Gypsies or Roma: Europe’s “Most Persecuted Minority”

Today is an important day for Gypsies, also known as Romani (estimated population 6-11 million worldwide). A group of academics, government advisers and gypsy representatives are meeting in Strasbourg to discuss the next steps in a pan-European project entitled “The Decade of Roma Inclusion, 2005 to 2015″. The Independent describes Gypsies/Roma as “Europe’s most persecuted minority that has become the subject of increasingly draconian laws.” (Photo above shows Romanies evicted from their homes in Paris.)

“Now President Nicolas Sarkozy in France and Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi in Italy would have us believe that the Roma community as a group represents a security threat so grave that it demands the removal of its members en masse. One is reminded of the Criminal Tribes Act passed by the British in India in 1871, which stigmatised 161 communities there as ‘born criminals’. A recent study concluded that the Act was a result of ‘profound ignorance of India’s social structure and cultural institutions.”

In 1885 the United States outlawed the entry of the Roma. The persecution of the Romanies reached a peak during World War II. In 1935, the Nuremberg laws stripped the Romani people living in Nazi Germany of their citizenship, after which they were subjected to violence, imprisonment in concentration camps and later genocide in extermination camps. More here…

The Independent continues: “Gypsies have been at the margin of European affairs ever since they arrived from India nearly a millennium ago. They have no claims on territory, have never started a war, are far from homogeneous and have produced few figures who bulk large in our history books. In the past they were usually in motion, trundling around the edges of European history, earning a living in the nooks and crannies of society, fortune telling, basket weaving, horse trading, dealing in scrap metal.

“They might be seen as people of doubtful honesty, capable of sly tricks, or seductively wild, depending on circumstance, but whatever they were it was of fleeting importance. They had their world, we, the gaje (non-Romanies), had ours…”

“‘The Decade of Roma Inclusion, 2005 to 2015′, according to its authors, is to ‘improve the socio-economic status and social inclusion of Roma’. The next phase will see Romanies stepping forward in museums and other institutions in Britain, Greece, Germany and Slovenia and talking about their culture, ‘getting people to talk to them and get to know them, to get rid of some of the fear,’ as one of the organisers puts it…

More here…