ITALY:
Monument In Memory of the Roma and Sinti Holocaust Unvieled
The Monument to the samudaripen (Roma and sinti Holocaust) is finally erected
A year of work, sacrifice and passion
The first monument in Italy
And the second across Europe for Roma and sinti
It's our memory.
Too many times forgotten...
Together thanks to the contribution of all, artists, singers, writers poets and also friends, human beings who with love and heart like us donated something
The little of each one can create
Something immense
Not from the institutions
This monument we erected all of us together with will and passion
A huge thank you to Alexian Santino Spinelli
That for me is first of all dad
You will become a man and rom
Present with us an immense moni ovadia
And a great gad lerner together with Liliana Segre
Proud of something so great
For all our people!
Matteo Salvini formally investigated over migrant ship standoff
Prosecutors are now investigating Salvini, a far-right populist, for the possible illegal detention of migrants on the vessel. Photograph: Stefano Rellandini/Reuters
Italy’s deputy prime minister has relented over the fate of over 100 refugees and migrants forcibly kept on a docked rescue ship, after being formally placed under investigation for possible illegal detention and kidnapping.
The Ubaldo Diciotti has been docked since Monday at the Sicilian port of Catania, initially with 177 migrants on board. Matteo Salvini, who is also the country’s interior minister and leader of the far-right League, had said that no one would be allowed to leave the boat until he received guarantees that other European nations would take most of them in.
Following the announcement on Saturday night of the formal investigation, Salvini finally gave permission for the remaining 134 migrants on board of the Diciotti to disembark. The Italian government announced that Albania would take in 20 of them, while Ireland would take 25 migrants. The Italian church said it would take in the rest to “put an end to this dramatic situation and sufferance”, said a spokesman for the Episcopal Conference of Italy.
A few days into the standoff, Salvini had allowed a group of 27 children travelling alone to disembark, and on Saturday doctors identified 16 people in need of immediate medical care, who were also allowed to leave the vessel. Two of them had possible symptoms of tuberculosis.
However, that left 134 people on board the ship, which is less than 100 metres long. Prosecutors announced on Saturday evening that they were investigating Salvini, a far-right populist, for holding all 177 hostage.
Migrants pray as they wait to disembark from the Italian coastguard ship Diciotti. Photograph: Orietta Scardino/EPA
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Italy had appeared to be in violation of the European convention on human rights, which states that any asylum seeker detained for more than 48 hours should be released and given the opportunity to apply for refugee status.
An investigation into the detention of the passengers on the ship was first launched on Wednesday, by Luigi Patronaggio, chief prosecutor for Agrigento, who visited the ship and questioned its passengers. Magistrates travelled to Rome on Friday to question Salvini, members of his staff and at least two high-ranking officials in the ministry of the interior.
Prosecutors slowly worked towards the highest levels of the minister’s command structure. At first, the magistrate did not rule out questioning Salvini himself, but after interviews with his staff, prosecutors decided it was not necessary, sources told the Guardian.
“I heard prosecutors asked for my details. Here you go. I was born in Milan, March 9 1973, in Milan. I’m ready and proud to be arrested because I’m fighting to defend the Italian border,” Salvini wrote on Facebook as the news emerged about the investigation.
The Diciotti crisis began on 15 August, when the vessel rescued 190 people from an overcrowded boat off the Italian island of Lampedusa. Thirteen were evacuated for emergency medical treatment, and after the boat was turned away by Maltese authorities, it was allowed to dock in Sicily. However, Salvini said he would not allow those on board to disembark until he was assured all would “go elsewhere”.
The case drew fierce censure abroad, but Salvini hit out against critics in Europe, threatening to suspend the country’s financial contribution to the EU if Brussels did not intervene to redistribute the people on board. The European Union described the threats as unhelpful.
CZECH REPUBLIC
Anti-Roma stigma of Czech president Miloš Zeman threatens progress over Romani rights
In late 2017, Zeman provocatively claimed in a television interview that 90% of his country’s “unadaptable” citizens are probably Roma. He was responding to a UN human rights report that called for better integration of Roma in the Czech Republic. Zeman repeated his criticism of “unadaptable” citizens in his Christmas speech.
Members of the Czech government council for Roma community affairs reacted angrily to Zeman’s allegations. Meanwhile, Roma citizens eloquently pointed out that the Czech Republic is their homeland, too.
