Roma Gypsies of World

In Albania they are divided mainly into two groups, the "Jevgs" (Jevgj), who speak only Albanian and are more assimilated, and the "Gabels", who are bilingual and live more according to Roma tradition. Jevgs claim Egyptian descent, but are considered as magjup by the Albanian majority, the same category used to include the Gabels. Others divide the Roma in four groups (urban/rural, assimilated/un-assimilated). Ethnic Albanians have historically used various different names to refer to Romani people, most of them today being considered offensive, including:

Gabel ("stranger", the word coming from a Latin root), occasionally used to distinguish the traditionally nomadic and less assimilated Roma as opposed to the Jevgs who live in cities and typically speak Albanian
Evgjit (from the plural form of Jevg: Jevgjit)
Magjup (related to the supposed origin in Egypt),
Arixhi (bear tamer, previously an occupation also taken by Roma in Romania) predominantly used in Southern dialects,
Kurbat (referring to emigration and used around Korça),
Qifto (of Greek origin and typically used in Gjirokaster), and Cergetar/Cergar (of Turkish origin and meaning "tent-dweller").Among Roma, ethnic Albanians, in addition to being ‘’gadjo’’, may be referred to as “whites”. "White hand" may also be used by Gabels and Jevgs to refer to Albanians as well as non-Roma minorities such as Greeks, Aromanians and Slavs. Jevgs may occasionally be derogatorily referred to as gadjo (non-Roma) due to their greater level of assimilation, and are also called sir ("garlic") by Gabels. Albanians, meanwhile, may refer to Jevgs and Gabels as "blacks" conversely, although this may be considered offensive. Using the phrase tsigan to refer to Roma is considered extremely offensive and should be avoided.

The Jevgs and Gabels share common genetic history. Even though they share similar genetic history a recent study showed that Jevgs and Gabels have different dna. With Jevgs being very close to Portuguese and Spanish Roma, suggesting Balkan and Albanian admixture in recent years.

Roma are occasionally held to share the "faith" (fe) of Aromanians in Albania, not for religious reasons (Roma are mostly Muslim but Aromanians are mostly Christian), but because of their historic shared nomadic lifestyle, although in the case of Albania many Roma had long been settled.

History

Origin

The Romani people originate from Northern India, presumably from the northwestern Indian states Rajasthan and Punjab. The linguistic evidence has indisputably shown that roots of Romani language lie in India: the language has grammatical characteristics of Indian languages and shares with them a big part of the basic lexicon, for example, body parts and daily routines. More exactly, Romani shares the basic lexicon with Hindi and Punjabi. It shares many phonetic features with Marwari, while its grammar is closest to Bengali. Genetic findings in 2012 suggest the Romani originated in northwestern India and migrated as a group. According to a genetic study in 2012, the ancestors of present scheduled tribes and scheduled caste populations of northern India, traditionally referred to collectively as the Ḍoma, are the likely ancestral populations of the modern European Roma. In February 2016, during the International Roma Conference, the Indian Minister of External Affairs Sushma Swaraj stated that the people of the Roma community were children of India. The conference ended with a recommendation to the Government of India to recognize the Roma community spread across 30 countries as a part of the Indian diaspora. The Jevgs have asserted origins of being Coptic migrants from Egypt in the fourth century, or of Egyptian slaves who escaped from Greece to Albania during the period of Egyptian intervention in the Greek War of Independence, but the authenticity of their proposed Egyptian origins is widely questioned by others in Albania.

Migration to Albania

The oldest attestation of Romani people in Albania is from 1635, and they may have been present since the 12th and 13th centuries.

Ottoman Era

The Ottoman era saw the conversion of most Roma populations in Albania as well as the surrounding territories to Islam. Ottoman rule set up a millet system by which the right of Christians to practice their religion was legally protected, but they were given second class citizenship with higher taxes, inability to bear witness against Muslims, inability to bear arms or have horses, restrictions on church building, forbidden from proselytizing, and various other restrictions, factors which ultimately induced conversions to Islam.

Additionally, responding to seasonal rebellions, there were episodes where regional governors in Albanian territories coerced conversions, despite such compulsion being traditionally prohibited by Islamic and Ottoman law. For these reasons, the majority of Roma in Albania and most neighbouring regions converted to Islam, as did much of the surrounding Albanian and Slavic populations with the exception of certain regions.

Under certain Ottoman rulers, Muslim Roma were considered to not be proper Muslims because of certain ritual differences, and they were taxed and discriminated against in similar ways to Christians. Under Mehmed IV, a tax was placed on dead Roma that would continue to be paid until enough had been gathered from living Roma to replace their supposed dues, while other rulers made attempts to “reeducate” Roma There were also cases where the presence of Roma was forbidden in mosques or cemeteries. In the late Ottoman Empire, Aromanians, Albanians and Roma shared an "oppressed" position of being socioeconomically disadvantaged minority populations inhabiting a crumbling state. In this way, the Ottoman era has been considered one of relative "equality" for the Roma and gadjo populations in Albania, with the two populations typically living peacefully in harmony, with Roma camps typically being located on the outskirts of Albanian cities.

Early Independence Era

In the late 19th and early 20th century, many Roma, mostly Muslim ones, fled areas that were newly independent from the Ottomans, where as Muslims they were identified as "Ottoman collaborators". Roma came to Albania especially from Serbia, Kosovo and Macedonia. Roma also fled to Albania from Romania where they had recently been enslaved, to settle in Albania and other territories still under Ottoman control. Even after Albania itself achieved independence from the Ottoman Empire, the Roma had a better situation than in Yugoslavia, but they were still treated with contempt, with large socioeconomic gaps between Roma and Albanians, segregated neighbourhoods, and "practically no intermarriages between Roma and non-Roma" During World War II For most of the duration of the war, Albania was under the control of an Italian puppet regime. Roma didn’t participate in the war, with many fighting in the Albanian military, and were Roma in Albania, Macedonia and Kosovo were typically supportive of the Italians and the Albanian authorities. However, although left mostly untouched by both the Italians and by Albanian nationalists, the Roma were persecuted during the brief German occupation of Albania in 1943, although the shortness of the German presence limited the damage they were able to wreak upon the Roma population.

Under Communism

Enver Hoxha imposed a harsh Stalinist regime upon Albania, attempting to homogenize the population by repressing religious and cultural differences. Although as a minority the Roma were supposedly accorded benefits and protections, in reality this was not always the case, and in 1960, Prime Minister Mehmet Shehu tried to ban Roma from entering Albanian towns.

After Communism

Despite inequalities and suppression during the communist era, the collapse of communism brought more misfortune to Roma, as they were the first to be heavily unemployed and rapidly fell to the bottom of society; as a result many Roma today are nostalgic for the days of communism.

In the late 1990s, Roma began temporarily migrating to Greece where they found more employment opportunities, beginning a recurrent pattern of seasonal Roma migration to Greece from Albania.

Demographics

According to Robert Elsie, the Romani number between 60,000 and 100,000 people. A 1994 estimation put the number at 95,000 Roma in Albania. The ERRC estimates 120,000 Roma in Albania. The most recent 2011 census counted 8301 Romani in Albania but it has been accused of drastically undercounting the number of Romani in the country, drawing criticism from the Council of Europe.

Roma people live all over the country, but some of the biggest communities can be found around the capital, Tirana, the cities of Fier, Berat and Gjirokaster, and around the town of Korça. The distribution of Jevgs ("Egyptians") is much less, numbering at most 10,000 people who are concentrated in and around the capital city of Tirana.

Socioeconomics

The poverty rate among Roma in Albania is particularly high (78%), in relation to the majority (22%).

Contrary to the expectations of many foreigners, investigations have found that discrimination against Roma in Albania is typically subtle rather than overt, and Roma typically do not face any open discrimination. In some cases, relations between Roma on one hand and the Albanian majority and other "gadjo" groups on the other is often quite cordial in the rural, traditional and "non-profit life" and both the majority of the Albanian intelligentsia and the working class are said to typically have positive views of Roma, who rarely if ever are cast as an "ethnic enemy". On the other hand, "gadjos" may be reluctant to accept Roma as equals in the urban and "profit-making life". However, Roma may suffer from the refusal to recognize the distinctness of their identity and traditions while Roma complain that although Albanians do not openly express derision, they may view Roma as poor, dirty, stupid, noisy and involved in theft, and as a result they are widely but tacitly discriminated against in the job market.

During the communist period, Roma of Gjirokastra, Korça, Tirana and Berati worked in handcraft enterprises. However, eventually demand for their products declined, and the enterprises were mostly shut down as Albania transitioned away from communism.

In 2007, it was written by a Roma organization that about 90% of Roma are unemployed, 40% of Roma have bad living conditions, 20% don't have the resources necessary to buy medicine, 40% of Roma families ask their kids to work rather than complete education to fulfil primary familial needs, and that the literacy rate of Roma has fallen since the end of communism, and is now 47.6%, with more women illiterate than men, with all these problems being attributed to a "bustle for racism".

Language

Romani people in Albania speak the Balkan variant of the Romani language and Vlax Romani.

Although Balkan Romani is endangered overall, it is relatively healthy in Albania. Of Roma ‘’Gabel’’ families, in 2005 it was written that 65% reported speaking only Romani at home, while 29% spoke a mix of Romani and Albanian at home, while only 6% speak only Albanian, with those 6% mainly being cases where of intermarriage between Roma (Gabels) and Albanians, or Gabels and Jevgs (“Egyptians”). While the Gabels widely speak their language, Jevgs speak only Albanian, as there was a language shift from Roma to Albanian awhile ago. Polls have shown that nearly all Gabels view language as an important factor in the ethnic differentiation between Albanians and Roma, although the same is not true of the majority of Jevgs.

On the other hand, currently there is no schooling for Roma in their native language.

Culture

Roma culture is distinguishable from the culture of the ethnic Albanian majority, as well as those of other minorities such as Aromanians and Greeks, in a number of ways.

Both Roma and Jevgs make a sharp distinction between themselves. There is seldom intermarriage or contact of any significant kind between them (US Department of State Report, 1993:695). On the one hand, Roma strongly deny a common identity with the Jevgs. It considers the Jevgs as being rich and even of having some millionaires among them (ERRC Report, 1997:12). One of the millionaires, Maksude Kasemi, was of Jevg origin. She was involved in the pyramid investment schemes, which dramatically collapsed in early 1997 and had drawn the whole Albanian society into a turmoil. Jevgs are ironically called “sir” in Romani slang, meaning “garlic” (Courthiades,1990s:31). They are even considered gadjo by the Roma, since they intermarry with Albanians and other ethnic groups and speak Albanian, and not Romani.

On the other hand, Jevgs distinguish themselves from the Roma, too. To call a Jevg a “Tsigan” (Gypsy) is the worst possible insult (Courthiades citing Stuart Mann, 14 1990s:31).

An important distinction is made between the Roma individual and the gadjo, a non-Roma, with a Roma necessarily being someone of Roma blood and/or someone who consistently demonstrates membership in and solidarity with the Roma people—in this way, although in the Carpathian Mountains the definition of Roma is strictly based on blood, in Albania and surrounding Balkan areas, a child of gadjo blood who was raised in a Roma family and in Roma culture and demonstrates consistent solidarity with the Roma is viewed as a proper Rom individual, whereas a Roma who has abandoned their roots is not, while the identification of "half-breed Roma" as either Roma or gadjo is done solely based on their adherence to Roma values.

Gender relations are patriarchal, as is also true among Albanians, but patriarchal values have been described as much stricter among the Roma than among ethnic Albanians, although this could be because of recent cultural change among the ethnic Albanian population. Sexual mores among the Roma have similarly been described as much more "puritan" than among Albanians.

Roma public life has been described as very communal, with most things considered to be belonging to the community rather than the individual.

The Fis

Roma social order revolves around the ‘’fis’’, a borrowed Albanian word that in the Roma context refers to a “tribe” based on close familial kinship.

Marriage

It has long been taboo for Roma to marry non-Roma, and indeed the large majority of Gabels and the majority of Jevgs both prefer to marry Gabels and Jevgs respectively, rather than with the other major Roma group. Roma marriages were in fact typically done within the same fis, although some members of the youngest generation are now disregarding this custom.

The virginity of the female before marriage is considered to be of utmost importance, and a marriage may be called off if it is discovered that the female is not in fact a virgin. Partly for this reason, girls are typically married young, between the ages of 13 and 15, while males are married between the ages of 16 and 18. Although the desires of the teenage spouses are rarely taken into account, if a son says he is in love with a particular Roma girl, his feelings may be considered, although the same is rarely true for girls. A husband-less girl who has reached 20 is often thought to be doomed to be left at home unmarried. Matchmaking for marriages is typically carried out without the consent of the two spouses, and orchestrated by a matchmaker who is experienced in matchmaking. When wishing to make a proposal on behalf of his son, a father customarily goes to the house of the desired wife, and states “we have come to seek a piece of bread”. Weddings, meanwhile, typically consist of feasts, dancing and music, and take place on Saturday or Sunday. They are often not recognized because the spouses are typically below the Albanian legal age of marriage. Roma rarely if ever have religious leaders preside over weddings.

Adultery is almost unheard of among Roma women but is found among the men. Roma men may marry many times over the course of their lives although subsequent weddings are not celebrated in the same way as the first one. The remarriage rate of both Jevgs and Gabels is much higher than that of Albanians, but the rate of the Jevgs is higher than that of the Gabels despite them otherwise being somewhat Albanized.

Religion

The majority of Roma in Albania are Muslim, having converted during the Ottoman era due to an array of coercive and non-coercive pressures, in particular to escape the high taxes levelled on the non-Muslim population. The surrounding ethnic Albanian majority as well as some regional Slavic populations also converted in most areas for similar reasons. In the modern era, there has been a trend of conversion of Muslim Roma to Christianity. Both Muslims and Christians employ a degree of syncretism with traditional religious practices.

Although the ‘’Gabels’’ were historically almost entirely Muslim in Albania (before more recent conversions to Orthodox Christianity), the ‘’Jevgs’’ have been divided between Muslims and Orthodox Christians. The feast of Saint George, celebrated on the sixth of May, is an occasion of paramount importance for Muslim and Christian Roma alike, and Saint George is seen as the symbol of the Roma people.

Traditions

The traditional dress of Roma is starkly different from that of Albanians, and is perceived by Roma as a major symbol of their identity and their differentiation from ethnic Albanians, and it is said that the dress of Roma woman can make her stand out even amongst 500 Albanians, with Roma women typically wearing blouses with printed flowers and embroidered gold threads. At weddings and other traditional events, women wear dressed decorated with gold thread and rose, older men wear dark red suits, and younger men wear flower-printed shirts. Handcrafts have also long been an important part of the economic culture of Roma, with 15% of Gabels and 10% of Jevgs being involved in their production as of 2005. Handcraft production used to be a major part of the Roma economy, but with the collapse of communism, many Roma handcraft enterprises also floundered, and conditions of dire poverty created situation where it was difficult for Roma to pass down their traditional handcraft making customs. Roma folkdances and music are considered an important part of Roma culture and another distinguishing factor. The majority of Roma neighborhoods have individuals who are professional musicians present. Roma musicians acknowledge in particular notable Turkish and Greek influences on their music, with Greek pop music more recently being very influential due to the regular immigration to Greece, so much so that it is accused of “eroding Roma culture” in some quarters. although Roma musicians have contributed to the development of the Albanian majority’s music scene as in other European countries.

Although traditional Roma folktales had long been passed down through the generations, today this custom is eroding as only a minority of Roma, both Gabels and Jevgs, remember their folktales, with Gabels remembering more than Jevgs. In attempt to stem this cultural loss, publications have been made of the local Roma folklore, but they are made in Albanian, not in the Romani language.

Vlax Romani of Argentina

Argentina

Introduction and History

Romani or Domari, are made up of two groups: the Ghorbati and the Nawari. Both groups speak a dialect of the language called Romany, which is related to the North Indo-Aryan language of India. Their dialect, Domari, contains many Arabic words.

Romani call themselves Rom, which in their language means "men." Rom is derived from the Indian word Dom, meaning "a man of low caste who gains his livelihood by singing and dancing." The Ghorbati are named from the Arabic word, gurbet, which means "stranger." In the Arab world, Romani are called Nauar, hence the Nawari Romani.

Romani originated in India where they worked as musicians, entertainers, and metal workers. There they were discriminated against and excluded from the temples. Later, they were sent to Persia as minstrels. From there they were separated into two groups. One traveled northward and became the Romany-speaking European Romani. The other traveled southward and became known as the Domari, or Middle Eastern Romani.

What Are Their Lives Like?

Dark skin and dark eyes are typical of most Romani. Their almost "mystical" lifestyle has made them the objects of curiosity, distrust, and even fear, from their beginnings until now. However, they are a proud and dignified people often not deserving a negative reputation.

The Romani live scattered throughout much of the world. Most of them are nomads, wandering from region to region, and they depend on a variety of entrepreneurial skills for their livelihood. It is common for Romani to have two or more specialized occupations. This makes it easier for them to adapt to a changing society's needs. When a region's people no longer need a Romani's particular skill, they move on to one that will.

Romani have long been known for their abilities as musicians, singers, and dancers. They also hold a wide variety of other occupations. The men are skilled makers of sieves, drums, bird cages, and reed mats. They also entertain with animals, work as tinkers, or play music. The women sometimes sell such things as cloth, shoes, kitchen utensils, or other products made by Romani men. Many also sing and dance. Both men and women shear sheep, spin wool, and tell fortunes. Sadly, some of the women and children are forced to beg for food as a means of survival.

Today, there are some Romani villages and communities in the Middle East. Some also live in the cities and have become an integral part of urban life. Other Romani are nomadic and either travel in caravans of wagons or carts, or they ride on camels, donkeys, or horses. The settled Romani usually live in houses that are typical to those of the region in which they settle.

Romani marriages usually take place between couples in their teens. The Romani family unit is highly valued and each member is depended on for his financial contribution.

Values such as justice, fidelity, and morality are very significant in Romani society. Such things as courtesy and friendliness are also very important. The control of deviants is strictly enforced. If a Romani becomes impure by some immoral or unlawful act, he is considered an outcast. Also, sexual purity is considered a must for young girls. In fact, it must be proven before marriage that the girl has never before been with a man. This strict social code is related to their old Hindu caste system which they have kept since their origin.

What Are Their Beliefs?

The Middle East Romani are often Muslim and they follow the practices and beliefs of the Islamic faith. The traditional beliefs of the Romani such as that ghosts, lizards, and snakes are capable of harming humans, that men have the power to curse others by giving them the "evil eye," and that some people have the power to heal the sick are no longer held by most Romani. There are a growing number of Christian Romani.

What Are Their Needs?

The quality of health care, nutrition, housing, and education is poor. Adequate educational opportunities must be provided in order to raise their standard of living.

Spiritually, the Islamic religion is very difficult to influence. Their nomadic lifestyle has also made it difficult for missionaries to reach them. It is encouraging to hear of recent breakthroughs in ministering to Romani.

Most Romani have no Christian resources available to them. Christian broadcasts and Scriptures must be made available if they are to hear the Gospel. Christian workers are needed to teach them how to live lives pleasing to God.

Prayer Points

Scripture Prayers for the Romani, Vlax in Argentina.
Ask the Lord to call people who are willing to share Christ with the Romani.
Ask God to strengthen, encourage, and protect the small number of Romani Christians.
Pray that those Romani who know Christ will be bold witnesses of the Gospel to their own people.
Ask the Holy Spirit to soften the hearts of Romani towards Christians so that they will be receptive to the Gospel.
Pray that God will raise up intercessors who will stand in the gap for them.
Ask the Lord to raise up fellowships of believers among the Middle East Romani.

