement contains an emphasis on defending the ethnic line,
as well as a preoccupation with poverty as a mode of solidarity. Romani leaders in Hungary have
sought alliances with, for example, groups that defend the homeless. This political cosmology has
discovered, in non-Roma defenders of Roma rights, a convenient bogey. These and other non-Roma
working on various aspects of Roma-related issues currently provide a convenient medium through
which the members of an otherwise fragmented and contentious Romani leadership can overcome their
differences.[8]

Whether the Romani movement will lean toward anachronistic, trivial nationalist consolidation, or
will create a civic mobilization with a vision that draws its power from new sources in a
globalizing world remains to be seen. What seems obvious at this juncture is that the availability
of the second road depends on a culture of human rights, both inside and outside the Romani
movement.

It is clear, however, that the Romani movement is struggling to overcome its pariah status among
other movements, very much like the Roma themselves are struggling to emancipate themselves from
both their pariah image and their disadvantaged position in society. It is the Romani movement
embracing a human rights agenda that can lead the Roma out of the Gypsy myth, and offer them
choices in an uncertain but real life, nonfictitious future.





















TABLE 1: NUMBER OF ROMA, BY COUNTRY

Country

Total population

Official number

Estimate

Albania

3,549,841

1,261

90,000-100,000

Austria

8,150,835

95

20,000-25,000

Belarus

10,350,194

11,283

10,000-15,000

Belgium

10,258,762

N/A

10,000-15,000

Bosnia-Herzegovina

3,922,205

9,092

40,000-50,000

Bulgaria

7,928,901

370,908*

700,000-800,000

Croatia

4,334,142

6,695**

30,000-40,000

Cyprus

762,887

N/A

500-1000

Czech Rep.

10,264,212

11,716*

250,000-300,000

Denmark

5,352,815

N/A

1,500-2,000

Estonia

1,423,316

N/A

1000-1500

Finland

5,194,901

10,000

7,000-10,000

France

59,551,227

N/A

280,000-340,000

Germany

83,029,536

50,000-70,000

10,000-130,000

Greece

10,623,835

150,000-300,000

160,000-200,000

Hungary

10,174,853

190,046

550,000-600,000

Ireland

3,840,838

10,891

22,000-28,000

Italy

57,679,825

130,000

90,000-110,000

Latvia

2,385,231

7,955

2,000-3,500

Lithuania

3,610,535

N/A

3,000-4,000

Luxembourg

442,972

N/A

100-150

Macedonia

2,046,209

43,900

220,000-260,000

Moldavia

4,431,570

11,600

20,000-25,000

Netherlands

16,171,520

20,000

3,500-40,000

Norway

4,525,000

356

500-1,000

Poland

38,633,912

25,000-30,000

50,000-60,000

Portugal

10,084,245

44,600

45,000-50,000

Romania

21,698,181

535,250

1,800,000-2,500,000

Russia

145,470,197

152,939

400,000

Serbia and Montenego

10,677,290

143,519**

400,000-450,000

Slovakia

5,379,455

89,920

480,000-520,000

Slovenia

1,930,132

2,293

8,000-10,000

Spain

40,037,995

325,000-450,000

700,000-800,000

Sweden

8,875,053

20,000

15,000-20,000

Switzerland

7,283,274

N/A

30,000-35,000

Turkey

66,493,970

N/A

300,000-500,000

Ukraine

48,760,474

47,914

50,000-60,000

United Kingdom

59,778,002

90,000

90,000-120,000

Total

795,101,136

2,281,577-2,581,577

6,105,600-8,625,150

Sources: The national statistical bureaus of the countries included that were consulted are: CIA Wo
rld Factbook (Washington, D.C.); the European Union “Regular Reports of the Candidate Countries for
 Membership in the European Union”; government reports provided to the UN Committee on the Eliminat
ion of Racial Discrimination; government reports provided to the Council of Europe’s Committee on t
he Framework Convention; United States Census Bureau.

Notes: In some cases, data provided is from preliminary census results. “N/A” indicates official da
ta is not available. Some countries have provided official estimates (see for example Finland, Germ
any, Greece, Italy, Moldova, Netherlands, Poland, Spain, Sweden, and the United Kingdom). The sourc
e of the column “Unofficial Number of Roma” are NGO estimates provided in Liegeois and Gheorghe (19
95).

* Census 2001
** Census 1991
















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teaches in the Human Rights Program of the Central European University in Budapest.



In: Social Research Magazine, special issue Pariah Minorities, vol. 70, no. 1, Spring 2003, pp 111
– 161.