Racist stigmatisation of Roma as socially “unadaptable” has a long history across Europe. As a result, many people prefer not to declare their Romani identity. Just over 13,000 Czech citizens claimed Romani nationality in the 2011 census. Yet the Council of Europe estimates that some 250,000 Roma are living in the Czech Republic, a little less than 2% of the population.
Widespread ignorance about the history of Europe’s Roma fuels damaging stereotypes and persistent discrimination. But far from being perennial outsiders or aliens, Roma have been intimately integrated into European societies for centuries. As I argue in my recent book, Roma were not simply victims of human rights violations in postwar Europe, but citizens claiming equal rights for themselves.
The genocide of European Roma during World War II casts a long shadow over postwar Romani history. The “Gypsy camp” at Auschwitz-Birkenau has become an important symbol for commemoration of the Roma Holocaust. But persecution and discrimination took many forms.
Years before the Nazis came to power, many states across Europe, including Czechoslovakia as well as France and Germany, introduced laws requiring “gypsies” to carry special passports, or regulating their freedom of movement. During the war, Roma across Europe faced incarceration, deportation, and forcible sterilisation.
Hope in postwar eastern Europe
After the war, the largest Romani communities in Europe lived in eastern, not western, Europe. The “people’s democracies” in eastern Europe promised a new era of working-class emancipation in which discrimination on the basis of race and sex would be a thing of the past. In Czechoslovakia, one of the most industrialised countries within the eastern bloc after the war, Romani activists were outspoken advocates for their own rights under socialism.
During the late 1940s and early 1950s, many Romani activists in Czechoslovakia saw socialism as a path towards equality for Roma. To them, equality meant the right to work, to education, housing, healthcare, and to freedom from discrimination on the basis of race, class or sex. They knew that the Soviet Union had offered cultural rights to Roma during the 1920s and early 1930s.
During the Prague Spring of 1968, as Czechoslovaks sought to create a democratic socialism “with a human face”, Czech and Slovak Roma battled to establish their own associations and to be recognised as full citizens of their socialist homeland. They wanted Roma to have a greater say in political decisions that concerned them. They raised awareness of Romani language and culture. And they fought to win compensation for Romani victims of Nazi racial persecution.
But the socialist regimes in postwar Europe saw the path to equality for Roma lying in assimilation as worker-citizens. Communist officials claimed Roma were a “social group”, not a national or ethnic minority with the right to state support for their language or culture. Post-Stalinist states revived campaigns against Gypsy “nomadism” and debates about coercive sterilisation of Romani women. To justify this, experts argued that Roma were “unadaptable” citizens.
Struggle for citizenship
By the 1970s, however, Roma from socialist Czechoslovakia and Yugoslavia were at the head of a new international Romani movement that called for recognition of the Romani nation. Today, Romani movements across Europe are making their history accessible to a wider audience through initiatives such as the digital Roma Archive.
The Czech Museum of Romani Culture in Brno has pioneered research on Romani history since the collapse of the communist regime in 1989. The museum’s director, Jana Horváthová, whose family were among the leaders of the Romani movement during the Prague Spring, seems optimistic.
For decades, a pig farm stood on the site of the former camp for Gypsies in Lety, from where Roma were deported to Auschwitz during the Nazi occupation. Years of lobbying by Romani activists persuaded the Czech government to purchase the farm. Horváthová believes that most Czechs now agree on the need to replace the pig farm with a memorial.
Whoever wins the presidential election, Czech and Slovak Roma will continue to face long-running struggles: to win compensation for Romani women sterilised without their consent, to desegregate the education of Romani school children, or to combat social exclusion. All these questions have deep historical roots, which are only obscured by reverting to negative and unfounded stereotypes about apparently “unadaptable” Roma.
Far right in Czech Republic: the politicians turning on Roma
Hostility towards Roma people is so ingrained in Czech political life, the country’s president recently called them “work shy”, and in this weekend’s Czech municipal elections some politicians are openly stirring up virulent anti-Roma sentiment. In the city of Most, just north of Prague, some local parties are advocating building a separate area for Roma people and using slogans which hark back to Nazi-style propaganda.
HUNGARY
Persecution of Roma in Hungary is spiralling out of control
Since the accession of Central European countries to the European Union (EU), threats to their Roma communities have escalated dangerously. This is evident in anti-Roma rallies, random violent attacks against families and neighbourhoods, and discriminatory public statements and government policies in many EU countries, including the Czech Republic, Romania, Bulgaria, France and Italy. Hungary, however, has become a particular concern.