Gypsies in Armenia

Armenia

Of the formerly fairly large sub-ethnic groups of Armenians – the Armenian Gypsies and the Armenian Tats, very few of their representatives still remain in Armenia. The reason for this is that the predominant area of residents for both of those groups have been other territories of Historic Armenia, rather than Eastern Armenia that includes the Republic of Armenia as it is today.

The Armenian Gypsies, having a special ethnonym BOSHA are Christians of the Armenian Grigorian Confession, followers of the Armenian Apostolic Church. They are descendants of Gypsies who came to Armenia perhaps in the 11th – 13th centuries as part of a large Gypsy migration from East India, their historic homeland.

History

Throughout history, the Gypsies have been referred to by many names—in Byzantine poetry, for example, they were referred to as Egyptian, but their precise origins are lost in antiquity. However, since the 18th century, scholars have been certain they came originally from India. The study of language can provide many clues about the development of a people, and that of the Roma is no exception. An important philological study was done in the 18th century establishing the fact that one in every three words in the Romani language is Hindi, which supports the theory that they originated in India.

At some point in the distant past, possibly as early as the 5th century c.e., more likely, sometime in the 10th century, they left India and went to Persia, borrowing numerous Persian words. They then passed through Armenia, incorporating equally numerous Armenian words in their own language. Next, they moved to the Byzantine territories of Constantinople and Thrace, and then, even before the Ottoman Turks, they passed into the Balkans. Finally, they moved into Europe, during successive waves, in the 15th century, the 19th century, and the post-communist era.

The armenization of the Gypsies who had settled in Armenia must have occurred perhaps in the 14th to 16th cc., anyway by the early 19th they did already have an Armenian identity, though had retained their language (an Indo-Aryan dialect), a particular lifestyle and a feeling of belonging in a group. Incidentally, some Gypsy (Bosha) families gave forth a number of prominent figures of the Armenian culture in the 19th century.

The Armenian-Gypsy system of first and second names as well as all personal attributes have Armenian characteristics. Considering the Armenian self-awareness and originality at the same time, the Armenian Gypsies are to be related to the groups having the so-called complex identity.

The language of the Armenian Gypsies, having occupied a special place in the system of Gypsy dialects, had been still in use in the late 19th century, but rather as a clandestine slang. It is now spoken by very old individuals and is quite degenerated.

The Armenian Gypsies now live in Yerevan, Gyumri, and in Georgian cities Akhalkalak and Akhaltsikh. Their principal economic activity is smith-craft, basket weaving, producing the household effects, which is quite common among the sedentary Gypsies. In contrast to other Gypsies, the Bosha do not practice fortune telling or magic.

To determine the numbers of the Armenian Gypsies is impossible, however by approximation they can amount to a few thousand persons in Armenia and Georgia. As to the Armenian Tats, they, like the Bosha, possess all the Armenian features: the names, confession, identity, etc. At the same time the Tats retain their language and the sense of their selfawareness, although at an everyday-life level. At the social level, however, the facets and features are being obliterated.

The Armenian Tats speak a particular language, a North-West Iranian dialect; they designate it as FARSI, i.e. PERSIAN. Now this language is unfortunately spoken only by individuals over 50.

The Tats live in Armenia currently in a tightly populated community in the village of Nor Madrasa (New Madrasa) near Ashtarak city. The village was established by the migrants from Azerbaijan where the Karabakh conflict triggered a massacre of the Armenian Tats, so that they had to flee to Russia and Armenia. Living now in Nor Madrasa are about a hundred families of the Armenian Tats.

Resources

Scholars who have written about the Armenian Boshas during the last century include Dr. Franz Nikolaus Finck, (1867-1910), Professor of General Linguistics at the University of Berlin. He lived in Armenia with the Gypsies and wrote in German, Armenian and English. Another is V. Papaziants (Papazian) who wrote "Hay-Poshaner, An Ethnographic Study", Tiflis, 1899 (in Armenian.)

Contemporary scholars include Charles J.F. Dowsett (1924-1998) of Oxford University whose last work was "Sayat-Nova: A Biography and Literary Study", 1997. Professor Dowsett's "Some Gypsy-Armenian Correspondences" (in Revue des etudes Armeniennes, nouvelle serie, v. 10, 1973-74) explores further, in English, the "Gypsy-Armenian" language. Currently, Dr. John A. C. Greppin, Professor of Linguistics at Cleveland State University who has lived and researched in Armenia continues the linguistic and ethnographic study of our Armenian Boshas in his many publications.

Romani people in Australia

Australia

The Romani people in Australia are citizens of Australia who are of Romani descent. They are sometimes referred to as Gypsies or Roma. Most Romani in Australia trace their roots to the United Kingdom and Greece, who in return trace their roots to northern India.

There are believed to be between 5,000 and 25,000 Romani in Australia.

Despite its wide use, many Romani people consider the term "Gypsy" to be a racial slur, and are offended or made uncomfortable by its use. The word traces its origin to Europeans incorrectly surmising that Romani people originated from Egypt.

Romani people of Austria

Austria

The Romani are an ethnic group that has lived in Austria since the Middle Ages. According to the 2001 census, there were 6,273 Romani speakers in Austria or less than 0.1% of the population. Estimations count between 10,000 and 25,000. A more recent estimation count between 40,000 and 50,000 Romani people or about 0.5%.Most indigenous Romani people in Austria belong to the Burgenland-Roma Group, in East-Austria. The Majority live in the State of Burgenland, in the City of Oberwart and in villages next to the District of Oberwart. The Burgenland-Roma speak the Vlax Romani language.

In Upper Austria there are also some Sinti families. 80% of the Sinti speak the Sinte Romani dialect of the Romani language.

Since 1960, there are also a significant Roma population which hails originally from former Yugoslavian countries, especially from Serbia (Gurbeti and Kalderash Roma-Groups) and Ashkali from Kosovo.

Origin

The Romani people originate from the Northern India, presumably from the north-western Indian states Rajasthan and Punjab. The linguistic evidence has indisputably shown that roots of Romani language lie in India: the language has grammatical characteristics of Indian languages and shares with them a big part of the basic lexicon, for example, body parts or daily routines. More exactly, Romani shares the basic lexicon with Hindi and Punjabi. It shares many phonetic features with Marwari, while its grammar is closest to Bengali. Genetic findings in 2012 suggest the Romani originated in north-western India and migrated as a group. According to a genetic study in 2012, the ancestors of present scheduled tribes and scheduled caste populations of northern India, traditionally referred to collectively as the Ḍoma, are the likely ancestral populations of modern European Roma.

In February 2016, during the International Roma Conference, the Indian Minister of External Affairs stated that the people of the Roma community were children of India. The conference ended with a recommendation to the Government of India to recognize the Roma community spread across 30 countries as a part of the Indian diaspora.

MINELRES: Roma in Azerbaijan:

Azerbbaijan

Lost and forgotten culture

Children run along beside anyone they can find, chanting, "Money, money, money, give me money, money, money," with their little palms open for donations. Women, in the sweltering heat or numbing cold, carry limp babies in their arms, stopping traffic for any spare change. Although cars, flats and houses have been replaced the covered wagons, the legacy of the Gypsy, or more politically correct, the Romani, still lives on.

Like many other cities, Baku’s streets are also alive with Romani life. The nostalgia of beautiful women draped in beads with clinking gold bracelets and colourful skirts, however, has been left far behind. These Gypsies or in Azeri ‘garachilar’ were caught like many others behind the closed doors of the Soviet Union, and in effect lost much of their

culture.

Ali, a father of three young children, who prefers not to give his surname, was born and raised in Akhsu, a village near Shemakha. His father was Azeri, but his mother was a 'garachi' who was moved to the area during the 1960s when the Soviet Government tired of the roaming behaviours of these nomads, and forced them to settle in pre-chosen districts, including the Shemakha region.

The traditionally secret and mysterious life of these nomadic tribes no longer exists in Ali’s clan, he claims. He attributes this part to the influence of the U.S.S.R., but also to his family’s strong following of Islam. Yet, what remains is a close comradeship between the families, he says.

Ali admits that he knows very little of the history of his people. According to him, they originate from the name 'Gara' a town in India. This is where the term garachi derived from. The Gypsies of Azerbaijan, he says, originated from the same place as the Gypsies of Europe. Many migrated northwards from India into Iran, and although a large number remained there, his grandparents decided to go to Azerbaijan. "They though that everything was good in the Soviet Union; a land of milk of honey," adds Ali.

In the old days, the Romani had a lot of sheep and goats, but no place to live. They travelled throughout the mountains, but after the influence of the U.S.S.R., things began to change and the tribes began to immerse themselves in the pre-existing culture. Although Ali’s tribe no longer has their own language, he acknowledges that there are at least two tribes in Azerbaijan that do.

Today, life is different for Ali's family. Ali, a university graduate is proud of his family and his clan, which includes 30 or 40 families. All are well educated, and many work as teachers, engineers, opticians and chemists.

Yet despite his pride, he doesn't like to distinguish himself from the local people. "It's not good to separate," he says. "We are all Azerbaijanis." His non-Romani neighbours feel the same way, and are happy to have them in their village.

"I am proud of who I am," Ali says. However, the story doesn’t remain the same everywhere. Ali explains that since the collapse of the Soviet Union many Romani are again living a nomadic life and have returned to their earlier culture.

He admits that there are Gypsies who beg and follow the traditions of Romani, adding that these people originate from a different clan than his and live mainly in the northwest of Azerbaijan.

Yet, most Romanis living in Azerbaijan have chosen not to integrate with the local culture. Unfortunately, they are left with knowledge of only a handful of their traditions, and they are pulled between their past and their present.

For some, such as 28-year-old Hanam, a Romani beggar in Baku's centre, they feel they know enough and don't care about such trivial things anymore. For Hanam, putting bread on the table for her children is more important she says after an afternoon dip in a public fountain with her sons. She claims that she doesn't care about her roots; neither does she remember anything her parents may have passed on to her as a child.

The Roma community of Belarus:

Belarus

The Roma Association of Belarusian Gypsies was founded on January 14, 1998, and has about 1,500 members. From 50,000 to 60,000 Gypsies currently live in Belarus, mostly in the provinces of Homel (Gomel) and Mahilau (Mogilyov), and especially in the towns and cities of Bobruisk, Zhlobin, Gomel, Kalinkovichi, Zhitkovichi, Mogilyov, Vitebsk, Minsk, and Turov. In 1999, The Roma Association of Belarusian Gypsies was admitted to the Internationale Romani Union representing Gypsies' associations in Europe and Australia. Advisor for National Issues: Aleksandr Bosyatsky....

[Source for this paragraph is a 18 January 2000 BelaPAN article] The Belarusian Romany Association "Roma" plans to erect memorials on the sites of mass executions of Belarusian Gypsies by the Nazis during World War II. According to Aleksandr Bosyatsky, Roma advisor for national issues, Europe's only Romany concentration camp was in Belarus, and more than 800 prisoners were slaughtered there in 1942 and 1943. In addition, according to Mr. Bosyatsky, 830 Gypsies were massacred in Uzda, the Minsk region, and about a thousand in Glubokoye, the Vitebsk region. According to Mr. Bosyatsky, Belarusian Gypsies who suffered from the Nazis currently receive humanitarian aid from Belarus' Understanding and Reconciliation Fund and Switzerland's' Holocaust victims fund. Compensations to Gypsy victims of Nazism will be discussed at a congress of the Internationale Romani Union in Rotterdam on April 8, 2000, said Mr. Bosyatsky.

An article in the September 1997 issue of Transitions states that determining the

number of Roma in Central and Eastern European countries is problematic and

varies widely depending "on whom you ask;" it gives the population of Roma in Belarus

as between 10,000 and 15,000 (22-23).

No additional or corroborating information on whether Belarusian Roma who were held in concentration camps during World War II receive compensation, nor on whether Roma live in certain areas, on the percentage that speaks Romani, on the dialects of Romani spoken, nor on the major Romani clans, could be found among the sources consulted by the Research Team.

ROMA IN Belgium

Belgium

Refuge from 1933 Onwards, Occupied in 1940

In the wake of the Nazis’ assuming power in the German Reich in 1933, several German and Netherland Roma families fled to Belgium. The military occupation of Belgium and northern France in May 1940 forced some families to settle in one place or flee to the unoccupied zone in the south. The newly created territory ‘Belgium and Northern France’ was placed under military administration and headed by a German military governor whose headquarters were located in Brussels. In April 1941, the military administration prohibited persons of the ‘Gypsy race’ (nomads de race) from staying in the coastal area. As of January 1942, ‘Gypsies’, travellers, travelling performers and persons of no fixed abode aged fifteen or older had to carry a ‘Gypsy card’ (Zigeuner kaart) at all times.

Deportation to Auschwitz

On 16 December 1942, the head of the SS, Heinrich Himmler, ordered the deportation of all Roma in the German Reich to the Auschwitz-Birkenau concentration and extermination camp. This order was extended to include Belgium and Northern France in March 1943. Because priority was given to deporting the Jewish population, arrests of the ‘Gypsies’ did not take place until October–December 1943. Those detained were first kept in prisons located near their places of residence before being transferred to the Malines (Mechelen) transit camp in the former Dossin military barracks, located between Antwerp and Brussels. A total of 25,484 Jews and 351 Roma were deported from the camp, which had been established in August 1942.

‘Transport Z’

Of the 351 arrested people deported to Auschwitz-Birkenau on 15 January 1944 in a special train (known as ‘Transport Z’), 160 were younger than fifteen years of age. Among them were Sinti, Roma travelling and circus performers as well as itinerant traders – all of whom had been classified as ‘asocial’. One hundred and forty-five came from France, one hundred and nine from Belgium, eighteen from the Netherlands, and one from Spain; fourteen had fled the German Reich, twenty were not allowed to return to Norway and thirty were considered stateless. Mention should also be made of nine men arrested in November 1943 near Antwerp and deported directly to Birkenau, and of Steven Karoli, who escaped a raid in autumn 1943, but was arrested in Brussels on 2 March 1944 and then sent to Auschwitz via Malines.

Very Few Survivors

Half of those deported died within six months of their arrival in the ‘Gypsy family camp’, a separate section in Birkenau. Around 110 people from ‘Transport Z’ were murdered on the night of 2–3 August 1944 as part of the ‘liquidation’ of the ‘family camp’. By then, sixty-eight men and women had been classified as ‘capable of work’ and transferred to the Dachau and Ravensbruck concentration camps. Only twenty men and thirteen women, i.e. just thirty-three of the 361 deported, survived.

The few survivors returned home after liberation. Depending on where they were born and their nationality, they went back to Belgium or France so as to be recognised as deported persons. There is no evidence that they were ever compensated for the property and assets stolen from them.

Recognition Seventy Years Later

The imprisonment of Roma in the ‘family camp’ and the appalling conditions there were mentioned in the trial against the major war criminals in Nuremberg (1945–46), albeit only on the basis of witness statements given by non-Roma. It is thus all the more remarkable that on 20 January 1946, Rosa Keck’s testimony on the deportation of her family – a total of twenty-one people – was heard by a tribunal in Hasselt (Limburg, Belgium) as part of the war crimes trial.

The silence about the genocide persisted until 1976, when the historian José Gotovitch published the first study. On 24 January 2013, the Belgian Senate – the upper house of the federalist parliament – acknowledged the responsibility of Belgian institutions for the persecution of Jews in Belgium and thus also for that of Roma.

Romani people in Bosnia and Herzegovina

Bosnia

The Romani people in Bosnia and Herzegovina are the largest of the 17 national minorities in the country, although—due to the stigma attached to the label—this is often not reflected in statistics and censuses.

Demographics

The exact number of Roma persons in Bosnia and Herzegovina is uncertain. Due to the social stigma attached to the label, many members of the community refuse to self-identify as such in official surveys and censuses. Their number is thus consistently underestimated.

The 2013 census recorded 12,583 Bosnian-Herzegovinian residents of self-declared Romani ethnicity (this data is deemed as grossly under-representing the Roma community in Bosnia and Herzegovina).

The July 2012 estimates of the Council of Europe counted a minimum of 40,000 and a maximum of 76,000 Roma in BiH, with an average of 58,000, i.e. the 1.54% of the total population. This would still make Bosnia and Herzegovina the country in the Western Balkans with the lowest percentage of Roma population.

A partial survey by the BiH Ombudsman through Roma associations recorded around 50,000 Roma living in Bosnia and Herzegovina, of which 35,000 in the Federation BiH, 3,000 in Republika Srpska, and 2,000–2,500 in the Brčko District — without counting the Roma population in the Sarajevo Canton.

The Needs Assessment process conducted in 2010 by the state-level BiH Ministry for Human Rights and Refugees (MHRR) directly identified 16,771 Roma persons in BiH. The MHRR estimates that there are at least 25,000 to 30,000 Roma residents in BiH, although they acknowledge that up to 39 percent of Roma did not participate in the registration in some districts. According to the Ministry, around 42 percent of the Romani population in BiH is below 19 years old. 0.44%

According to the 1991 census, there were 8,864 Roma in Bosnia and Herzegovina or 0.2 percent of the population. Yet, the number was probably much higher, as 10,422 Bosnians stated that Romani was their native language.

Kali Sara and other local Roma NGOs put the number of Roma in BiH at between 80,000 and 100,000.

Important Roma communities in BiH are living in Brčko, Bijeljina, Sarajevo, Banja Luka, Mostar, Tuzla, Kakanj, Prijedor, Zenica and Teslić.

The largest number of Roma in Bosnia and Herzegovina live in the Tuzla Canton (15,000–17,000), of which a sizeable proportion in the municipality of Tuzla (6,000–6,500), as well as in Živinice (3,500), Lukavac (2,540). The Sarajevo Canton hosts around 7,000 Roma families, mostly in the municipality of Novi Grad, Sarajevo (1,200–1,500 families). The Zenica-Doboj Canton hosts between 7,700 and 8,200 Roma, of which 2,000–2,500 in the Zenica Municipality, 2,160 in Kakanj, 2,800 in Visoko.

2,000–2,500 Roma live in the Central Bosnia Canton, mostly in Donji Vakuf (500–550), Vitez (550) and Travnik (450). In the Una-Sana Canton there are between 2,000–2,200 Roma, of which 700 in the Bihać Municipality. In the territory of Herzegovina-Neretva Canton there are between 2,200–2,700 Roma, of which 450 in Konjic and 250 in Mostar. 2,000–2,500 Roma live in the Brčko District. In Republika Srpska live around 3,000–11,000 Roma, most of which in Gradiška (1,000), Bijeljina (541), Banja Luka (300), Prnjavor (200), Derventa (120).

History

There have been Romani people in Bosnia and Herzegovina for more than 600 years. Roma are deemed to have arrived in the territory of today's Bosnia and Herzegovina by the 14th–15th centuries, and to have adopted Islam as the majority confession during the times of Ottoman rule (15th–19th centuries). Already then, Roma were stigmatised and had to live in settlements outside city boundaries.

Rousseau, as French consul in Bosnia and Herzegovina, estimated in 1866 a number of 9,965 or 1.1 percent of the population were Romani. Johann Roskiewicz estimated in 1867 the number of the "Gypsies" in Bosnia at 9,000 (1.2 percent) and in Herzegovina at 2,500 (1.1 percent), resulting in a total of 11,500 Romani.