________________________________

* I am grateful to my colleagues at the European Roma Rights Center (ERRC), a public interest law
organization based in Budapest, Hungary. Unless otherwise indicated, statements of fact concerning
the current situation of the Roma are taken from the research archives of this organization.
Publicized material in English and Romani with emphasis on human rights issues related to the Roma
can be found at <www.errc.org>.


[1] Some Romani activists have opposed the reference to a “Roma problem” and consider the very
phrase to be based on racist premises. Indeed, from the point of view of the Roma themselves, Roma
are not a “problem”; the gadje racist society is.


[2] See complete results of the census by the Bulgarian State Statistics Institute at
<http://www.nsi.bg/Census/Ethnos-final-n.htm>.


[3] For example, the so-called tinkers had already lived nomadic lives on the British Isles long
before the arrival of the Roma in 1430. The tinkers were also Gypsy-like tribes, whose occupations
(typically metal work) were similar to those of the Roma. They may also have been of Indian origin
and, merging with the Roma who arrived in the fifteenth century, constitute today the Gypsy
Traveler groups. Their language is so strongly anglicized that no interpretation to or from English
is necessary; and the physical appearance of the Travelers is undistinguishable from that of the
British, perhaps because of some mixing with the local inhabitants in a limited territory. Even
today, many people in the United Kingdom and Ireland are surprised to hear that Traveler (or even
Gypsy) is an ethnic identity designation and that Travelers consider themselves a separate
ethnocultural group. There is a widespread misconception that “Traveler” and “Gypsy” stand simply
for a lifestyle. This is reflected in the frequent spelling of the latter with a small initial “g”.


[4] Episodes of feudal personal dependency similar to enslavement were characteristic of other
countries as well. In sixteenth-century England, King Edward VI passed a law according to which
recaptured Gypsies who had previously been branded with a “V” sign had to be branded with "S" and
enslaved for life. Some Gypsies were used as a slave-like labor force in the Spanish and Portuguese
fleet; Gypsies were state property in Russia during the reign of Catherine the Great, as well as in
Scotland (Hancock, 2002: 26-28).


[5] On the origins of romanticizing stereotyping, see Ascherson:


The Greek tragedians, when they had invented the barbarians, soon began to play with the “inner bar
barism” of Greeks. Perhaps part of the otherness of barbarians was that unlike the civilized, they
were morally all of a piece–not dualistic characters in which a good nature warred with a bad, but
whole. The “Hippocratic” doctors, the unknown writers of the Greek medical treatises wrongly attrib
uted to the physician Hippocrates, asserted in Airs, Waters, Places that Scythians and all “Asians”
 resembled one another physically, while “Europeans” differed sharply in size and appearance from o
ne city to another. Barbarians were homogeneous; civilized people were multiform and differentiated
. The Greek tragedians thought this might be true about minds as well as bodies. If it was, they we
re not sure that the contrast between Greek and barbarian psychology–the first complex and inhibite
d, the second supposed to be spontaneous and natural—was altogether complimentary to the Greeks. So
mewhere here begins Europe’s long unfinished ballad of yearning for noble savages, for  hunter-gath
erers in touch with themselves and their ecology, for cowboys, cattle-reivers [thieves], gypsies an
d Cossacks, for Bedouin nomads and aboriginals walking their song-lines  through the unspoiled wild
erness" (1996: 82-83).


[6] An authorization under the Race Relations (Amendment) Act, signed by Home Office Minister
Barbara Roche in April 2001, specified seven ethnic or national groups whom immigration officers
were empowered to refuse entry to the United Kingdom outright on the basis of their race or
nationality. These included Afghans--even while Britain was at war with the Taliban regime and
denouncing its abuses against the Afghan people--Kurds, Tamils, Somalis, and Roma. The European
Roma Rights Center has since conducted a study involving "white" and Roma Czech citizens of similar
circumstances and found a marked difference in their treatment at the Prague airport. The United
Kingdom secretary of state admitted in court that this was a policy designed to prevent asylum
seekers from reaching the UK, where their claims would have to be properly considered. We believe
this clearly contravenes the Geneva Convention on Refugees and risks driving people toward less
open and legitimate means of entry. Our six clients in this case all went to the Prague airport to
catch flights to London during the course of July 2001. All had valid airline tickets. All are
Czech nationals---and so did not need a visa for travel to the United Kingdom. Yet all were singled
out for extended questioning apparently by reference to the color of their skin. They were
prevented from traveling to the United Kingdom.


[7] See the information on a workshop organized by European Roma Rights Center in Igalo,
Montenegro, in September 2002, on the theme of "Personal Documents and Threats to the Exercise of
Fundamental Rights among Roma in the FRY" <http://www.errc.org>.


[8] I am indebted to Claude Cahn for formulating this point.