In the past six years, sustained hate crimes and racist propaganda have created a threatening atmosphere for Roma families and communities across the country. The mounting incidence of violence against Hungary’s Roma is at the heart of a recent report issued by Harvard University’s FXB Center for Health and Human Rights. It recounts evidence of escalating violence, killings, military trainings, and propaganda against Roma in Hungary from 2008 to the present.
I grew up in Romania and have worked on Roma rights issues in central and eastern Europe for several years. Although I have witnessed inter-ethnic tensions and extremist attacks against Roma, including Roma houses set on fire and Roma families expelled into the woods for weeks, the incidents I tracked on a recent field trip to Hungary still managed to shock me. In Hungary, anti-Roma sentiment is not limited to the blatant rejection and discrimination against the Roma community that currently abounds across Europe; it also includes systemic threats, physical attacks, and killings.
No end in sight
The FXB report alerts institutions, opinion-makers and the general population to the escalating violence and hatred targeted against the Roma. The report documents threatening behaviour by organisations, and the perpetration of crimes that have induced widespread terror amongst Hungary’s Roma population.
Far-right parties and organisations continue to organise marches and rallies across Hungarian cities and villages. The amplification of these extremist voices has not only reinforced existing anti-Roma sentiments, but also provoked anti-Roma violence. Racially motivated crimes, which are not always treated as such, are now a common occurrence throughout the country. The European Roma Rights Center tracked 61 incidents of such violence between 2008 and 2012, and recorded the murders of seven adults and two children. In June 2008, for example, Human Rights First reported that a man killed a 14-year-old Romani boy in Fenyeslitke and threatened to “kill all the Roma in the village”.
Though the rise in racially motivated crimes and violent attacks since 2008 should have been strong signals for intervention, the FXB report shows how weak Hungarian government’s response has been. Because of its failure to act definitively, perpetrators and their followers have been emboldened, untrammeled by public outrage or strong government sanction. Racist violence is increasingly accepted as a legitimate form of retribution, a model followed by citizens, organisations, and leaders alike.
Just as troubling as this escalating violence is the proliferation of secret camps run by neo-Nazi groups to prepare their members for armed combat. One of these groups, the Hungarian National Front, was found to be organising military trainings on weapon usage, combat, and urban fighting once a month in 2012-2013. According to an informant interviewed by the Athena Institute, training involves “physical exercises, running, basic formation exercises, which are roughly the same as a basic military training for conscripts”. He added: “tactical shooting, in-building and assault tactics were practised with air and paintball guns”.
The Wiesenthal Center, amongst others, urged the Council of Europe in 2009 to investigate the neo-Nazi revival, warning: “Hungary is sinking into the abyss of racial hatred that could easily spread throughout this region.”
But so far, no organisation or individual in Hungary has been found guilty of clandestine combat preparation, even though organising military training in weapon usage, combat, and urban fighting is illegal in the EU.
Old lessons
The FXB report notes that over the past year, violent attacks, marches, and racially motivated crimes against Roma have declined, and this is certainly a positive development. However, the fact that right-wing extremist policies and laws are simultaneously being put into place is deeply worrying. Instilling fear can take many forms.
In Hungary, violent attacks, killings and rallies of the past five years have now given way to extremist right-wing policies, which generate the same lack of safety for Roma and for other minority groups. The tendency to replace actual violence with repressive legislation has been seen in other countries affected by mass violence and conflict, such as Kosovo and Bosnia-Herzegovina.
The renewal of anti-Roma activity demands we hold the EU and its member states responsibile for protecting the Roma community, as they are compelled to do. Societies across the continent are riven by economic, political, and ethnic tensions. Hungary, along with other European countries, has experienced a serious economic decline over the past few years. In such precarious times, the EU’s stated obligation to defend democracy and protect the safety of all its citizens becomes even more pressing.
The EU was founded on lessons learned from the lethal excesses of extremist ideology, and by failing to address the insecurity of the Roma in Hungary, the it fails in its obligation to preserve human dignity, respect for human rights, equality and freedom. It is a shame and an outrage that the Roma community must rely on advocates and human rights groups rather than governments. The increasingly frightening case of Hungary shows how urgently Europe’s Roma need new allies and guardians.