Attitudes towards Roma in Bosnia and Herzegovina hardened during the Austro-Hungarian forty-years rule (1878–1918), also due to rumours that Roma lived off immoral earnings. The 1911 Encyclopaedia Britannica mentions 18,000 Romani in Bosnia and Herzegovina (1.6 percent).

The worst period for Bosnian Roma came with World War Two, when Bosnia and Herzegovina was included in the Nazi-aligned Independent State of Croatia (NDH). It is estimated that 28,000 Roma perished in the conflict, in concentration and extermination camps such as Jasenovac. In Socialist Jugoslavia, the situation of Roma improved considerable, as they became officially recognised as a “national minority”, and came to enjoy a large degree of security and welfare. During the war in Bosnia of 1992–1995, the Roma suffered mistreatment by all conflict parties, being often considered as agents of the enemy, or forcefully conscripted. Over 30,000 Bosnian Roma were expelled based on ethnic cleansing. Roma were subject to inhumane conditions in concentration camps and entire communities were destroyed. Several Roma from Kosovo moved to Bosnia and Herzegovina during socialist times as well as again during the Kosovo war. Kosovo Roma still face issues with civil documentations due to the lack of recognition of Kosovo by Bosnia and Herzegovina.

Socio-economic conditions

Civil registration

Bosnia and Herzegovina has markedly tackled the situation of lack of civil registration documents and risks of statelessness, thanks to cooperation between the state authorities and NGOs, reducing the number of Roma persons without documents from some 3,000 to 57 in 2017. This result remains to be made sustainable, due to the risks of administrative complications linked to cases of temporary migration and the lack of recognition of documents for children born abroad.

Many Roma in BiH still live in informal settlements, without access to water and electricity, as well as collective centres for IDPs. The Ministry of Human Rights and Refugees, in cooperation with municipalities and thanks to EU funds (4 million EUR in 2012) is building housing solutions for 150 Roma families in 14 municipalities. The legalisation and improvement of living conditions in informal settlement is ongoing and is still uneven across the country. Local Action Plans are being dressed up by municipalities.

Employment

Most Roma in BiH either work in the informal economy or have no means of sustenance. The percentage of employed Roma is very low, less than 1% in the FBiH and Brčko District of BiH and in the RS it is less than 3%. Those who find employment tend not to register or self-identify as Roma anymore, to avoid social stigma.

Lack of education and low skills add to problems of discrimination in the access to the labour market. Very few Roma are also registered as unemployed at the entities' Employment Bureaus. Public programmes to subsidize employment and self-employment of Roma population have achieved little results, due to the lack of retention of employees at the end of the projects. Some good examples of cooperation with big enterprises (e.g. "Bingo" supermarkets) have been registered too.

Education

Many Roma still face issues with access to education, in terms of both enrolment and completion of primary studies. In July 2010, the Council of Minister adopted the Revised Action Plan on the educational needs of Roma. The measures therein should be implemented by the 12 line ministries of education in entities and cantons and the department in Brčko District. Authorities provide textbooks, school transport, meals and other subsidies. Enrolment of Roma children in primary, secondary, as well as higher education has since increased, despite still concerningly high rates of drop-out. Bosnia and Herzegovina does not have issues with segregated education of Roma children.

Healthcare

Access to healthcare services remain difficult for a high share of the Roma population in BiH due to administrative and bureaucratic complications. Lack of school attendance and of registration as unemployment risks leaving many Roma citizens of BiH without health insurance coverage. Elderly Roma citizens face issues with seeing their right to health insurance recognised. Roma associations estimate that between 60-70% of the Roma population in BiH have access to health care.

Political participation

Associations and representatives

84 associations of Roma are registered in BiH, of which 64 are in the Federation (with 25 active ones), 18 in Republika Srpska and two in the Brčko District (one active). In the RS, 11 associations over 18 are members of the RS Roma Union (Savez Roma RS). Roma associations mostly operate at municipality level.

Romani people in Brazil

Brazil

The Romani people in Brazil are known by non-Romani ethnic Brazilians as ciganos (Portuguese pronunciation: [siˈɡɐ̃nus]), or alternatively by terms such as boêmios, judeus (in Minas Gerais) and quicos (in Minas Gerais and São Paulo), in various degrees of accuracy of use and etymology as well as linguistic prestige.

As implied by some of their most common local names, most Brazilian Romani belong to the Iberian Kale (Kalos) group, like their fellow lusophone Portuguese ciganos, and the Spanish Romani people, known as gitanos. A 2012 government report indicates that they arrived in Brazil in the second half of the 16th century, after being expelled from Portugal. They were sentenced to prison in Portugal, requested to be exiled instead, and were ultimately sent to Brazil (some were first sent to Africa). The report also indicates that most Romani men in Brazil today "live from trade and the women engage in palm reading". At one time, they traded horses but now, deal in used cars and other goods.

The 2010 census data indicates a population of 800,000 ciganos, or 0.4% of Brazil's population; there are concerns in Brazil about lack of public policy directed at this segment of the population. The Special Secretariat for the Promotion of Racial Equality estimates the number of ciganos in Brazil at 800,000 (2011). Many still speak the Romani language. A 2015 report by the United Nations stated that the Roma (Cigano) community who seemed to be "highly invisible" in Brazil. "They are still largely stereotyped […] as thieves, beggars or fortune tellers." The 2010 IBGE Brazilian National Census encountered Romani camps in 291 of Brazil's 5,565 municipalities. It is the second largest Romani population in the world, after the United States.

The first Brazilian president (1956–1961) of direct non-Portuguese Romani origin was Juscelino Kubitschek, 50% Czech Romani by his mother's bloodline. His term was marked by economic prosperity and political stability, being most known by the construction of Brazil's new capital, Brasília. Nevertheless, Brazil already had a president of Portuguese Kale ancestry before Juscelino's term, Washington Luís who was trained as Lawyer became a career politician, and later focused on historical studies in Brazil.

Romani people in Bulgaria

Bulgaria

Romani people (Bulgarian: цигани [tsiɡɐni], роми [rɔmi]) in Bulgaria constitute Europe's densest Romani minority. The Romani people in Bulgaria "speak Bulgarian, Turkish or Romani, depending on the region and their religious affiliations."

According to the latest census in 2011, the number of the Romani is 325,343, constituting 4.4% of the total population, in which only one ethnic group could be opted as an answer and 10% of the total population did not respond to the question on ethnic group. In a conclusive report of the census sent to Euro stat, the authors of the census (the National Statistical Institute of Bulgaria) identified the census results on ethnicity as a "gross manipulation”. The former head of the National Statistical Institute of Bulgaria, Reneta Indzhova claims to have been fired by the Bulgarian Prime Minister in 2014 for attempting to check the actual number of the Romani and implied that neither the census did enumerate the Romani, nor its statistics did provide the "real data".

Unlike other censuses under Euro stat, which require the ethnic identification to be verified by a family tree in the Bulgarian census the ethnic identification is completely up to the voluntarily identification of the enumerated and not up to any further investigation by the enumerators. The previous 2001 census recorded 370,908 Romani (4.7% of the population). The preceding 1992 census recorded 313,396 Romani (3.7% of the population), while a secret backstage 1992 census ordered by the Ministry of Interior recorded a figure of 550,000 Romani (6.5% of the population); the Ministry of Interior ordered at least two other secret censuses to enumerate the Romani in denial, the one in 1980 recorded 523,519 Romani, while the one in 1989 recorded that the number of the Romani was 576,927 (6.5% of the population) and that over half of the Romani identified as Turks. The majority of the estimated 200,000-400,000 Muslim Romani tend to identify themselves as ethnic Turks, some deny their origin, or identify as Bulgarians.

The demographic collapse in Bulgaria affects only ethnic groups other than the Romani. According to data of the European Commission, to which Eurostat belongs, the Romani in Bulgaria number 750,000 and they constitute 10.33% of the population. An NGO estimates that the number of the Romani in Bulgaria is twice as this high and their population grows by 35,000 a year.

Overview

In Bulgaria, Romani are most commonly referred to as Tsigani (цигани, pronounced [tsiɡəni]), an exonym that some Romani resent and others embrace. The form of the endonym Roma in Bulgarian is romi (роми). They are generally younger, according to the 2011 census they make up 10.2% of the population aged up to 9 years, on a note 14.9% of the total age group being non-respondents. In Bulgaria Roma are discriminated: 59% to 80% of non-Roma have negative feelings towards Roma.

Roma constitute the majority of prison population according to self-identification of inmates, with 7000 prisoners (70%) out of 10,000 in total. According to 2002 data, the poverty rate among Romani is 61.8%, in contrast to a rate of 5.6% among Bulgarians. In 1997, 84% of Bulgarian Romani lived under the poverty line, compared with 32% of ethnic Bulgarians. In 1994, the poverty rate of Romani was estimated at 71.4%, compared with 15% for Bulgarians. The unemployment rate of non-Romani in Bulgaria was 25%, while of the Romani it was 65% in 2008, for instance in neighbouring Romania and Hungary the Romani had much lower unemployment rates - 14% and 21% respectively. In 2016 only 23% of the Romani in Bulgaria are employed. The unemployed enjoy more financial aid than other citizens, especially for children, which may have prompted the higher birth rates of the Romani.

In 2011 the share of Romani with university degree reached 0.3%, while 6.9% have secondary education; the same share was 22.8%/47.6% for Bulgarians. The Turks are more negative towards the Romani than the Bulgarians, with 30-50% rejecting various interactions and friendship with Romani. Although only 25% of Romani parents object to their children to be married with a Bulgarian and a Turk, only 4% of the Bulgarians and 6% of the Turks would marry a Romani person. Romani are avoided by the majority traditionally, especially for marriage, however, there are ethnically mixed people with Gypsy and Bulgarian parents who are called жоревци "zhorevtsi" (from the common name George).

Bulgaria participates in the Decade of Roma Inclusion, an international initiative to improve the socio-economic status and social inclusion of Roma, with eight other governments committing themselves to "work toward eliminating discrimination and closing the unacceptable gaps between Roma and the rest of society". The rights of the Romani people in the country are also represented by political parties and cultural organizations, most notably the Civil Union "Roma". Noted Roma from Bulgaria include musicians Azis, Sofi Marinova and Ivo Papazov, surgeon Aleksandar Chirkov, politicians Toma Tomov and Tsvetelin Kanchev, footballer Marian Ognyanov, and 1988 Olympic boxing champion Ismail Mustafov.

History

Origin

The Romani people originate from Northern India presumably from the northwestern Indian states Rajasthan and Punjab. The linguistic evidence has indisputably shown that roots of Romani language lie in India: the language has grammatical characteristics of Indian languages and shares with them a big part of the basic lexicon, for example, body parts or daily routines. More exactly, Romani shares the basic lexicon with Hindi and Punjabi. It shares many phonetic features with Marwari, while its grammar is closest to Bengali.

Genetic findings in 2012 suggest the Romani originated in northwestern India and migrated as a group. According to a genetic study in 2012, the ancestors of present Scheduled Castes and Scheduled Tribes populations of northern India, traditionally referred to collectively as the Ḍoma, are the likely ancestral populations of the modern European Roma. In February 2016, during the International Roma Conference, the Indian Minister of External Affairs stated that the people of the Roma community were children of India. The conference ended with a recommendation to the Government of India to recognize the Roma community spread across 30 countries as a part of the Indian diaspora.

The Romani people emigrated from Northern India, presumably from the northwestern Indian states of Rajasthan and Punjab, possibly as early as 600 A.D. They emigrated to the Middle East and then reached the European continent. Moreover, "the Roma (the name is the plural form of the word "Rom") moved from India at the beginning of the 12th century, reached Europe in the 14th century and Central Europe in the 15th century." The language of the Romani people is called Romani [romaňi čhib] or Romany. It is an Indic (or Indo-Aryan) language – like Sanskrit, Hindi, and Bengali — which belongs to the Indo-Iranian branch of the Indo-European family. The language retains much of the Indic morphology, phonology and lexicon, while its syntax has been heavily influenced by contact with other languages.

Bulgarian ethnologists Elena Marushiakova and Veselin Popov assert that no direct evidence indicates when precisely the Romani first appeared in Bulgaria. While they mention that other Bulgarian and international scholars have associated the 1387 Charter of Rila term Agoupovi Kleti with the Romani, they hold that the term refers to seasonal lodgings for mountain herdsmen. Instead, they delimit the mass settlement of Romani in Bulgarian territory between the 13th and 14th centuries, supporting this time frame with 13th- and 14th-century documents referring to Romani presence in the surrounding Balkan states. According to Bulgarian sociologist Ilona Tomova, Ottoman fiscal reports between the 15th and 17th centuries indirectly indicate Romani settlement in Bulgaria since the 13th century, as most registered Romani possessed Slavonic names and were Christians.

"Although the largest Roma migration wave to the Bulgarian lands seems to have occurred in the 13th and 14th centuries, many Roma arrived with the Ottoman troops, accompanying army craftsmen and complementary military units."

In addition, during the 14th and 15th centuries, Muslim Romani arrived in Bulgaria with the Ottoman rule, serving as auxiliaries, craftsmen, musicians and other professions. Unlike the Ottoman Empire's other subjects in the millet system, Romani were governed based on their ethnicity, not their religious affiliation. Ottoman tax records first mention Romani in the Nikopol region, where 3.5% of the registered households were Romani. Under Mehmed II's reign, all Romani – Christian and Muslim – paid a poll-tax that was otherwise imposed only on non-Muslims.

During the 16th century, Suleiman I enacted laws to prohibit the mingling of Muslim and Christian Romani and to administer taxes collected from the Romani: the 1530 Gypsies in the Rumelia Region Act and a 1541 law for the Romani sancak. Muslim Romani were taxed less than Christian Romani, yet they were taxed more than other Muslims for not adhering to Islamic laws and customs. Ottoman imperial assembly registers from 1558-1569 characterize the Romani as ehl-i fesad (people of malice), charging them with crimes such as prostitution, murder, theft, vagrancy and counterfeiting.

Roma in Bulgaria are not a unified community in culture and lifestyle. The most widespread group of the Romani in the country are the yerlii or the 'local Roma', who are in turn divided into Bulgarian Gypsies (daskane roma) and Turkish Gypsies (horahane roma). The former are mostly Christian (Eastern Orthodox and Protestant), while the latter are Muslim. Many of the Muslim Romani or the so-called Turkish Gypsies are usually well integrated in the ethnic Turkish society in Bulgaria. Many possess Turkish ethnic identity and speak Turkish in addition to Romani. Moreover, between 50% and 75% of Romani are Muslims and more than 30 Romani dialects are reportedly used in the country. Muslim Romani can be divided into several linguistic groups: for example the Horahane Romani, who speak only Romani (although they know Turkish or Bulgarian) and identify themselves as Romani; Romani whose language is a mix between Romani and Turkish; Romani who use only Turkish (rarely Bulgarian and Romani); and Romani who can only speak Turkish, identifying themselves as either Romani or Turkish.

A subgroup of the Bulgarian Gypsies in southern Bulgaria, the Asparuhovi bâlgari ("Asparuh Bulgarians") — that is known also as stari bâlgari ("Old Bulgarians"), sivi gâlâbi ("Grey Doves", "Grey Pigeons"), or demirdzhii — self-identify as the descendants of blacksmiths for Khan Asparuh's army. Some deny any connection with the Romani and most do not speak Romani.

According to the 2011 census of the population of Bulgaria, there are 325,343 Gypsies in Bulgaria, or 4.4 percent. 180,266 of these are urban residents and 145,077 rural.

Most of the Roma, 66%, are young children and adults up to 29 years old, the same group constitutes 37% among ethnic Bulgarians, while 5% of Roma are 60 years and over, Bulgarians are 22%.

From the 1992 census to the 2001 census, the number of Romani in the country has increased by 57,512, or 18.4%. The Romani were only 2.8% in 1910 and 2.0% in 1920.

While the Romani are present in all provinces of Bulgaria, their highest percentages are in Montana Province (12.5%) and Sliven Province (12.3%) and their smallest percentage is in Smolyan Province, where they number 686 — about 0.05% of the population.

Varbitsa is possibly the only urban settlement where the Romani are the most numerous group. The largest Romani quarters are Stolipinovo in Plovdiv and Fakulteta in Sofia. The number of places where Romani constitute more than 50% of the population has doubled from the 1992 to the 2001 census. The largest village with a Romani majority is Gradets in Kotel Municipality.

Age structure

Although Roma constitute only 4.4 percent of the Bulgarian population, they constitute around 12 percent of all children aged between 0 and 9 years old according to the 2011 census.[63] In some municipalities, like Valchedram and Ruzhintsi in northwestern Bulgaria, more than the half of all children belong to the Roma ethnicity.

Problems of exclusion and discrimination

In a UNDP/ILO survey, Bulgarian Romani identified unemployment, economic hardship and discrimination in access to employment as major problems.

The Council of Europe body ECRI stated in its June 2003 third report on Bulgaria that Romani encounter "serious difficulties in many spheres of life", elaborating that:

"The main problems stem from the fact that the Roma districts are turning into ghettos. [...] Most Roma neighbourhoods consist of slums, precariously built without planning permission on land that often belongs to the municipalities. As the Bulgarian authorities have not taken steps to address the situation, the people living in these districts have no access to basic public services, whether health care, public transport, waste collection or sanitation."

To which the Bulgarian government answered officially in the same document:

ECRI has correctly observed that members of the Roma community encounter "serious difficulties" "in many spheres of life". The rest of this paragraph, however, regrettably contains sweeping, grossly inaccurate generalizations ... Due to various objective and subjective factors, many (but by no means all!) members of the Roma community found it particularly difficult to adapt to the new realities of the market economy. “…Romani mahala-dwellers are still captives of the past, holding onto and behaving according to preconceptions about the socialist welfare state that clash with the modern realities of a market economy and privatisation". More concretely, the allegation that the people living in these districts "have no access to basic public services" is largely inaccurate.

Certain difficulties (though not remotely on the scale suggested) do exist in this regard, and the authorities are taking concrete measures to address them. However, as the Advisor on Roma and Sinti issues at the OSCE, N. Gheorghe remarked during the Skopje meeting: “…many of the Roma confuse public services with rights to which they are entitled and which are guaranteed by the welfare state" .

Concerning the issue of the electricity supply it should be noted that dwellers of such neighbourhoods sometimes refuse to pay their electricity bills. This attitude could at least in part be explained by the fact that “…Romani mahala-dwellers believe they have rights as citizens to electricity and other services, and that the state has an obligation to provide and to a large extent to subsidize them" In these circumstances electricity suppliers may find themselves with no other option but to "sometimes cut off" the electricity supply in order to incite the consumers to commence honouring their debts. Such cut-offs are part of standard practice and the ethnic origin of the consumers is irrelevant in these cases.

With respect to welfare benefits, which allegedly "in some cases, moreover, Roma do not receive" while "they are entitled" to them, it should be underscored that Bulgaria’s social welfare legislation sets uniform objective criteria for access to welfare benefits for all citizens, irrespective of their ethnic origin (furthermore, any discrimination, including on ethnic grounds is expressly prohibited by law). The question of who is entitled or not entitled to welfare benefits is determined by the relevant services on the basis of a means test. Every single decision of these services must be (and is) in written form and clearly motivated. If a claimant is not satisfied with a decision, he/she is entitled to appeal it before the regional welfare office. Consequently, this allegation of ECRI is also erroneous." A monitoring report by the Open Society Institute found that Romani children and teenagers are less likely to enrol in primary and secondary schools than the majority population and less likely to complete their education if they do. Between 60% and 77% of Romani children enrol in primary education (ages 6–15), compared to 90-94% of ethnic Bulgarians. Only 6%-12% of Romani teenagers enrol in secondary education (ages 16–19). The drop-out rate is significant, but hard to measure, as many are formally enrolled but rarely attend classes.

The report also indicates that Romani children and teenagers attend de facto segregated "Roma schools" in majority-Romani neighbourhoods and villages. These "Roma schools" offer inferior quality education; many are in bad physical condition and lack necessary facilities such as computers. As a result, Romani literacy rates, already below those for ethnic Bulgarians, are much lower still for Romani who have attended segregated schools. The official position of the Bulgarian government to such segregation is:

"There had never been a policy of "segregation" of Roma children in the national education system. The fact that in some neighbourhoods in certain towns particular schools were attended predominantly by pupils of Roma origin was an unintended consequence of the administrative division of the school system. According to the rules valid for all children irrespective of their ethnic origin, admittance to any public school was linked administratively to the domicile of the family. In neighbourhoods where the population was predominantly of Roma origin, this system produced schools, attended predominantly by pupils of Roma origin. It is precisely this situation that the authorities are taking special measures to rectify. Therefore, the word "segregation" with respect to Roma children is inaccurate." Romani children are often sent to special schools for children with intellectual disabilities or boarding schools for children with "deviant behaviour" (so-called "delinquent schools"). According to reports of the Bulgarian Helsinki Committee (BHC), Romani made up half the number of students in schools for children with intellectual disabilities and about two-thirds of the students of the boarding schools, where the BHC found a variety of human rights abuses, including physical violence. In both sets of special schools, the quality of teaching is very poor and essential things such as desks, textbooks and teaching materials are inadequate or altogether lacking. On two occasions, the European Committee of Social Rights has found violations of the European Social Charter in situations with Bulgaria's Romani population: in 2006, concerning right to housing, and in 2008, concerning right to health— in both cases on complaints from the European Roma Rights Centre.

Political representation

According to a report of POLITEA, "For the most of the 1990s the only representation the Romani got was through the mainstream political parties. This was a very limited form of representation in which one or two Romani had a symbolic presence in Parliament during each term." The Bulgarian Constitution does not allow political parties based on ethnic, religious, or racist principles or ideology. However, "Twenty one Roma political organizations were founded between 1997 and 2003 in Bulgaria [...]".In the 2005 Bulgarian parliamentary election, three Romani parties took part: Euroroma, Movement for an Equal Public Model (as part of a coalition led by the Union of Democratic Forces) and the Civil Union "Roma" (as part of a coalition led by the Bulgarian Socialist Party Currently, the Movement for Rights and Freedoms represents Muslim Romani. The party relies on the biggest share of Romani people, 44%of the total Romani vote, including non-Muslims.

Romani people are considered second-class citizens by some Bulgarians. Romani integration programmes funded by the European Union have had mixed success.

Public opinion

The 2019 Pew Research poll found that 68% of Bulgarians held unfavorable views of Roma.

Canada

Romani people in Canada

The Romani people in Canada are citizens of Canada who are of Romani descent. According to the 2011 Census there were 5,255 Canadians who claimed Romani (Gypsy) ancestry.

History

Origin

The Romani people originate from the Northern India, presumably from the north western Indian states Rajasthan and Punjab. The linguistic evidence has indisputably shown that roots of Romani language lie in India: the language has grammatical characteristics of Indian languages and shares with them a big part of the basic lexicon, for example, body parts or daily routines. More exactly, Romani shares the basic lexicon with Hindi and Punjabi. It shares many phonetic features with Marwari, while its grammar is closest to Bengali. Genetic findings in 2012 suggest the Romani originated in north western India and migrated as a group. According to a genetic study in 2012, the ancestors of present scheduled tribes and scheduled caste populations of northern India, traditionally referred to collectively as the Ḍoma, are the likely ancestral populations of modern European Roma.

Migration to Canada during the 1990s

When Romani refugees were allowed into Canada in 1997, a protest was staged by 25 people, including neo-Nazis, in front of the motel where the refugees were staying. The protesters held signs that said, for examples, "Honk if you hate Gypsies," "Canada is not a Trash Can," and "G.S.T. — Gypsies Suck Tax." (The last is a reference to Canada's Goods and Services Tax, also known as GST.) The protesters were charged with promoting hatred, and the case, R. v. Krymowski, reached the Supreme Court of Canada in 2005.

Following the influx of over 3,000 Czech Romani refugees to Canada in 1997 a community centre was opened in Toronto, Ontario. The Roma Community Centre is a non-profit organization that is dedicated to providing community support to the Romani people in Canada. The organization was founded in 1997. The centre has also provided assistance to Romani refugees from the former Yugoslavia (Serbia, Croatia, North Macedonia, Montenegro, Bosnia, Slovenia, Kosovo), Czech Republic, Slovakia, Hungary, Romania, Albania, Ukraine, Poland, Portugal, Greece, Ireland, Bulgaria, and other countries with Roma populations. These refugees claim to be fleeing discrimination and persecution in Europe. The centre has also denounced pejorative statements about Romani people in the Canadian media and has denounced anti-Semitism and racism.

Recent

Starting in 2008, Roma immigration from Hungary began to increase. That year Hungary fell into recession, and violence and discrimination against Roma increased. Many Roma in Hungary live in squalor. In 2011 Roma asylum seekers from Hungary numbered 4,400, but most of these claims were either rejected or withdrawn.

Immigration Minister Jason Kenney was quoted as saying in 2012 "If they subsequently withdraw their own claim, they’re telling us that in fact they don’t need Canada’s protection, that they’re not victims of persecution, and that’s… a bogus claim. It’s a fake claim." The government has since pushed to reduce Hungarian Roma immigration. In December 2012, Hungary was added to a list of "Safe Countries", which would make refugee claims harder. On September 5, 2012, prominent Canadian commentator Ezra Levant broadcast a commentary "The Jew vs. the Gypsies" on The Source in which he accused the Romani people of being a group of criminals saying:

These are gypsies, a culture synonymous with swindlers. The phrase gypsy and cheater have been so interchangeable historically that the word has entered the English language as a verb: he gypped me. Well the gypsies have gypped us. Too many have come here as false refugees. And they come here to gyp us again and rob us blind as they have done in Europe for centuries … They’re gypsies. And one of the central characteristics of that culture is that their chief economy is theft and begging.

In March 2013, Levant apologized for his remarks, stating that "I attacked a particular group, and painted them all with the same brush. And to those I hurt, I'm sorry" and expressed hope that this "will serve as an example of what not to do when commenting on social issues." The Canadian Broadcast Standards Council (CBSC) subsequently ruled, in September 2013, that Levant's broadcast was “in violation of the Canadian Association of Broadcasters’ Code of Ethics and Equitable Portrayal Code,” and that his comments about the Roma were "abusive and unduly discriminatory against an ethnic group, and violated other provisions of the [code] regarding negative portrayal, stereotyping, stigmatization and degradation." The council noted that Levant had already issued two on-air apologies, and as such, he would not be ordered to issue another.

Canada’s Roma have a rich history,

including here in Kamloops

The Romani people of Canada have been met with both fascination and suspicion.

For more than a century, Canadians have been fascinated by the colourful bands of “Gypsies” that roamed the country. There was a circus-like feeling when they came to town. Dressed in colourful costumes, women danced, told fortunes, sold herbs and worked as midwifes. Men made and sold copper utensils and furniture. Gypsies must have been a rare source of entertainment in frontier towns like Kamloops.

Historical entries of the Roma are brief says Professor Cynthia Levine-Rasky, author of Writing the Roma:

“In historical almanacs, most encounters are discussed only fleetingly, such as the report of the “Gypsy show put on in Kamloops in 1898, or in description of visitors who dressed ’like Gypsies,’ or in the numerous sightings of nearby campsites (Canada’s History Magazine, June/July 2018).” While these Gypsies were never identified as Roma, the nature of their activities closely corresponded with the people. The Roma liked the myth that the name “Gypsy” projected, so it’s understandable.

“Gypsy” obscures the people’s origin. In Europe, the Gypsy label was given to the Roma because they were thought to originate in Egypt. The Roma never identified a homeland. Their origins were further obscured as they took surnames from whatever country they landed in.

We now know that the Roma originated from Northern India in the eleventh century. Their exodus to North Africa and Europe suggests they may have been refugees from the spread of Islam into India.

In Canada, the most common subgroups of Roma came from the United Kingdom, Russia, and Hungary. In some respects, the Roma were like other ethnic group. “Also like other groups, the Roma have been misunderstood or regarded with suspicion,” says Levine-Rasky. “But, unlike with people with other ethnicities, the myth of the Gypsy travelled alongside the Roma wherever they went.”

One attack on the Roma is seared into their historical memory. The Roma settled into a camp near Glace Bay, Cape Breton Island, in 1935. Women told fortunes in town and the men, who were skilled mechanics, did odd jobs.

In the middle of the night five drunken miners attacked the camp, intent on raping two Romani girls; Bessie and Millie Demetro. A reporter wrote: “hardly a member of the band escaped the carnage that followed.” Their father, Frank Demetro, fired a gunshot into the air to scare them off. He was arrested for firing another shot that killed one of the miners. Demetro was taken to hospital to care for his injuries and placed under RCMP guard. Frank’s brother Russel, fearing that Frank would not survive prison because he was diabetic, admitted to the shooting. Russel was tried but acquitted on a plea of self-defence.

Canadian Roma commemorate the event with a song in which Frank appeals to his wife Kezha: “Kezha, de ma ki katrinsa te kosav a rat pa mande (Kezha, give me your apron to wipe the blood from me)” but don’t look for bands of Gypsies roaming the countryside today.

“When we learn of their historical travails, however, the Gypsy myth is challenged, just as it is when we encounter the Roma in Canada today –a dynamic and pluralistic community numbering about one hundred thousand and encompassing citizens of many faiths, occupations, and statuses,” says Levine-Rasky.

The Roma in Peterborough

When sixty "gypsies" set up camp on an extension of George Street in Peterborough, Ontario, in the early summer of 1909, they caused a sensation.

In Peterborough, Ontario, in the early summer of 1909, each evening the Evening Examiner reported, “literally thousands of people” visited the “gypsy” encampment, some arriving in carriages, others in automobiles, the rest on foot, to stand and watch while the Romany women went about the ordinary business of preparing supper. Some of the women were not amused being gawked at and threw water and boiled rice at the spectators, but Rosie, styled by the Peterborough newspaper as “the Gypsie Queen” and reportedly all of fourteen years old (and very self-possessed), ordered the offenders to stop, and they did.

The Peterborough townspeople, including photographer Frederick Lewis Roy, whose pictures accompany this article, studied the women whose flowing, brightly coloured garments and abundance of jewellery they deemed fantastic; they noted the children, “practically naked” and permitted to smoke cigarettes; they commented on the food — “a funny smelling stew” that “would hardly commend itself to the average person.” Finally, as night fell, a local police constable arrived to drive back the crowds to allow the Romany people to sleep in peace. The Romany women had no male companions to help them in the task of securing their protection because, unfortunately, all the men, including their chief, Stephen George, were in Peterborough county jail charged with the offence of loitering on the roadside and obstructing passengers in a public highway and the offence of allowing vehicles to stand on the road in the township of Smith for a period of more than three hours.

It was an old tune to the Roma, a stateless minority of some twelve million people (also known as gypsies). Throughout their thousand-year Diaspora, as they moved ever westward from their roots in India, to western Europe in the fourteenth and fifteen centuries, to the Americas in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, the Roma have been considered either exotic or dangerous, creations of a romantic imagination or convenient scapegoats, admired or reviled; in most cases, wholly “other” — strangers in whatever land they happen to dwell.

In its most virulent forms, persecution of the Roma had led to enslavement by the princes of medieval Romanya, decreed hangings of all Roma over age eighteen in King Frederick William’s Prussia, and mass death in the Nazi concentration camps. Lately, in post-Communist Eastern Europe, Roma have undergone renewed attacks and evictions, oppression that has been not without consequence to Canada. Late in the summer of 1997, about 1,000 Roma from the Czech Republic tried to immigrate to Canada after a film on Czech television depicted Canada as a haven. Two months after the film’s showing, Canada re-imposed visa requirements for Czechs, effectively reducing Roma refugee claimants to a trickle.

Mercifully, the reaction of the Peterborough townspeople in 1909 to the strangers in their midst was comparatively temperate. But, as newspaper accounts of the day indicate, the reaction nonetheless honed to the stereotypes that have been the Roma’s constant companions for a millennium — attraction, wonder, criticism, and distrust.

Canada may be a multicultural society today, particularly in its larger cities, but in 1909 Canadians were more provincial than cosmopolitan, more openly biased than politically correct, and each social grouping more protective of its niche in society. Outsiders, whether geographical, religious, or cultural, were openly declared so, their alien status often supported by policy and enforced by law.

I asked a 102-year-old friend of mine if he remembered the Roma. “Oh yes!” he replied. “Everyone was afraid of them, but they wouldn’t hurt anyone. I went up to the jail and talked to them.”

The Peterborough of 1909 was a town of fewer than 20,000 citizens, most of them of English, Irish, and Scottish descent living at a time before the advent of cinema, radio, and television. The arrival of the Roma must have been the most exotic event of the decade for people who had to depend on their own resources for entertainment.

Peterborough jail was home to the Romany men for more than a week. Frequently referred to in newspaper copy as Mexicans because they were believed to have originated in Mexico, the Roma had been under the keen eye of various regional authorities for some time as they travelled eastward through southern Ontario. “The Mexicans have terrorized the countryside,” the Evening Examiner declared in its Tuesday, June 22, 1909 issue under the headline, “Gypsy Captives Are a Picturesque Lot”: “all along the line they have caused trouble and annoyance, and the authorities have done well to round them up instead of merely driving them on to other fields of prey.”

With their men in jail, the Romany women and children were detained in the jail’s courtyard. But after a couple of days, after the men did not plead to the charges at their first court appearance and were remanded in custody until the following week, the civic leaders decided to let the women and children leave and look after themselves, as the cost of feeding sixty people, thirty horses, and assorted dogs, as well as hiring special constables, was thought too great a burden on taxpayers. The leaders also contacted Ottawa to ascertain if the Roma could be deported to Mexico, but they were told the Roma were naturalized Canadians and deportation was impossible.

As the caravan of fifteen wagons, women, and children moved down one of the main streets to a vacant lot at the edge of town, it caused “a sensation as it passed,” according to the newspaper. A circus ground was the allusion chosen by the reporter to describe the encampment the Roma made on the town’s outskirts. It was here the people of Peterborough gathered in great numbers — like a circus crowd — to observe the social behaviour of their itinerant guests.

As to put a finishing touch to so Eastern a picture, a beautiful girl, gold bedecked and scarlet clad, rose up and in a graceful, languorous manner began to dance, chanting the while and moving her arms in time with the music.

Anything that appeared to veer from the norms of life as lived by the average Peterborough citizen caught the eyes of reporters and was diligently recorded, whether the subject was braided hair, necklaces of coins, children and dogs sleeping together, or women smoking pipes. One woman, Mrs. MacFarlane Wilson, writing in the Toronto Globe, described the men as “disreputable looking” but the women as “beautiful, of a rich ruddy brown complexion, black hair, dazzling white teeth, and those mournful stag-like black eyes which seem to denote past tragedies.” She continued:

There were no Madonna-like faces, no curves or dimples, but features clearly carven like cameos, and, as Romany blood is gentle blood, their hands and feet were slim and small.

She was describing a wedding party. After a week of incarceration, the men were brought to a packed courtroom of spectators. The magistrate seemed to embody the contradictory response of Peterborough to the Roma: he found several of the men guilty as charged but thought further imprisonment ineffective. He released the prisoners on payment of a $125 fine (a considerable sum in 1909) and a promise to leave Peterborough at once. But he expressed sympathy for the Roma (“They had not had proper bringing up ...”) and granted them a three-day reprieve so that the queen, Rosie, Stephen George’s daughter, could be married to a man named Stoke, described as “an extensive land-owner in the far west.”

Mrs. Wilson was captivated by the life and colour of the wedding, the climax of nine days of novelty for Peterborough, the scarlet dresses worn by the women, the bride’s light chintz-like silk with yards of pink muslin, the flowers in her hair floating down her back, the free spending on food, the kegs of ale, “and even telegraphing.” She added:

If some of the Peterborough region’s farmers and shopkeepers had felt aggrieved by the presence of the Roma, if civic officials were quick to prosecute, their feelings were not universally shared, even in establishment quarters. None other than the band from the local 57th Regiment played the dance music for the wedding.

The Ottawa Children's Aid Society was summoned when someone thought two of the children had skin too fair for Roma.

The next day, the Evening Examiner reported, the Roma “folded their tents like the Arabs” and were gone, bound for Ottawa. But interest in their movements did not abate immediately. The Peterborough newspaper continued with a stream of stories as the town’s former guests progressed by caravan through eastern Ontario. The Roma were ordered to decamp from a hamlet about two or three days journey down the road by men armed with dogs and guns.

They were accused of robbery in Ottawa. Attempts were made by authorities to drive them out of Hull, Quebec, where they were seen bathing near their encampment “in a half-naked condition.” A kidnapping charge was levelled against two Romany men, then dismissed. The Ottawa Children’s Aid Society was summoned when someone thought two of the children had skin too fair for Roma. (The children proved to be those of Stephen George.) Wherever they travelled, rumours and accusations accompanied them, and more often preceded them. It was the old tune. Played again and again.

“No One Is Sorry,” the Evening Examiner declared in the subhead to its July 3 account when the Roma left Peterborough, but the content of the story somewhat belied this claim. “The authorities will not be sorry that the strange visitors have left,” the paper stated, “although the public will miss an attraction that never seemed to lose interest for them.”

Chile

Roma in Chile

The academic world has been attempting to rationalise the origins of Roma for many decades. There is a general consensus, that is based on both linguistic and DNA sciences, that Roma originated from northern India. This, supposed, Indian origins for Romany people was seen as a breakthrough for anthropologists. Why? Because for hundreds of years the Roma people have been an extremely reclusive people, so much so that they have been considered as a group “that don’t want in… as far as traditional anthropological categories are concerned” There is some confusion for students of Romany origins because; on one hand, Roma have traditionally claimed to have originated in Egypt and Palestine; and on the other hand, Western academia have systematically denied Roma of these origins and have instead imposed Indian origins. Many Western influenced Roma believe in the pseudo-scientific hypothesis of Indian origins.

Should we be surprised that many Western influenced Roma believe in the imposed Indian origins? It would be worthwhile to observe that Roma who originally settled in Western Europe suffered a political approach from European governments which “aimed at the annihilation of the Gypsies” which included cultural genocide. Those knowledgeable on the principles of cultural genocide understand that the typical modus operandi is to substitute the ethnic groups culture with a more “rational” (albeit, Western influenced) culture. Which is, by all appearances, what has occurred with the traditional Egyptian and Palestinian beliefs of Roma origins and the now, Western imposed origins based in India.

Origins (Gitano Origins to Chile) by Gaston Salamanca

Numerous linguistic and historical studies have revealed that the gitanos migrated from the north of India around 1000 AD (Tong, 1983; Vaux de F., 1984; Hancock, 1993). However, very few Chilean gitanos indicate that this is the country which the migration started from. A relatively widespread idea amongst the Chilean gitanos is that they originated from one of the twelve Israelite tribes. Chabela Nicolich suggests: “We are from Jerusalem. From the Holy Land the first Roma came from…“.