ROMANIA
To Europe’s shame, Roma remain stigmatised outsiders – even when they live in mansions
Anti-Roma sentiment and negative stereotypes across Europe are so pervasive that even wealthy Roma families face stigma and inferior treatment. That’s the finding of our new research on wealthy Roma households in Romania, which exposes the deep-seated stigmatisation of Europe’s perennial “outsiders”.
Most government and EU policies dealing with the integration of Roma across Europe are fairly consistent. They talk the talk of integration: “social capital”, “empowerment”, economic and labour market “inclusion”, “desegregation” or “participation”.
Yet, in my research with human geographer Remus Cretan, we found that wealthy Roma households in Romania who are economically active, upwardly mobile, and live in conventional housing in mixed neighbourhoods, still face the same stigmatisation as those Roma households who live in abject poverty within segregated ghettos.
We interviewed 60 Roma households in south-west Romania whose relative wealth challenged the dominant perception of Roma as an economically excluded group living in degraded environments. And our analysis of Romanian print media over a five-year period between 2012 and 2016 showed heightened attention to “wealthy Roma” and criticism of “ugly Gypsy palaces”, particularly since 2013 and an escalation in populist rhetoric.
Roma settlement in more affluent neighbourhoods is met with hostility and protest. Yet many interviewees faced unfounded accusations that their wealth was a result of begging and theft, or that their daughters were sex workers, and their children faced the same accusations from peers. They are invariably accused of building their wealth on illegal activity, a criticism that draws on longstanding stereotypes of criminality and deviance. Those Roma who do achieve social mobility in Romania are often met with accusations of belonging to a “Roma mafia”. All this serves to undermine economic progress and leads to Roma avoidance of public spaces, stifling “integration”.
Widespread prejudice
The marginalisation of Roma across Europe raises fundamental questions about the EU project. For the political right, Roma are used as a means of mobilising anti-EU sentiment within Europe. For the left, the systematic and toothless failures of EU policy to address widespread Roma racism undermines the rhetoric of the EU as an inclusive, rights-driven project, but also serves as a reminder of the importance of the nation and national character.
From day-to-day interactions through to political rhetoric, Roma are largely treated by wider society as inferior. In November 2017, Lisa Evans, the wife of Northern Ireland footballer Corry Evans, posted an offensive tweet after a Romanian referee awarded a “dodgy” penalty for a highly questionable handball on the part of her husband. She wrote: “Romanian gypsy c**t!!! And to actually think Northern Ireland has probably homed one of his smelly relatives!! Ungrateful t**t!! Anyway onwards and upwards.”
She later deleted the tweet and apologised for posting it, but her words captured the scale of the task in hand. Conflation of the Romanian nationality with the diverse Roma ethnic group underscores the widespread level of ignorance. References to housing and welfare, hygiene and “ungratefulness” are all longstanding Roma stereotypes that seem to roll off the tongue. It’s as if Roma are sub-human.
Perhaps unsurprisingly, when faced with such hostility, many Roma show a tendency towards avoidance and separation – a protective retreat into the private sphere of the family or the group. Though there is sometimes resistance to eviction and ghettoisation, often the burden of stigmatisation, or the threat of violence, drive Roma to avoid interaction and public spaces altogether. Sites and opportunities for meaningful interaction are severely curtailed, further perpetuating stereotypes. Certain myths – such as that Roma “steal babies” – are all the more powerful when backed by political or media rhetoric and the actions of state officials.
Seen as the Roma’s problem
Yet often, Roma separation and exclusion is seen as a problem of Roma: it’s Roma themselves who need to change. Roma culture and customs are presented by both the right and the left as the problem and a threat to non-Roma. These perspectives always lack historical perspective and serve to make racism against the Roma invisible. For example, 500 years of slavery in Romania or the Romani Holocaust are key contexts for understanding the position of Roma, but these histories are woefully neglected.
While our research in Romania captured the socio-economic diversity of Roma families beyond poverty and deprivation, it also exposed how consistently they are harassed and stigmatised, regardless of wealth. The power of group stigmatisation is such that Roma retreat from the public sphere, and so maintain their separation and diminish the chance of bonds and identification with non-Roma.
Until the longstanding and widely held perception of Roma inferiority is acknowledged and better understood, then policies of Roma “integration” can only be partially successful. Only through an understanding of group stigmatisation and its drivers can racist attitudes be addressed effectively. And perhaps then Europe’s longstanding shame can lead to more opportunities and spaces for meaningful interaction between Roma and non-Roma.