In Chile, as far as we know, no academic publications exist that indicate the date or from what country the first gitanos began to arrive to Chile. The scarce information we have been able to find come from various newspaper articles. They all coincide in indicating Serbia as the place from where the majority of the first gitano families came from. Russia and Romania are also mentioned as countries from where the first gitanos immigrated from (Sotomayor, 1993; Contreras, 1994).

I strongly feel an affinity with Gaston Salamanca’s research on the origins of Chilean Roma. Firstly, as my mother pointed out to me, she also believes we come from Palestine. Secondly, having both Romani and Sephardic Jewish ancestry, I also feel a connection with the twelve-tribes of Israel. Whether these evidences are right or wrong to the reader is not as important to me as the fact that they are truth for my ancestors. It is believed that the Roma are one of the most diverse ethnic groups in the world, and to place us in a clinical and academically defined box would limit the very essence we exude.

China

Gypsies In China

Legendary Gypsies Once in China You may think of Carmen, a fickle girl in Georges Bizet's "Carmen," or Esmeralda, an incredible dancer in Victor Hugo's "Notre-Dame de Paris," when talking about gypsies. However, very few would imagine that this legendary people came to China once, believing that they stuck only to the roads of Europe. In fact, "Gypsies set foot on Chinese soil some 200 years earlier than on European soil. To be exact, during the Yuan Dynasty (1271-1368) when they toured to Northwest China's Shaanxi and Gansu provinces," says Cai Hongsheng, a history professor from Sun Yat-sen University in South China's Guangdong Province.

Back then, gypsies were called Luoli in Chinese. Cai noted that the name originally came from Persia, where gypsies arrived in the fifth century. He made reference to a paper by Yang Zhijiu, a historian at Nankai University, who died in 2002 at the age of 87. Yang was an expert on the Yuan Dynasty and Hui history. In his paper entitled "Gypsies in China's Yuan Dynasty Luri Huihui" published in 1991, Yang wrote: "These nomadic people, called 'Luoli' in Chinese with the similar pronunciation as 'Luri,' came to northern China's Shaanxi and Gansu in the 13th century, before they arrived in Europe around the 15th century, where they remain as gypsies today." Yet, "The name Luoli in Chinese or Luri in Persian is different from either Gypsy in English or Bohemian in French. Either Gypsy or Bohemian is a derogatory name for it contains a connotation of scorning their wandering lifestyle," Yang wrote in the paper. However, Cai pointed out that Yang didn't provide answers to pending questions such as where the gypsies came from? Where else had they been? And do Luoli remain in China today?

Regrettably, no more records have been found as yet in order to help answer these questions. Yang's studies unfortunately came to an end when he died in 2002. Another essay by Li Hao, an official from Yunnan Province who is also interested in the subject, described the Luoli's lifestyle patterns around Dali, a scenic spot in Yunnan, during the end of the Yuan to the early Ming Dynasty (1368-1644). In Li's essay, Dali was then an important gateway of cultural exchange and trading with south eastern Asian countries, and those from India, Persia, and the Luoli, named as "Moluo" in southwest China. Similar to how gypsies are depicted in films and on stage, Li described how the Luoli would sing and dance in the streets, or sell herbs and practise fortune telling to make a living. It was believed that the Gypsies also made money by singing and dancing. They created more than 100 songs during their stay in Dali. "Those songs were sung in Chinese, indicating that Luoli gradually adopted Han culture, and successfully found a way to make a living," says Cai. Furthermore, it also suggested that the Luoli's performances were well accepted by local people. "Without large audiences how could they possibly create so many songs?" says Cai rhetorically. "These accounts are really making a breakthrough," says Cai. "They are corroborated by historical records, despite the essay's personal tone and strong flavour of local culture."

An interesting detail in the essay describes how Luoli girls became concubines for a local general. As the essay puts it, in 1252, a local Mongolian general, named Uriyanghatai, had eight concubines. Of them, the most beautiful were three Luoli girls. Lady Lotus, daughter of the Luoli tribe's headman, was the general's most favourite for she was good at dancing and singing Chinese songs. It was said that Lady Lotus loved the general so much that after his death she would pay her respects at his tomb every year on Tomb-Sweeping Day, a traditional Chinese festival of worshipping their beloved dead. "Her loyal behaviour lasted over 30 years, " says Cai. "Meanwhile, this story shows the harmonious relationship that existed between the Luoli and the local residents." Searching for clues Cai said that the Luoli in China enjoyed a relatively good material life and freedom. They could develop their talents and live their way of life, while the local authorities provided them with housing and other social services. Mysteriously, however, it appears that the Luoli suddenly disappeared after the Ming Dynasty, leaving a gap in the historical records. "Not a single word can be found about the Luoli, or Gypsy, or any other name related to them in the historical records, chorography or ethnography since the Qing Dynasty (1644-1911)," says Cai, "We don't know why they disappeared, where they went or whether any of their offspring remain in China today."

In order to track them down, Dai Yuanguang, a professor who once worked at Lanzhou University, joined a research project conducted by the university's Research Centre for Humanities. Between 1990 and 1992, he travelled frequently to areas where the Luoli once stayed, including Xinjiang Uygur Autonomous Region, Shaanxi and Gansu provinces. As a result, Dai discovered some murals featuring images of gypsies dancing in grottoes in the area of Aksu in Xinjiang. He also found that inhabitants of Turpan in Xinjiang and of Yongdeng County in Gansu had different physical features and personalities different from Han people. They had much longer straighter noses than people of Chinese origin. The physical characteristics resembled those of the Luoli people. As for their way of living is concerned, they moved around at certain times of the year, demonstrating their unconstrained lifestyles, quite different to those of the local Han residents. Based on his findings, Dai proposed, "It might be that they are the descendants of the gypsy race." He also dated the Luoli's entry into China as early as the time of the Crusades which took place during the 11th century.

Now engaged in journalism and communication studies at Shanghai University's School of Film Arts & Technology, Dai says he plans to return to these places later this year. "The study of gypsies could aid international communication, by learning more about how different cultures and sects blended in China, and revealing the kinds of influences Luoli brought about on local customs," says he. However, Cai believes that it's not wise to jump to conclusions based solely on these people's different lifestyles or physical features, despite all the research regarding Luoli existing in China between the Yuan and the Ming periods. "The big challenge at this point is to find their traces in order to unveil whether those that look different from the Han Chinese are gypsies or their descendents. Solid fieldwork is desperately needed. Facts speak louder than words," he says. (China Daily September 28, 2005)

Colombia

Roma Gypsies of Colombia

One Hundred Years of Solitude, Gabriel García Márquez’s literary recreation of a period of Colombian history, includes the presence of the memorable character Melquíades. A wise and honourable Rom, Melquíades regularly visits Macondo, bringing with him the latest scientific inventions acquired from his travels to demonstrate to the astonished and intrigued inhabitants of the town.

Most South American history books, however, exclude the presence of the Roma (mistakenly believed at one time to have originated from Egypt, hence the misnomer ‘Gypsies’); it is as if they never existed in the region. Yet today it is estimated that about 1 million Roma live in Brazil, 300,000 in Argentina, between 15-20,000 in Chile, 5,000 each in Ecuador and Uruguay, and 8,000 in Colombia (where in 2005, for the first time, Roma were included in the census). Most of these Roma peoples have arrived in South America for the same reasons their ancestors were forced to leave Northern India some thousand years ago and to adopt a life of frequent nomadism in Europe (hence becoming ‘outsiders’ wherever they stopped); namely, for reasons of racist harassment and systematic persecution.

Adhering to their own customs and belief systems and speaking their own language (all of which have their origins in Indian cultural and linguistic traditions), the Roma have been seen as ‘foreigners’ wherever they arrived and have been feared, subjugated, ordered to give up their language, dress and customs, and exploited by Gadje (non-Roma) populations. In the 16th century, Spain and Portugal sought to reduce their Roma populations via banishment to the newly conquered territories of the Americas; on his third voyage to the Americas in 1498, Columbus took with him four ‘Egyptians’ whose punishment, imposed by Spanish authorities for the ‘crime’ of being Roma and wishing to maintain their customs and Romani shib (Romani language), was commuted to hard labour in the galleys.

This period of ‘legal’ immigration was soon to end; in 1582, Spanish authorities passed a decree forbidding the entry of Roma to their American colonies and ordering that all Roma in the so-called ‘New World’ be expelled immediately. Many Roma were deported from the Americas, but many others formed rochelas, alternative societies which existed at the margins of colonial legislation and where the Roma lived in invisibility alongside escaped African slaves, indigenous peoples, and other white and mixed-race fugitives and deserters.

For five hundred years, beginning in the 13th century and continuing until 1864, the Roma were enslaved in Eastern Europe. Following independence from Spain, a law was passed in 1821 in the newly-liberated territory of New Granada (present-day Colombia). This new law prohibited the importation of slaves to the region, and stipulated that any slaves from other nations who did arrive would immediately be granted their freedom. As a result of this law, many Roma sought to escape European slavery by fleeing to Colombia, and the waves of migration from Europe to the Americas have continued throughout the 20th century and up to the present day; Roma have fled the Porajmos (‘the great devouring’, or the Holocaust, during which – officially - half a million Roma were murdered), the rise of extreme-right ‘white power’ groups, and increasing incidences of racially-motivated murder of Roma in the former Soviet Bloc.

In recent years, Latin American Roma have begun to seek to emerge from ‘invisibility’ and to link their struggles against impoverishment and marginalisation with the struggles of indigenous and African-descended groups in the region. In 1997, Colombian Roma formed the Proceso Organizativo del Pueblo Rom [Gitano] de Colombia (PROROM), an organisation which works to highlight the positive cultural and economic contributions Roma have made and can continue to make to the dominant societies in which they live, and to demand recognition of their rights to speak their own language and to retain their own cultural identity in a multicultural society.

Ana Dalila Gómez Baos, a Colombian Rom candidate of the Partido Polo Democrático Alternativo (PDA) leftist opposition party, points out that in Colombia violence and violations of human rights are part of a strategy which impacts predominantly upon marginalised and impoverished sectors of society, namely, the indigenous, the African-descended, and the Roma. According to Gómez Baos, it is ‘time to show that the Gypsy people can contribute different ways of doing politics in support of an ethnically and culturally diverse society’. It may indeed be worth listening to a people who have succeeded in maintaining their own culture and internal cohesion in spite of one thousand years of systematic persecution.

Croatia

Romani in Croatia

There have been Romani people in Croatia for more than 600 years and they are concentrated mostly in the northern regions of the country. The 2011 Croatian census found 16,675 Romani in Croatia or 0.4% of the population. In 2001, more than half of the Romani population was located in the Međimurje County and the City of Zagreb. A considerable number of Romani refugees in Croatia are from the ethnic conflict in Bosnia. In the 2011 census, the largest religious groups among the Romani were Catholics (8,299 or 49.77% of them), Muslims (5,039 or 30.22% of them) and Eastern Orthodox (2,381 or 14.02% of them. There are more than 120 Romani minority NGOs in Croatia.[7] One of the most prominent is Croatian Roma Union and Alliance of Roma in the Republic of Croatia "Kali Sara."

History

Origin

The Romani people originally came to Europe from Northern India, presumably from the north-western Indian states of Rajasthan and Punjab. The linguistic evidence has indisputably shown that roots of the Romani language lie in India: the language has grammatical characteristics of Indian languages and shares with them a big part of the basic lexicon, for example, body parts or daily routines. More exactly, Romani shares the basic lexicon with Hindi and Punjabi. It shares many phonetic features with Marwari, while its grammar is closest to Bengali. Genetic findings in 2012 suggest the Romani originated in north-western India and migrated as a group. According to a genetic study in 2012, the ancestors of present scheduled tribes and scheduled caste populations of Northern India, traditionally referred to collectively as the Ḍoma, are the likely ancestral populations of the modern European Roma. In February 2016, during the International Roma Conference, the Indian Minister of External Affairs stated that the people of the Roma community were children of India. The conference ended with a recommendation to the Government of India to recognize the Roma community spread across 30 countries as a part of the Indian Diaspora.

Migration to Croatia

Romani people were mentioned for the first time in the Republic of Ragusa in 1362 in some commercial records. Ten years later, Romani were recorded as being in Zagreb, where they were merchants, tailors and butchers. Various Romani groups have lived in Croatia since the 14th century. In the Middle Ages Roma living in cities lived together with rest of the population. According to litteras promotorias, nomad Romani groups also had the authority to resolve independently all intergroup conflicts.

Maria Theresa and Joseph II, in regulations issued in 1761, 1767 and 1783, outlawed the Romani nomadic lifestyle, forced them to accept local clothing codes and languages, made regulations regarding personal and family names and limited their choice of professions. Large groups of Roma arrived in Croatia in the 19th century from Romania after the abolition of Romani slavery there in 1855.

World War II

Jasenovac concentration camp Jasenovac was a concentration and extermination camp established in Slavonia by the authorities of the Independent State of Croatia (NDH) during World War II. The concentration camp, one of the ten largest in Europe, was established and operated by the governing Ustaše regime, which was the only quisling regime in occupied Europe to operate extermination camps solely on their own for Jews and other ethnic groups. It was established in August 1941 in marshland at the confluence of the Sava and Una rivers near the village of Jasenovac, and was dismantled in April 1945. It was "notorious for its barbaric practices and the large number of victims". Unlike German Nazi-run camps, Jasenovac "specialized in one-on-one violence of a particularly brutal kind” and prisoners were primarily murdered manually with the use of blunt objects such as knives, hammers and axes.

In Jasenovac the majority of victims were ethnic Serbs (as part of the Genocide of the Serbs); others were Jews (The Holocaust), Roma (The Porajmos), and some political dissidents. Jasenovac was a complex of five sub camps spread over 210 km2 (81 sq mi) on both banks of the Sava and Una rivers. The largest camp was the "Brickworks" camp at Jasenovac, about 100 km (62 mi) southeast of Zagreb. The overall complex included the Stara Gradiška sub-camp, the killing grounds across the Sava river at Donja Gradina, five work farms, and the Uštica Roma camp.

During and since World War II, there has been much debate and controversy regarding the number of victims killed at the Jasenovac concentration camp complex during its more than three-and-a-half years of operation.

After the war, a figure of 700,000 reflected the "conventional wisdom". Since 2002, the Museum of Victims of Genocide in Belgrade has no longer defended the figure of 700,000 to 1 million victims of the camp. In 2005, Dragan Cvetković, a researcher from the Museum, and a Croatian co-author published a book on wartime losses in the NDH which gave a figure of approximately 100,000 victims of Jasenovac.

The United States Holocaust Memorial Museum (USHMM) in Washington, D.C. presently estimates that the Ustaša regime murdered between 77,000 and 99,000 people in Jasenovac between 1941 and 1945.

Background

The Independent State of Croatia (NDH) was founded on 10 April 1941, after the invasion of Yugoslavia by the Axis powers. The NDH consisted of the present-day Republic of Croatia and modern-day Bosnia and Herzegovina together with Syrmia in modern-day Serbia. It was essentially an Italo–German quasi-protectorate, as it owed its existence to the Axis powers, who maintained occupation forces within the puppet state throughout its existence. However, its day-to-day administration was comprised almost exclusively of Croatians, including monks and nuns, under the leadership of the Ustaše.

Before the war the Ustaše were an ultra-nationalist, fascist, racist and terrorist organization, fighting for an independent Croatia. In 1932 the Ustaše leader Ante Pavelić proclaimed: "The KNIFE, REVOLVER, MACHINE GUN and TIME BOMB; these are the idols, these are bells that will announce the dawning and THE RESURRECTION OF THE INDEPENDENT STATE OF CROATIA". Ustaše terrorists set off bombs on international trains bound for Yugoslavia, and Pavelić and other Ustaše leaders were sentenced to death in absentia by French courts, for organizing the assassination of the Yugoslav King and the French Foreign Minister, in 1934 in Marseilles.

The Ustaše were virulently anti-Serb and also antisemitic. In their "17 Principles" they proclaimed that those who were not "of Croat blood" (i.e. Serbs and Jews), will not have any political role in the future Croat state. In 1936, in "The Croat Question", Pavelić spouted anti-Serb and anti-Semitic hatred, calling Jews "the enemy of the Croat people".

NDH legislation

Some of the first decrees issued by the leader of the NDH Ante Pavelić reflected the Ustaše adoption of the racist ideology of Nazi Germany. The regime rapidly issued a decree restricting the activities of Jews and seizing their property.

These laws were followed by a decree for "the Protection of the Nation and the State" of 17 April 1941, which mandated the death penalty for the offence of high treason if a person did or had done "harm to the honour and vital interests of the Croatian nation or endangered the existence of the Independent State of Croatia". This was a retroactive law, and arrests and trials started immediately. It was soon followed by a decree prohibiting the use of the Cyrillic script, which was an integral part of the rites of the Serbian Orthodox Church. On April 30, 1941, the Ustaše proclaimed the main race laws, patterned after Nazi race laws - the "Legal Decree on Racial Origins", the "Legal Decree on the Protection of Aryan Blood and the Honour of the Croatian People", and the "Legal Provision on Citizenship". These decrees defined who was a Jew, and took away the citizenship rights of all non-Aryans, i.e. Jews and Roma.

By the end of April 1941, months before the Nazis implemented similar measures in Germany, the Ustaše required all Jews to wear insignia, typically a yellow Star of David.] The Ustaše declared the "Legal Provision on the Nationalization of the Property of Jews and Jewish Companies", on 10 October 1941, and with it they confiscated all Jewish property. The Ustaše enacted many other decrees against Jews, Roma and Serbs, which became the basis for Ustaše policies of genocide against Jews and Roma, while against Serbs - as proclaimed by an Ustaše leader, Mile Budak - the policy was to kill a third, expel a third, and forcefully convert to Catholicism a third, which many historians also describe as genocide. The decrees were enforced not only through the regular court system, but also through new special courts and mobile courts-martial with extended jurisdiction. Almost immediately the first concentration camps were set up, and in July 1941 the Ustaše government began clearing ground for what would become the Jasenovac concentration camp.

Start of Mass terror

Actions against Jews began immediately after the Independent State of Croatia was founded. On 10–11 April 1941, Ustaše arrested a group of prominent Zagreb Jews and held them for ransom. On 13 April the same was done in Osijek, where Ustaše and Volksdeutscher mobs also destroyed the synagogue and Jewish graveyard.

This process was repeated multiple times in 1941 with groups of Jews. Simultaneously, the Ustaše initiated extensive anti-Semitic propaganda, with Ustaše papers writing that Croatians must "be more alert than any other ethnic group to protect their racial purity, ... We need to keep our blood clean of the Jews". They also wrote that Jews are synonymous with "treachery, cheating, greed, immorality and foreignness", and therefore "wide swaths of the Croatian people always despised the Jews and felt towards them natural revulsion".

The first mass killing of Serbs was carried out on April 30, when the Ustaše rounded up and killed 196 Serbs at Gudovac. Many other mass killings soon followed. Here is how the Croatian Catholic Bishop of Mostar, Alojzije Mišić, described the mass killings of Serbs just in one small area of Herzegovina, just during the first 6 months of the war: People were captured like beasts. Slaughtered, killed, thrown live into the abyss.

Women, mothers with children, young women, girls and boys were thrown into pits. The vice-mayor of Mostar, Mr. Baljić, a Mohammedan, publicly states, although as an official he should be silent and not talk, that in Ljubinje alone 700 schismatics [i.e. Serb Orthodox Christians] were thrown into one pit. Six full train carriages of women, mothers and girls, children under age 10, were taken from Mostar and Čapljina to the Šurmanci station, where they were unloaded and taken into the hills, with live mothers and their children tossed down the cliffs. Everyone was tossed and killed. In the Klepci parish, from the surrounding villages, 3,700 schismatics were killed. Poor souls, they were calm. I will not enumerate further. I would go too far. In the city of Mostar, hundreds were tied up, taken outside the city and killed like animals.

First concentration camps

On April 15, only 5 days after the creation of the NDH, the Ustaše established the first concentration camp, Danica, at Koprivnica. In May 1941, they rounded up 165 Jewish youth in Zagreb, members of the Jewish sports club Makabi, and sent them to Danica (all but 3 were later killed by the Ustaše). The Croatian historian, Zdravko Dizdar, estimates that some 5,600 inmates passed through the Danica camp, mostly Serbs but also Jews and Croat Communists. Of the 3,358 Danica inmates Dizdar was able to trace by name, he found that 2,862, i.e. 85%, were later killed by the Ustaše at the Jadovno and Jasenovac concentration camps, the vast majority Serbs, but also hundreds of Jews and some Croats.

In June 1941, the Ustaše established a new system of concentration camps, stretching from Gospič to the Velebit mountains, to the island of Pag. Ustaše sources state that they sent 28,700 people to these camps in the summer of 1941. Of these, Ustaše records show only 4,000 returned, after the Ustaše were forced by the Italians to shut down the camps and withdraw from the area, because of the strong resistance their mass killings had sparked. Thus the likely death toll for these camps is around 24,000, although some sources put it as high as 40,000. After residents reported the contamination of drinking water due to large numbers of corpses rotting across Velebit, the Italians sent medical officers to investigate. They found multiple death pits and mass graves, in which they estimated some 12,000 victims were killed. At Slana Concentration Camp on the island of Pag they dug up one mass grave, with nearly 800 corpses, of whom half were women and children, the youngest being 5 months old.

The majority of these victims were Serbs, but among them were also 2,000-3,000 Jews. Thus the Ustaše initiated the mass killing of Jews at approximately the same time as Nazi Einsatzgruppen in Eastern Europe, and months before the Nazis started the mass killings of German Jews.

The influence of Nazi Germany

On 10 April 1941, the Independent State of Croatia was established, supported by Nazi Germany and fascist Italy, and it adopted similar racial and political doctrines.

Jasenovac contributed to the Nazi "final solution" to the "Jewish problem", the killing of Roma people and the elimination of political opponents, but its most significant purpose for the Ustaše was as a means to achieve the destruction of Serbs inside the Independent State of Croatia (NDH). Jasenovac was located in the German occupation zone of the Independent State of Croatia. The Nazis encouraged Ustaše anti-Jewish and anti-Roma actions and showed support for the intended extermination of the Serb people. Soon, the Nazis began to make clear their genocide goals, as in the speech Hitler gave to Slavko Kvaternik at a meeting on 21 July 1941:

The Jews are the bane of mankind. If the Jews will be allowed to do as they will, like they are permitted in their Soviet heaven, then they will fulfil their most insane plans. And thus Russia became the centre to the world's illness ... if for any reason, one nation would endure the existence of a single Jewish family, that family would eventually become the centre of a new plot. If there are no more Jews in Europe, nothing will hold the unification of the European nations ... this sort of people cannot be integrated in the social order or into an organized nation. They are parasites on the body of a healthy society, that live off of expulsion of decent people. One cannot expect them to fit into a state that requires order and discipline. There is only one thing to be done with them: To exterminate them. The state holds this right since, while precious men die on the battlefront, it would be nothing less than criminal to spare these bastards. They must be expelled, or – if they pose no threat to the public – to be imprisoned inside concentration camps and never be released.

At the Wannsee Conference, Germany offered the Croatian government transportation of its Jews southward, but questioned the importance of the offer as "the enactment of the final solution of the Jewish question is not crucial, since the key aspects of this problem were already solved by radical actions these governments took." In addition to specifying the means of extermination, the Nazis often arranged the imprisonment or transfer of inmates to Jasenovac. Kasche's emissary, Major Knehe, visited the camp on 6 February 1942. Kasche thereafter reported to his superiors:

Capitan Luburic, the commander-in-action of the camp, explained the construction plans of the camp. It turns out that he made these plans while in exile. These plans he modified after visiting concentration-camps instalments in Germany.

Kasche wrote the following:

The Poglavnik asks General Bader to realize that the Jasenovac camp cannot receive the refugees from Kozara. I agreed since the camp is also required to solve the problem in deporting the Jews to the east. Minister Turina can deport the Jews to Jasenovac. Stara-Gradiška was the primary site from which Jews were transported to Auschwitz, but Kashe's letter refers specifically to the sub-camp Ciglana in this regard. In all documentation, the term "Jasenovac" relates to either the complex at large or, when referring to a specific camp, to camp nr. III, which was the main camp since November 1941. The extermination of Serbs at Jasenovac was precipitated by General Paul Bader, who ordered that refugees be taken to Jasenovac. Although Jasenovac was expanded, officials were told that "Jasenovac concentration and labour camp cannot hold an infinite number of prisoners".

Soon thereafter, German suspicions were renewed that the Ustaše were more concerned with the extermination of Serbs than Jews, and that Italian and Catholic pressure was dissuading the Ustaše from killing Jews. The Nazis revisited the possibility of transporting Jews to Auschwitz, not only because extermination was easier there, but also because the profits produced from the victims could be kept in German hands, rather than being left for the Croats or Italians. Instead Jasenovac remained a place where Jews who could not be deported would be interned and killed: In this way, while Jews were deported from Tenje, two deportations were also made to Jasenovac. It is also illustrated by the report sent by Hans Helm to Adolf Eichmann, in which it is stated that the Jews will first be collected in Stara-Gradiška, and that "Jews would be employed in 'forced labour' in Ustaše camps", mentioning only Jasenovac and Stara Gradiška, "will not be deported".

The Nazis found interest in the Jews that remained inside the camp, even in June 1944, after the visit of a Red Cross delegation. Kasche wrote: "Schmidllin showed a special interest in the Jews.... Luburic told me that Schmidllin told him that the Jews must be treated in the finest manner, and that they must survive, no matter what happens. ...

Luburic suspected Schmidllin is an English agent and therefore prevented all contact between him and the Jews".Hans Helm was in charge of deporting Jews to concentration camps. He was tried in Belgrade in December 1946, along with other SS and Gestapo officials, and was sentenced to death by hanging, along with August Meyszner, Wilhelm Fuchs, Josef Hahn, Ludwig Teichmann, Josef Eckert, Ernst Weimann, Richard Kaserer and Friedrich Polte.

Jadovno concentration camp was the first camp used for extermination by the Ustaše. Jadovno was operational from May 1941 but was closed in August of the same year, coinciding with the formation of the camp at Jasenovac in the same month. The Jasenovac complex was built between August 1941 and February 1942. The first two camps, Krapje and Bročice, were closed in November 1941. Three newer camps continued to function until the end of the war:

Ciglana (Jasenovac III)
Kožara (Jasenovac IV)
Stara Gradiška (Jasenovac V)

Ustaše militia executing people over a mass grave near Jasenovac concentration camp

The camp was constructed, managed and supervised by Department III of the "Ustaše Supervisory Service" (Ustaška nadzorna služba, UNS), a special police force of the NDH. Vjekoslav "Maks" Luburić was head of the UNS. Individuals managing the camp at different times included Miroslav Filipović-Majstorović and Dinko Šakić. The camp administration in times used other Ustaše battalions, police units, Domobrani units, auxiliary units made up of Bosnian Muslims, as well as Germans and Hungarians. The Ustaše interned, tortured and executed men, women and children in Jasenovac. The largest number of victims were Serbs, but victims also included Jews, Roma (or "gypsies"), as well as some dissident Croats and Bosnian Muslims (i.e. Partisans or their sympathizers, all categorized by the Ustaše as "Communists").

Upon arrival at the camp, the prisoners were marked with colors, similar to the use of Nazi concentration camp badges: blue for Serbs, and red for communists (non-Serbian resistance members), while Roma had no marks. This practice was later abandoned.

Most victims were killed at execution sites near the camp: Granik, Gradina, and other places. Those kept alive were mostly skilled at needed professions and trades (doctors, pharmacists, electricians, shoemakers, goldsmiths, and so on), and were employed in services and workshops at Jasenovac.

Inmate population

Serbs constituted the majority of inmates in Jasenovac. Serbs were generally brought to Jasenovac concentration camp after refusing to convert to Catholicism. In many municipalities around the NDH, warning posters declared that any Serb who did not convert to Catholicism would be deported to a concentration camp. The Ustaše regime's policy of mass killings of Serbs constituted genocide.

The Jasenovac Memorial Area list of victims is more than 56% Serbs, 45,923 out of 80,914, see victim lists. In some cases, inmates were immediately killed upon acknowledging Serbian ethnicity, and most considered it to be the sole reason for their imprisonment. The Serbs were predominantly brought from the Kozara region, where the Ustaše captured areas that were held by Partisan guerrillas. These were brought to the camp without sentence, almost destined for immediate execution, accelerated via the use of machine-guns. The exact number of Serbian casualties in Jasenovac is uncertain, but the lowest common estimates range around 60,000 people, and is one of the most significant parts of overall Serbian casualties of World War II.

Jews, the primary target of Nazi genocide, were the second-largest category of victims of Jasenovac. The number of Jewish casualties is uncertain, but ranges from about 8,000 to almost two thirds of the Croatian Jewish population of 37,000 (meaning around 25,000).

Most of the executions of Jews at Jasenovac occurred prior to August 1942. Thereafter, the NDH deported them to Auschwitz. In general, Jews were initially sent to Jasenovac from all parts of Croatia after being gathered in Zagreb, and from Bosnia and Herzegovina after being gathered in Sarajevo. Some, however, were transported directly to Jasenovac from other cities and smaller towns Roma in Jasenovac consisted of both Roma and Sinti, who were captured in various areas in Bosnia, especially in the Kozara region. They were brought to Jasenovac and taken to area III-C, where nutrition, hydration, shelter and sanitary conditions were all below the rest of the camp's own abysmally low standards.

The figures of murdered Roma are estimated between 20,000 and 50,000. Anti-fascists consisted of various sorts of political and ideological opponents or antagonists of the Ustaše regime. In general, their treatment was similar to other inmates, although known communists were executed right away, and convicted Ustaše or law-enforcement officials, or others close to the Ustaše in opinion, such as Croatian peasants, were held on beneficial terms and granted amnesty after serving a duration of time. The leader of the banned Croatian Peasant Party, Vladko Maček was held in Jasenovac from October 1941 to March 1942, after which he was kept under strict house arrest.

Unique among the fascist states during World War II, Jasenovac contained a camp specifically for children in Sisak. Around 20,000 Serb, Jewish and Roma children perished at Jasenovac.

Women and children

Of the 83,145 named victims listed in the Jasenovac Memorial Site, more than half are women (23,474) and children (20,101) below age 14. Most were held at Stara Gradiška camp of the Jasenovac complex, specifically designed for women and children, as well as associated camps in Jablanac and Mlaka, while children were also held in other Ustaše concentration camps for children at Sisak and Jastrebarsko.

Many of the children in the camps were among the tens-of-thousands of Serb civilians captured during the German-Ustaše Kozara offensive, after which many of their parents sent to forced labour in Germany, while the children were separated from the parents and placed in Ustaše concentration camps.

In addition nearly all the Roma women and children in the NDH were exterminated at Jasenovac, as well as thousands of Jewish women and children, among the up to two-thirds of all Croatian Holocaust victims killed at Jasenovac. The terrible conditions the children were held in were described by one of the female inmates Giordana Friedländer:

When I entered the room I had something to see. One child was lying with his head in feces, the other children in urine were lying on top of each other. I approached one of the girls with the intention of lifting her out of the pool of dirt, and she looked at me as if smiling. She was already dead. One 10-year-old boy, completely naked, was standing by the wall because he could not sit down. Out of him hung his gut covered in flies. Later the commandant of the camp, Ante Vrban, ordered the room sealed and with a mask on his face inserted cyclone gas into the room, killing the children.

At his trial the commandant of Ante Vrban, admitted to these killings.

Living Conditions

The living conditions in the camp evidenced the severity typical of Nazi death camps: a meager diet, deplorable accommodation, and the cruel treatment by the Ustaše guards. As in many camps, conditions would be improved temporarily during visits by delegations – such as the press delegation that visited in February 1942 and a Red Cross delegation in June 1944 – and reverted after the delegation left. Systematic starvation:

Again, typical of death camps, the diet of inmates at Jasenovac was insufficient to sustain life: In camp Bročice, inmates were given a "soup" made of hot water with starch for breakfast, and beans for lunch and dinner (served at 6:00, 12:00 and 21:00). The food in Camp No. III was initially better, consisting of potatoes instead of beans; however, in Januarythe diet was changed to a single daily serving of thin "turnip soup," often hot water with two or three cabbage leaves thrown into the pot.

By the end of the year, the diet changed again, to 3 daily portions of thin gruel made of water and starch. To still their terrible hunger, "people ate grass and leaves, but these were very difficult to digest". As a special treat prisoners ate a dead dog, and there were "cases of scatophagia - inmates removing undigested beans and the like from the feces in the Ustasha latrine". People began to die of starvation already in October 1941.

Water: Jasenovac was even more severe than most death camps in one respect: a general lack of potable water. Prisoners were forced to drink water from the Sava river.
Accommodation: In the first camps, Bročice and Krapje, inmates slept in standard concentration-camp barracks, with three tiers of bunks. In the winter, these "barracks" freely admitted rain and snow through their roofs and gaps in their walls. Prisoners would have to wade through ankle deep water inside the cabin. Inmates who died were often left inside the "barracks" for several days before they were removed. In Camp No. III, which housed some 3,000 people, inmates initially slept in the attics of the workshops, in an open depot designated as a railway "tunnel", or simply in the open. A short time later, eight barracks were erected. Inmates slept in six of these barracks, while the other two were used as a "clinic" and a "hospital", where ill inmates were sent to die or be executed. Forced labour: As in all concentration camps, Jasenovac inmates were forced daily to perform some 11 hours of hard labour, under the eye of their Ustaše captors, who would execute any inmate for the most trivial reasons. The labor section was overseen by Ustaša's Dominik "Hinko" Piccili (or Pičili) and Tihomir Kordić. Piccili (or Pičili) would personally lash inmates to force them to work harder. He divided the "Jasenovac labour force" into 16 groups, including groups of construction, brickworks, metal-works, agriculture, etc. The inmates would perish from the hard work. Work in the brickworks was hard. Blacksmith work was also done, as the inmates forged knives and other weapons for the Ustaše. Dike construction work was the most feared. Sanitation: Inside the camp, squalor and lack of sanitation reigned: clutter, blood, vomit and decomposing bodies filled the barracks, which were also full of pests and of the foul stench of the often overflowing latrine bucket. Due to exposure to the elements, inmates suffered from impaired health leading to epidemics of typhus, typhoid, malaria, pleuritis, influenza, dysentery and diphtheria. During pauses in labour (5:00–6:00; 12:00–13:00, 17:00–20:00) inmates had to relieve themselves at open latrines, which consisted of big pits dug in open fields, covered in planks. Inmates would tend to fall inside, and often died. The Ustaše encouraged this by either having internees separate the planks, or by physically drowning inmates inside. The pit would overflow during floods and rains, and was also deliberately drained into the lake, from which inmate drinking water was taken. The inmate's rags and blankets were too thin to prevent exposure to frost, as was the shelter of the barracks. Clothes and blankets were rarely and poorly cleansed, as inmates were only allowed to wash them briefly in the lake's waters once a month save during winter time, when the lake froze. Then, a sanitation device was erected in a warehouse, where clothes were insufficiently boiled.

Lack of personal possessions: Inmates were stripped of their belongings and personal attire. As inmates, only ragged prison-issue clothing was given to them. In winter, inmates were given thin "rain-coats" and they were allowed to make light sandals. Inmates were given a personal food bowl, designed to contain 0.4 litres (0.088 imp gal; 0.11 U.S. gal) of "soup" they were fed with. Inmates whose bowl was missing (e.g.: stolen by another inmate to defecate in) would receive no food. During delegation visits, inmates were given bowls twice as large with spoons. At such times, inmates were given colour tags.
Anxiety: The fear of death, and the paradox of a situation in which the living dwell next to the dead, had great impact on the internees. Basically, an inmate's life in a concentration camp can be viewed in the optimal way when looking at it in three stages: arrival to camp, living inside it, and the release. The first stage consisted of the shock caused by the hardships in transit to camp. The Ustaše would fuel this shock by murdering a number of inmates upon arrival and by temporarily housing new-arrivals in warehouses, attics, in the train tunnel and outdoors. After the inmates grew familiar with the life in camp, they would enter the second and most critical phase: living through the anguish of death, and the sorrow, hardships and abuse. The peril of death was most prominent in "public performances for public punishment" or selections, when inmates would be lined in groups and individuals would be randomly pointed out to receive punishment of death before the rest. The Ustaše would intensify this by prolonging the process, patrolling about and asking questions, gazing at inmates, choosing them and then refrain and point out another. As inmates, people could react to the Ustaše crimes in an active or passive manner. The activists would form resistance movements and groups, steal food, plot escapes and revolts, contacts with the outside world. All inmates suffered psychological trauma to some extent: obsessive thoughts of food, paranoia, delusions, day-dreams, lack of self-control. Some inmates reacted with attempts at documenting the atrocities, such as survivors Ilija Ivanović, Dr Nikola Nikolić and Đuro Schwartz, all of whom tried to memorize and even write of events, dates and details. Such deeds were perilous, since writing was punishable by death and tracking dates was extremely difficult. Mass murder and cruelty.

According to Jaša Almuli, the former president of the Serbian Jewish community, Jasenovac was a much more terrifying concentration camp in terms of brutality than many of its German counterparts, even Auschwitz. In the late summer of 1942, tens of thousands of ethnic Serb villagers were deported to Jasenovac from the Kozara region in Bosnia, where NDH forces were fighting the Partisans. Most of the men were murdered in Jasenovac, and the women were sent to forced labour camps in Germany. Children were either murdered or dispersed to Catholic orphanages.

According to survivors' testimonies, at the special camp designed for children, Catholic nuns murdered children under their watch by gripping them by their legs and crushing their heads against the wall however this could not be verified or certified.

On the night of 29 August 1942, prison guards made bets among themselves as to who could slaughter the largest number of inmates. One of the guards, Petar Brzica, boasted that he had cut the throats of about 1,360 new arrivals. Other participants who confessed to participating in the bet included Ante Zrinušić-Sipka, who killed some 600 inmates, and Mile Friganović, who gave a detailed and consistent report of the incident. Friganović admitted to having killed some 1,100 inmates. He specifically recounted his torture of an old man named Vukasin Mandrapa; he attempted to compel the man to bless Ante Pavelić, which the old man refused to do, even after Friganović had cut off both his ears and nose after each refusal. Ultimately, he cut out the old man's eyes, tore out his heart, and slashed his throat. This incident was witnessed by Dr Nikolić.

An agricultural knife nicknamed "Srbosjek" or "Serbcutter", strapped to the hand. It was used by the Ustaše militia for the speedy killing of inmates at Jasenovac

The Ustaše slaughtered inmates with a knife that became known as the "Srbosjek" (Serbian Cyrillic: Србосјек, "Serb-cutter").

The construction was originally a type of wheat sheaf knife, manufactured prior to and during World War II by the German factory Gebrüder Gräfrath from Solingen-Widdert, under the trademark "Gräwiso". The upper part of the knife was made of leather, as a sort of a glove, designed to be worn with the thumb going through the hole, so that only the blade protruded from the hand.

It was a curved, 12-centimetre-long (4.7 in) knife with the edge on its concave side. The knife was fastened to a bowed oval copper plate, while the plate was fastened to a thick leather bangle. Its agricultural purpose was to enable field workers to cut wheat sheaves open before threshing them. The knife was fixed on the glove plate to prevent injuries and to increase work speed.

Systematic extermination of prisoners

Besides sporadic killings and deaths due to the poor living conditions, many inmates arriving at Jasenovac were scheduled for systematic extermination. An important criterion for selection was the duration of a prisoner's anticipated detention.

Strong men capable of labour and sentenced to less than three years of incarceration were allowed to live. All inmates with indeterminate sentences or sentences of three years or more were immediately scheduled for execution, regardless of their physical fitness. Systematic extermination varied both as to place and form. Some of the executions were mechanical, following Nazi methodology, while others were manual.

The mechanical means of extermination included:

Cremation: The Ustaše cremated living inmates, who were sometimes drugged and sometimes fully awake, as well as corpses. The first cremations took place in the brick factory ovens in January 1942. Croatian engineer Dominik "Hinko" Piccili (or Pičili) perfected this method by converting seven of the kiln's furnace chambers into more sophisticated crematories. Crematoria were also placed in Gradina, across the Sava River. According to the State Commission, however, "there is no information that it ever went into operation." Later testimony, however, say the Gradina crematory had become operational. Some bodies were buried rather than cremated, as shown by exhumation of bodies late in the war Gassing and poisoning: The Ustaše tried to employ poisonous gas to kill inmates arriving in Stara Gradiška. They first tried to gas the women and children who arrived from Djakovo with gas vans that Simo Klaić called "green Thomas". The method was later replaced with stationary gas-chambers with Zyklon B and sulfur dioxide. Manual methods were executions that took part in utilizing sharp or blunt craftsmen tools: knives, saws, hammers, et cetera. These executions took place in various locations:

Granik: Granik was a ramp used to unload goods of Sava boats. In winter 1943–44, season agriculture labourers became unemployed, while large transports of new internees arrived and the need for liquidation, in light of the expected Axis defeat, were large. Vjekoslav "Maks" Luburić devised a plan to utilize the crane as a gallows on which slaughter would be committed, so that the bodies could be dumped into the stream of the flowing river. In the autumn, the Ustaše NCOs’ came in every night for some 20 days, with lists of names of people who were incarcerated in the warehouse, stripped, chained, beaten and then taken to the "Granik", where weights were tied to the wire that was bent on their arms, and their intestines and neck were slashed, and they were thrown into the river with a blow of a blunt tool in the head. The method was later enhanced, so that inmates were tied in pairs, back to back, their bellies cut before they were tossed into the river alive. Gradina: The Ustaše utilized empty areas in the vicinity of the villages of Donja Gradina and Uštica, where they encircled an area marked for slaughter and mass graves in wire. The Ustaše slew victims with knives or smashed their skulls with mallets. When Roma arrived in the camp, they did not undergo selection, but were rather concentrated under the open skies at a section of camp known as "III-C". From there the Roma were taken to liquidation in Gradina, working on the dike (men) or in the corn fields in Ustice (women) in between liquidations. Thus Gradina and Uštica became Roma mass grave sites. Furthermore, small groups of Roma were utilized as gravediggers that actually participated in the slaughter at Gradina. Thus the extermination at the site grew until it became the main killing-ground in Jasenovac. At Gradina, 105 mass graves, covering a total area of 10,130 m² have been found. A further 22 mass graves, the extent of which has not yet been confirmed, have also been found. Separately, at Uštica. 21 mass graves with a surface area of 1218 m² have been found. Limani Graves. Prior to early 1942, when liquidations of prisoners began at Gradina, most inmates were killed inside the Jasenovac III camp. A special detail of prisoner-gravediggers was ordered every day to bury the bodies in huge trenches dug close to the camp fence. In this area, called Limani. seven mass graves are located, with a total surface area of 1,175 m². Međustrugovi and Uskočke šume. These are sites of mass murders of prisoners from Stara Gradiška, mainly during 1944. In 1946, 967 victims were exhumed (311 men, 467 women and 189 children) from 4 mass graves. The remains were later interred in a common cemetery at Stara Gradiška, while identified victims were returned to where they had come from, mostly the Srijem area. About a thousand additional victims are buried in Međustrogovi Woods in one enormous mass grave. Krapje When Krapje (Camp I) and Brocice (Camp II) were closed in November 1941, of the 3,000 to 4,000 prisoners then in the camps, only about 1,500 were transferred to the new Camp III (Brickworks), the rest were killed. At Krapje three mass graves are found - a central mass grave, a second mass grave, in which mostly Jewish victims were buried, and a third large grave, where the executed employees of Zagreb Electrical Trams were buried Mlaka and Jablanac: Two sites used as collection and labour camps for the women and children in camps III and V, but also as places where many of these women and children, as well as other groups, were executed in the countryside around these two villages. Five mass graves were identified in and around Mlaka. Velika Kustarica: According to the state-commission, as far as 50,000 people were killed here in the winter amid 1941 and 1942. There is evidence suggesting that killings took place there at that time and afterwards.

The Ustaše carried out extensive means of torture and methods of killing against detainees which included but not limited to: inserting hot nails under finger nails, mutilating parts of the body including plucking out eyeballs, tightening chains around ones head until the skull fractured and the eyes popped and also, placing salt in open wounds. Women faced untold horrors including rape, cutting off ones breasts and also, cutting out wombs from pregnant women. Many of these mutilated and murdered bodies were disposed of into the adjacent river. The Ustaše took pride in the crimes they committed and even wore necklaces of human eyes and tongues that were cut out from their Serb victims.

Inmate help

In July 1942, Diana Budisavljević, with the help of a German officer, Albert von Kotzian, obtained written permission to take the children from the Stara Gradiška concentration camp with the help of the Ministry of Social Affairs, including Kamilo Bresler, she was able to relocate child inmates from the camp to Zagreb, and other places.

The Red Cross has been accused of insufficiently aiding the persecuted people of Nazi Europe. The local representative, Julius Schmidllin, was contacted by the Jewish community, which sought financial aid. The organisation helped to release Jews from camps, and even debated with the Croatian government in relation to visiting the Jasenovac camp.

The wish was eventually granted in July 1944. The camp was prepared for the arrival of the delegation, so nothing incriminating was found. Inmate resistance groups were aided by contacts among the Ustaše. One of these groups, operating in the tannery, was assisted by an Ustaše, Dr Marin Jurcev (and his wife), who were later hanged for this on orders of Dinko Šakić, as was any Ustasha found guilty of consorting or collaborating with inmates were executed.

End of the camp

Just like the Nazis with their Sonderaktion 1005, toward the end of the war the Ustasha sought to destroy evidence of their crimes at Jasenovac.

Among the few surviving inmates of the camp, at least four – Miroslav Trautman, Karl Weiss, Walter Grünn and Egon Berger – all testified that the Ustashe dug up and burned corpses at Jasenovac. Walter Grünn testified that: "All the oil and beams from the camp were taken to Gradina [one of the main killing fields at Jasenovac]. From these beams, roasts were erected, on which the dug up bodies were thrown, covered with oil and then burned". The Jasenovac camp commanders, Miroslav Filipović and Ljubo Miloš both confirmed that the Ustashe gave the command to completely destroy all evidence of the mass graves at Jasenovac, while Miloš also described the process:

"A strong guard was set up around the sites, and then healthy inmates were brought in from the camps, who dug up the corpses and stacked them in one particular location and burned them completely with gasoline or oil".

This mass burning of corpses was confirmed by a post-war commission, which performed selective excavations at Jasenovac, and in most places found "ashes and burnt remains of bones", although they also managed to find some intact mass graves, including one with 189 corpses, most with smashed skulls, among them 51 children below age 14.

With the Partisans fast approaching, on April 21, 1945, the Ustashe killed the remaining 700 women at Jasenovac. After that only an estimated 1,073 male prisoners remained, and on the night of April 21–22 they decided to stage an escape. On 22 April, 600 prisoners revolted; but only 54 managed to escape, while all the rest were killed.

Before abandoning the camp shortly after the prisoner revolt, the Ustaše killed the remaining prisoners and torched the buildings, guardhouses, torture rooms, the "Piccili Furnace", and all the other structures in the camp. Upon entering the camp in May, the Partisans came across only ruins, soot, smoke, and the skeletal remains of hundreds of victims.

During the following months of 1945, the grounds of Jasenovac were thoroughly destroyed by prisoners of war. The Allied forces captured 200 to 600 Domobran soldiers of the army of the Independent State of Croatia. Labourers completed the destruction of the camp, levelling the site and dismantling the two-kilometre-long (1.2 mi), four-metre-high (13 ft) wall that surrounded it.

Victim numbers

Memorial signs with claims of victim counts, situated on the Bosnian side of the Sava river at Gradina.

Since World War II, scholars and Holocaust institutions have advanced diverse estimates of the number of victims killed at Jasenovac, ranging from 1.1 million to 30,000. Most modern sources place it at around 100,000. Historian Tomislav Dulić disputes the often quoted 700,000 figure in Jasenovac, but states that an estimated 100,000 victims still makes it one of the largest camps in Europe during World War II.

The United States Holocaust Memorial Museum website states that "Determining the number of victims for Yugoslavia, for Croatia, and for Jasenovac is highly problematic, due to the destruction of many relevant documents, the long-term inaccessibility to independent scholars of those documents that survived, and the ideological agendas of post-war partisan scholarship and journalism".

Contemporary sources

The documentation from the time of Jasenovac originates from the different sides in the battle for Yugoslavia: The Germans and Italians on the one hand, and the Partisans and the Allies on the other. There are also sources originating from the documentation of the Ustaše themselves and of the Vatican.

German sources

High-ranking German military officers estimated that the Ustaše killed between 250,000 (as of March 1943) and 700,000 Serbs in the entire NDH. Specifically regarding Jasenovac, the Nazi intelligence service, Sicherheitsdienst, in a report on Vjekoslav Luburić, the head of all Ustaše concentration camps, stated that the Ustaše had killed 120,000 people in Jasenovac, 80,000 in Stara Gradiška, and 20.000 in other Ustaše concentration camps.

General von Horstenau described his eyewitness account of children dying at the camp, the aftermath of the slaughter perpetrated by Jasenovac guards, when they herded Serb residents of nearby Crkveni Bok to the camp:

In Crkveni Bok, an unfortunate place, over which about five hundred 15- to 20-year-old thugs descended under the leadership of an Ustasha lieutenant colonel, people were killed everywhere, women were raped and then tortured to death, children were killed. I saw in the Sava River the corpse of a young woman with her eyes dug out and a stake driven into her sexual parts. This woman was at most twenty years old when she fell into the hands of these monsters. All around, pigs devoured unburied human beings.

"Fortunate” residents were shipped in terrifying freight cars; many of these involuntary "travelers" cut their veins during transport to the camp [Jasenovac].

Ustaše sources

The Ustaše themselves gave more exaggerated estimates of the number of people they killed. Vjekoslav "Maks" Luburić, the commander-in-chief of all the Croatian camps, announced the great "efficiency" of the Jasenovac camp at a ceremony on 9 October 1942. During a banquet that followed, he reported:

We have slaughtered here at Jasenovac more people than the Ottoman Empire was able to do during its occupation of Europe. A circular from the Ustaše general headquarters reads: "the concentration and labor camp in Jasenovac can receive an unlimited number of internees." In the same spirit, Filipović-Majstorović, once captured by Yugoslav forces, admitted that during his three months of administration, 20,000 to 30,000 people died.

As it became clear that his confession was an attempt to somewhat minimize the rate of crimes committed in Jasenovac, his claim to have personally killed 100 people being extremely understated, Filipović-Majstorović's figures are reevaluated so that in some sources they appear as 30,000–40,000 Filipović was Commandant of Jasenovac in Summer-early Fall of 1942, when the scholarly consensus is that the Ustaše exterminated 25,000 – 27,000 Roma, nearly all at Jasenovac, while the mass murder of other ethnic groups was also underway.

Jasenovac camp commanders, Miroslav Filipović and Ljubo Miloš both testified that just before the end of the war the Ustaše gave the command to completely destroy all evidence of mass graves at Jasenovac, by forcing remaining inmates to dig up and burn the corpses This is similar to what the Nazis did, including at Sajmište concentration camp, on the territory of the Independent State of Croatia. The mass burning of corpses at Jasenovac was separately attested to by many surviving Jasenovac inmates, as well as post-war excavations which in many places found only ashes and burnt remains of bones.

Catholic church sources

Jure Paršić was appointed Catholic priest in the town of Jasenovac, by Alojzije Stepinac, in November, 1942. Although Paršić sympathized with the Ustaše cause, and arrived in Jasenovac after the great majority of the victims were killed, he still estimated that the Ustaše killed 30,000 to 40,000 people at Jasenovac. Writing in Germany in 1985, he says the whole town knew what went on in the camp, “even the children knew more than they should know.” From the Ustaše guards he confessed, Paršić learned of things “far more terrible than he had supposed”, adding that he doubted there were any guards who had not “bloodied their hands”. But since he heard this in confession, Paršić stated he would "take this information with him to the grave".

Jure Paršić also wrote that he told Archbishop Stepinac in detail what he discovered at Jasenovac, to which he says Stepinac "shed a tear". After the Ustaše killed seven Slovenian Catholic priests in Jasenova Stepinac on February 24, 1943 wrote Ante Pavelić that this represented a “shameful stain and a crime that cries out for revenge, just as the whole of Jasenovac is a shameful stain on the Independent State of Croatia."

Inmate sources

Jasenovac inmates Milko Riffer and Egon Berger wrote of “hundreds of thousands” victims. The Roma were all hauled in at the same time, kept in an open, barbed-wired area where other inmates could see them, and all murdered within a couple of months.

Thus estimates of Roma victims are more specific – from up to 20.000 to 45.000. Riffer also mentions why other estimates were more difficult – many victims were killed before even entering the camp and thus were never registered, plus to hide their crimes, the Ustaše burned the camp records.

Yugoslav and Croatian official estimates

A 15 November 1945 report of the National Committee of Croatia for the investigation of the crimes of the occupation forces and their collaborators, which was commissioned by the new government of Yugoslavia under Josip Broz Tito, indicated that between 500,000–600,000 people were murdered at Jasenovac. These figures were cited by researchers Israel Gutman and Menachem Shelach in the Encyclopedia of the Holocaust from 1990 Shelach wrote that some 300,000 bodies were found and exhumed. The Simon Wiesenthal Center's Museum of Tolerance adopted the same number at some point.

In 1964, the Yugoslav Federal Bureau of Statistics created a list of World War II victims with 597,323 names and deficiency estimated at 20–30%, giving between 750,000 and 780,000 victims. Together with the estimate of 200,000 "collaborators and quislings” killed, the total number would reach about one million. The bureau's list was declared a state secret in 1964 and published only in 1989. The survey results showed a far lower figure of 59,188 killed at Jasenovac, of whom 33,944 were recorded as Serbs.

The second edition of Vojna enciklopedija (1972) reproduced the figure of the State Commission of Crimes, 600,000 victims in Jasenovac up to 1943. In August 1983, General Velimir Terzić of the Partisans asserted that, according to the newest data, at least one million Serbs were killed at Jasenovac. Novelist Milan D. Miletić (1923–2003) speculated the number at one million or more. Based on documentary material and information from inmates and camp officials, and from official war crimes commissions, archivist Antun Miletić quoted from the sources the estimation at 600–700,000 victims, most Serbs.

An analysis 1970’s high school history textbooks published in Yugoslavia showed that while all textbooks devoted about 1 or 2 paragraphs to Ustaše crimes, there were considerable differences in victim estimates across the then republics. Thus the main 1970's Croatian history textbook had the lowest estimate of Jasenovac victims (“thousands of people”), while the Serbian textbook wrote of “hundreds of thousands”, and the Bosnian textbook listed 800,000 victims.

In his 1982 book, Franjo Tuđman (the later President of Croatia), deliberately misinterpreted the 1964 survey and claimed 60,000 deaths in all camps in the NDH.

During the breakup of Yugoslavia, the Croatian side began publicly suggesting substantially smaller numbers of victims. In 1991 the new Croatian government established the Commission for the Determination of War and Post-War Victims, which in its final report listed only 2,238 victims of Jasenovac, among these only 293 Jews.

Later the head of the Commission and former Constitutional Court justice, Vice Vukojević, asserted that “The Jasenovac camp was run by Jews, the [NDH] State only provided guards”.

The Jasenovac Memorial Site, the museum institution sponsored by the Croatian government since the end of the Croatian War of Independence, states that current research estimates the number of victims at between 80,000 and 100,000. On the other hand, revisionist efforts in Croatia continue to greatly minimize Jasenovac victim numbers, or entirely deny that it was a place of mass murder of Jews, Serbs and Roma, instead claiming that Jasenovac was a mere “work-camp” Critics note these revisionist efforts have received the support of the Croatian Catholic Church, state media, some politicians and have even obtained state funding.

The State Commission of Croatia for the Investigation of the Crimes of the Occupation Forces and their Collaborators from 1946 concludes:

Such a manner of preconceived and inhumane torture and slaughter of a people has never been recorded in history. The Ustase criminals followed precisely the model of their German masters, most consciously executed all their orders, and did so in pursuit of a single goal: to exterminate as many of our people as possible, and to create a living space as large as possible for them. The total dependence by the Ustase on their German masters, the foundation of the camp itself, the dispatch of the "disloyal", the brutal implementation of Hitler's racist Nazi theories and the deportation to the camps and extermination of the racially and nationally "impure", the same methods of torture and atrocities with minor varieties of Ustase cruelty, the building of furnaces and incineration of victims in furnaces (the Picilli furnace) — all of the evidence points to the conclusion that both Jasenovac and the crimes committed in it were fashioned from a German recipe, owing to a German Hitlerite order as implemented by their servants, the Ustase. Subsequently, responsibility for the crimes of Jasenovac falls equally on their German masters and the Ustase executioners.

1960s forensic investigations

On 16 November 1961, the municipal committee of former partisans from Bosanska Dubica organized an unofficial investigation at the grounds of Donja Gradina, led by locals who were not forensic experts. This investigation uncovered three mass graves and identified 17 human skulls in one of them. Based on this, along with the fact that 120 other untouched graves were identified, they extrapolated the number of victims to 350,800.

In response, scientists were called in to verify the site. Dr Alojz Šercelj started preliminary drilling to identify the most likely grave locations, and then between 22 and 27 June 1964, exhumations of bodies and the use of sampling methods was conducted at Jasenovac by Vida Brodar and Anton Pogačnik from Ljubljana University and Srboljub Živanović from Novi Sad University. Consistent with accounts by Ustaše and few surviving inmates of Ustaše excavations and mass burning of corpses before the end of the war, to conceal their crimes, in some places the Commission found only ashes and burnt remains of bones. They also uncovered a total of seven mass graves, which held a total of 284 victims' remains, including one mass grave with 197 corpses, of whom 51 were children below age 14, and 123 were women. A large number of these corpses, especially the children, had smashed skulls. The scientists concluded that the entire Jasenovac complex could have around 200 similar sites.

In October 1985, a group of investigators from the Serbian Academy of Sciences and Arts, led by Vladimir Dedijer, visited Jasenovac and made a record of it, in which the record taker, Antun Miletić, mentioned the 1961 excavation, but misquoted the number of victims it identified as 550,800. They also noted the 1964 excavation, and estimated that Gradina held the remains of 366,000 victims, without further explanation.

In 1989, prior to the breakup of Yugoslavia, Serbian anthropologist Srboljub Živanović published what he claimed were the full results of the 1964 studies, which in his words has been "suppressed by Tito's government in the name of brotherhood and unity, in order to put less emphasis on the crimes of the Croatian Ustaše."

In November 1989, Živanović claimed on television that their research resulted in victim counts of more than 500,000, with estimates of 700,000–800,000 being realistic, stating that in every mass grave there were 800 skeletons. Vida Brodar then commented on that statement and said the research never resulted in any victim counts, and that these numbers were Živanović's manipulations, providing a copy of the research log as corroboration. A Croatian historian, Željko Krušelj, publicly criticized Živanović and labeled him a fraud over this.

Victim lists

The Jasenovac Memorial Area maintains a list of the names (collected until March 2013) of 83,145 Jasenovac victims, including 47,627 Serbs, 16,173 Romani, 13,116 Jews, 4,255 Croats, 1,128 Bosnian Muslims, and 266 Slovenes, among others. Of the 83,145 named victims, 20,101 are children under the age of 14, and 23,474 are women. The memorial estimates total deaths at 80,000 to 100,000. The list is subject to update – in 2007, it had 69,842 entries.

Antun Miletić, a researcher at the Military Archives in Belgrade, has collected data on Jasenovac since 1979. His list contains the names of 77,200 victims, of whom 41,936 are Serbs. In 1997, the Museum of Genocide Victims in Belgrade identified 10,521 Jewish victims at Jasenovac, with full names.

In 1998, the Bosniak Institute published SFR Yugoslavia's final List of war victims from the Jasenovac camp (created in 1992). The list contained the names of 49,602 victims at Jasenovac, including 26,170 Serbs, 8,121 Jews, 5,900 Croats, 1,471 Romani, 787 Bosnian Muslims, 6,792 of unidentifiable ethnicity, and some listed simply as "others."

In 1998, the Croatian State Archives issued an announcement that a notebook had been found containing partial raw data of the State Commission for War Crimes, where the number of victims of Jasenovac from the territory of the People's Republic of Croatia was 15,792, with victims by year: 2,891 persons in 1941, 8,935 in 1942, 676 in 1943, 2,167 in 1944, and 1,123 in 1945. The notebook was generally described as incomplete, particularly the Jasenovac records, but the said numbers were deemed credible as all the other numbers of victims mentioned in the book were consistent with those from the other documents released by the State Commission. According to Vladimir Žerjavić number of killed is about 85,000 peoples, respectively 50 thousand Serbs, 13,000 Jews, 10,000 Croats, 10,000 of Romani people and 2,000 Muslims. Estimates by Holocaust institutions.

The United States Holocaust Memorial Museum estimates that the Ustaše murdered between 66,000 and 99,000 people at Jasenovac between 1941 and 1945, including "between 45,000 and 52,000 Serb residents of the so-called Independent State of Croatia, between 12,000 and 20,000 Jews, between 15,000 and 20,000 Roma (Gypsies), between 5,000 and 12,000 ethnic Croats and Muslims, who were political opponents of the regime".

Statistical estimates

In the 1980s, calculations were done by Serbian statistician Bogoljub Kočović, and by Croatian economist Vladimir Žerjavić, who claimed that total number of victims in Yugoslavia was less than 1.7 million, an official estimate at the time, both concluding that the number of victims was around one million. Kočović estimated that, of that number, between 370,000 and 410,000 ethnic Serbs died in the Independent State of Croatia, of whom 45-52,000 died at Jasenovac. Žerjavić estimated that 322,000 Serbs died in the NDH, of whom 50,000 were killed at Jasenovac Both Kočović and Žerjavić estimated 83,000 total deaths at Jasenovac, Žerjavić's figure includes Jews, Roma, Croats and Bosnian Muslims, as well as Serbs Žerjavić's research was criticised by Antun Miletić, director of Belgrade's military archives, who in 1997 claimed the figure for Jasenovac was 1.1 million.

Another critic of Žerjavić, Dr Milan Bulajić, former director of the Museum of the Victims of Genocide in Belgrade, maintained that the numbers were in the range of 700,000–1,000,000. After Bulajić retired from his post, Dragan Cvetković, a researcher from the Museum and a Croatian co-author published a book on wartime losses giving a figure of approximately 100,000 victims in Jasenovac. The figure of 100,000 is used as a typical approximate. Jewish Croatian historian Ivo Goldstein also cites that approximate by noting the victims list of 83,811 while adding that "10-20% may still be missing" with ongoing research still being conducted.

The Jasenovac Memorial Site was established in 1960, on the initiative of the Yugoslav Federation of War Veterans’ Organizations. Its central symbol is the Flower Memorial, “a sign of eternal renewal” designed by Bogdan Bogdanovic, with a plaque inscribed with a verse from the antiwar poem “The Pit”, by the Croatian poet-Partisan, Ivan Goran Kovačić:

That simple happiness, the window's glint;
Swallow and young; or windborne garden sweet -
Where? - The unhurried cradle's drowsy tilt?
Or, by the threshold, sunshine at my feet?

In 1968, the Museum was added to the Memorial Site, with the exhibit focusing on the victims. The Socialist Republic of Croatia adopted a new law on the Jasenovac Memorial Site in 1990, shortly before the first democratic elections in the country.

When Franjo Tuđman was elected for Croatia's president that year, revisionist views on the concentration camp's history came into prominence. The memorial's status was demoted to that of a nature park, and its funding was cut. After Croatia declared its independence and exited the Yugoslav Federation in June 1991, the memorial site found itself in two separate countries. Its grounds at Donja Gradina belonged to Bosnia and Herzegovina, which was then still part of Yugoslavia. Simo Brdar, assistant director of the Jasenovac Memorial Site, doubted that the Croatian authorities, dominated by nationalists, were committed to preserve the artefacts and documentation of the concentration camp. In August 1991, he transported some of the materials to Bosnia and Herzegovina. As the Yugoslav wars unfolded, Croatian forces vandalized, devastated and looted the memorial site and its museum during September 1991. They were driven out from Jasenovac after a month by the Yugoslav People's Army. Brdar returned to the site and collected what was left of the museum's exhibits and documentation. He kept the collections until 1999, when they were housed in the Archives of Republika Srpska.

President Franjo Tuđman had announced plans to relocate to Jasenovac bodies of the Ustaše. At the end of 2000, the collections were transferred to the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum (USHMM), after an agreement with the government of Republika Srpska. A year later, the USHMM transported the collections to Croatia and gave them to the Jasenovac Memorial Site. Israeli President Moshe Katsav visited Jasenovac in 2003, and was the first Israeli head of state to officially visit the country.

In 2004, at the yearly Jasenovac commemoration, the Croatian authorities presented new plans for the memorial site, changing the concept of the museum as well as some of the content. The director of the Memorial Site, Nataša Jovičić, explained how the permanent museum exhibition would be changed to avoid provoking fear, and cease displaying the "technology of death" (mallets, daggers, etc.), rather it would concentrate on individualizing it with personal stories of former prisoners.

The German ambassador to Croatia at the time, Gebhard Weiss, expressed scepticism towards "the avoidance of explicit photographs of the reign of terror".

The New York City Parks Department, the Holocaust Park Committee and the Jasenovac Research Institute, with the help of former U.S. Representative Anthony Weiner (D-NY), established a public monument to the victims of Jasenovac in April 2005 (the sixtieth anniversary of the liberation of the camps). The dedication ceremony was attended by ten Yugoslav Holocaust survivors, as well as diplomats from Serbia, Bosnia and Israel. It remains the only public monument to Jasenovac victims outside of the Balkans. Annual commemorations are held there every April.

The Jasenovac Memorial Museum reopened in November 2006 with a new exhibition designed by Croatian architect Helena Paver Njirić, and an educational centre designed by the firm Produkcija. The Memorial Museum features an interior of rubber-clad steel modules, video and projection screens, and glass cases displaying artefacts from the camp. Above the exhibition space, which is quite dark, is a field of glass panels inscribed with the names of the victims. Njirić won the first prize of the 2006 Zagreb Architectural Salon for her work on the museum. e removal of all Ustaše killing instruments from the display and a lack of explanation of the ideology that led to the crimes committed there in the name of the Croatian people. Israeli President Shimon Peres visited Jasenovac on 25 July 2010, dubbing it a "demonstration of sheer sadism".

On 17 April 2011, in a commemoration ceremony, former-Croatian President Ivo Josipović warned that there were "attempts to drastically reduce or decrease the number of Jasenovac victims ... faced with the devastating truth here that certain members of the Croatian people were capable of committing the cruellest of crimes, I want to say that all of us are responsible for the things that we do." At the same ceremony, then Croatian Prime Minister Jadranka Kosor said, "there is no excuse for the crimes and therefore the Croatian government decisively rejects and condemns every attempt at historical revisionism and rehabilitation of the fascist ideology, every form of totalitarianism, extremism and radicalism ... Pavelić's regime was a regime of evil, hatred and intolerance, in which people were abused and killed because of their race, religion, nationality, their political beliefs and because they were the others and were different."

Cyprus

Roma in Cyprus West Asia

One route taken by the medieval proto-Romani cut across Persia and Asia Minor to Europe. Numerous Romani continue to live in Asia Minor. Other Romani populations in the Middle East are the result of modern migrations from Europe. Also found in the Middle East are various groups of the Dom people, often identified as "Gypsies." They are derived from a migration out of north-western India beginning about 600 years earlier.

History

Historians estimate that the first immigrants came between 1322 and 1400, when Cyprus was under the rule of the Lusignan (Crusader) kings. These Roma were part of a general movement from Asia Minor to Europe. Those who landed on Cyprus probably came across from the Crusader colonies on the eastern Mediterranean coast (present-day Lebanon and Israel). There is no evidence suggesting one cause for the Roma to leave mainland Asia, but historical events caused widespread upheaval and may have prompted a move to the island. In 1347 the Black Death had reached Constantinople, the capital of the Byzantine Empire; in 1390 the Turks defeated the Greek kingdom in Asia; and ten years later, the Battle of Aleppo marked the advance of the Mongols under Tamerlane.

The first surviving written record of Roma in Cyprus is from 1468. In the Chronicle of Cyprus compiled by Florio Bustron, the Cingani are said to have paid tax to the royal treasury, at that time under King James II. Later, in 1549, the French traveller Andre Theret found "les Egyptiens ou Bohemians" in Cyprus and other Mediterranean islands. He noted their simple way of life, supported by the production of nails by the men and belts by the women, which they sold to the local population.

During the Middle Ages, Cyprus was on a regular shipping route from Bari, Italy to the Holy Land. Second immigration likely took place sometime after the Turks dominated the island in 1571. Some Kalderash came in the 19th century.

Currently, Roma in Cyprus refer to themselves as Kurbet, and their language as Kurbetcha, although most no longer speak it. Christian or Greek-speaking Roma are known as Mantides.

According to the Council of Europe there are 1000–1500 (0.16%) Romanis living in Cyprus.

Names of Roma in Cyprus

Tsinganos: the official term used in Greek documents and written material. It comes from the term Cingani (used in the 1468 text), which in turn comes from the archaic word Adsincan, used in mediaeval Byzantium.
Yiftos: the Cypriot dialect form of mainland Greek Yiftos. This is common in speech and comes from earlier Aigiptos, a reference to the earlier belief that the Romanies came from Egypt. Kurbet: the local term used by Turkish-speaking Cypriots, a Roma group of Doms which is also present in Syria.

Romani in the Czech Republic

Czech Republic

Romani people (Czech: Romové, commonly known as Gypsies Czech: Cikáni) are an ethnic minority in the Czech Republic, currently Roma making up 2–3% of the population. Originally migrants from North Western India sometime between the 6th and 11th centuries, they have long had a presence in the region. Since the creation of Czechoslovakia in 1918, the Romani population have experienced considerable hardship, having been a main target of Nazi extermination programs during World War II, and the subject of forced relocation and other radical social policies during the Communist era.

In the successor state, the Czech Republic, challenges remain for the Romani population with respect to education and poverty, and there are frequent tensions with the ethnically Czech majority population over issues including crime and integration.

Demographics

According to the 2011 census, the Romani population was 13,150, 0.2% of the total number reporting some nationality. Of these, 5,199 responded by listing only Romani nationality; the remaining 7,951 listed their Romani nationality in combination with another nationality, for example, Romani and Czech, Romani and Moravian and so on.

In the 2001 Census, 11,746 people reported their nationality as Romani – 0.1% of those claiming some nationality.

However, 40,370 respondents to the 2011 census reported Romani language as their language.

History

Origin

The Romani people originate from Northern India, most likely from the north-western Indian states Rajasthan and Punjab. Linguistic evidence indicates that the roots of Romani language lie in India; the language shares grammatical characteristics with Indian languages, as well as a large part of the basic lexicon, such as body parts or daily routines. More specifically, Romani shares its basic lexicon with Hindi and Punjabi. It shares many phonetic features with Marwari, while its grammar is closest to Bengali.

The results of a genetic study in 2012 suggest that the Romani originated in North Western India and migrated as a group. The study indicates that the ancestors of present scheduled tribes and scheduled caste populations of North India, traditionally referred to collectively as the Ḍoma, are the likely ancestors of modern European Roma In February 2016, during the International Roma Conference, the Indian Minister of External Affairs stated that the people of the Roma community were children of India.

The conference ended with a recommendation to the Government of India to recognize the Roma community spread across 30 countries as a part of the Indian Diaspora.

World War II

During the Nazi occupation of Czechoslovakia in World War II, Romani were exterminated by Nazi mobile killing units and in camps such as Lety, Hodonín and Auschwitz. 90% of native Romani were killed during the war; the Romani in modern-day Czech Republic are mostly post-war immigrants from Slovakia or Hungary and their descendants.

Communist era

During the communist years unsuccessful attempts to change the nomadic living style of Romani were undertaken by the government. Many Romani people were re-housed in panelák housing estates, which subsequently fell into acute disrepair, such as the Chánov housing estate near Most.

After 1989, some Romani women accused the state of "forced sterilizations" arguing that they were not properly informed of what "sterilization" meant According to Czech ombudsman Otakar Motejl, "at least 50 Romani women were unlawfully sterilized". The Czech representative at the United Nations protested against the accusations, claiming that they were "false" and that Romani women "exaggerate in all cases”.

A hospital in Vitkovice, Ostrava, apologised to a Romani woman who was sterilised after her second caesarean, but a request for a compensation of 1 million Czech crowns was rejected by the court.

Emigration

Many Romani left the country after the independence of the Czech Republic, saying that they felt unsafe due to a surge in right-wing activity. Countries such as Ireland, the UK, Norway and Sweden took in large numbers, but most Romani returned home after a few years.

Immigration rates to Great Britain dropped suddenly after financial support for refugees started to be paid out in the form of food tickets in summer 2000 (due to the Immigration and Asylum Act 1999). The following year, British customs officers began to check the passengers flying to the UK from Prague airport and routinely rejected those of Romani origin. In October 1997, after receiving over 1,000 requests for asylum from Czech Roma within a single year, Canada reinstated a visa regime for Czech citizens.

The Romanis are at the centre of the agenda of far-right groups in the Czech Republic, which spread anti-ziganism. One highly publicized case was the Vítkov arson attack of 2009, in which four right-wing extremists seriously injured a three-year-old Romani girl. The public responded by donating money as well as presents to the family, who were able to buy a new house from the donations, while the perpetrators were sentenced to 18 and 22 years in prison.

In January 2010, Amnesty International launched a report titled Injustice Renamed: Discrimination in Education of Roma persists in the Czech Republic. According to the BBC, Amnesty argued that while cosmetic changes had been introduced by the authorities, little genuine improvement in addressing discrimination against Romani children had occurred.

According to a 2010 opinion poll, 68% of Czechs have antipathy towards Romani. The survey also found that 82% Czechs oppose any form of a "special care of Roma rights", 83% of Czechs consider Romani asocial, and 45% of Czechs would support the expulsion of Romani people from the Czech Republic. A 2011 poll, which followed a number of brutal attacks by Romani perpetrators against white victims, reported that 44% of Czechs are afraid of Roma people. The majority of Czechs (90%) do not want Romani people as neighbours, viewing them as thieves and social parasites. Despite a long waiting list for adoptive parents, Romani children from orphanages are almost never adopted by Czech couples. After the Velvet Revolution in 1989 jobs traditionally employing Romanis either disappeared or were taken over by immigrant workers. The 2019 Pew Research poll found that 66% of Czechs held unfavorable views of Roma.

Crime

Crime statistics from the early 1990s reported that the crime rate among the Romani population in Czechoslovakia was highly disproportionate, especially regarding burglaries. According to Říčan (1998), about 20–30% of the Romani population earn their livelihood in illegal ways, such as procuring prostitution, trafficking and other property crimes Romani make up more than 60% of the Czech prison population and about 50% of repeat offenders, and are thus more than 20 times over-represented in Czech prisons than their population share would suggest.

Denmark

The Gypsies of Denmark

The first recorded Gypsies in Denmark came from Scotland in 1505 and then moved on to Sweden. They had a letter of recommendation from King James IV of Scotland to King Hans of Denmark, his uncle. In 1505 other Gypsies came across the border from Germany. Junker Jørgen of Egypt came to Jutland and got a letter of safe conduct from Duke Frederik.

In 1536, however, Gypsies (tatere) were ordered to leave Denmark in three months. This order was not obeyed. In 1554 King Christian III circulated a letter accusing many noblemen and others of supporting the Gypsies, although they were wandering around and deceiving the people. Anyone who gave them refuge would be punished, anyone who killed a Gypsy could keep his property, any local authority official who did not arrest the Gypsies in his area would have to pay for any damage they did. The main effect of this letter was that the Gypsies started travelling in smaller groups. A further letter was issued in 1561 by Frederick II, in a milder form than Christian's. A certain Peder Oxe was sent to arrest all Gypsies in Jutland and bring them to Copenhagen to work as smiths or in the galleys.

In 1578 the Bishop of Fyn told his priests not to marry Gypsies and to have them buried outside the churchyard as if they were Turks. In 1589 the original edict, ordering Gypsies to leave the realm inside three months, was re-issued with the addition of capital punishment for those who remained. With the end of immigration and strong laws the Gypsies resident in Denmark merged with the indigenous nomadic population forming a group of Travellers, popularly still called tatere. There was a small immigration of Sinti and Jenisch families at the beginning of the nineteenth century. The laws against Gypsies were eased in 1849 and reimposed in 1875 with the threat of a large-scale immigration of Vlah Romanies. From 1911 this law was carried out more effectively with the creation of a national police force. A travelling musical group known as Marietta's gang were probably the last to be expelled, in 1913, and by 1939 there were very few families of Gypsies, if any, in Denmark and the Travellers had all but disappeared.

After 1945 the Government banned anyone who had not been born in a caravan from nomadizing. Around 1970 there was a camping site at Islands Brygge near Copenhagen which was used by Scandinavian Travellers and Gypsies, and from time to time by Dutch Travellers. After the repeal of anti-Gypsy legislation in 1953 small numbers immigrated from eastern and central Europe. They are settled in houses and flats in Copenhagen and Helsingor. The current estimated Gypsy population in Denmark is 1,750.