Plight of the gypsies in New Europe

[southsider2k5]

This is from today's Trib

 

MICHALOVCE, Slovakia -- On May 1, when the European Union rolls out the red carpet to welcome 10 new members into the club, an 11th nation will slip in through the back door.

 

Eastern Europe's Gypsies have no flag and no anthem. They will have no representatives in the European Parliament or in any of the EU's other governing councils.

 

But the Gypsies, or Roma as they prefer to call themselves, have a language, a culture and a history. They number more than 4.5 million, making them a larger national entity than all but four of the new EU entrants.

 

Poland, Hungary, the Czech Republic and Slovakia--the largest of the new members--have a combined Roma population of about 1.5 million. Romania and Bulgaria, scheduled to join the EU in 2007, will bring an additional 3 million.

 

Although the Roma have been "Europeans" for about a millennium, having migrated from the east, they entered the 21st Century as Europe's poorest, least understood and most despised minority. Once isolated and ignored as a local problem in Eastern Europe, they now become a worry for the whole continent.

 

According to a recent United Nations report, the Roma of Eastern and Central Europe endure living conditions "closer to those of sub-Saharan Africa than [of] Europe." One in 6 Roma are in constant hunger, 40 percent live in households with no running water and more than half don't have indoor toilets.

 

Rights groups carry banner

 

For years, human-rights groups have criticized Eastern European governments for discriminatory treatment of the Roma. But discrimination is hardly confined to the East.

 

"The Roma gypsies of Eastern Europe are heading to Britain to leech on us. We don't want them," declared the Daily Express, a London tabloid that has led an unabashedly xenophobic campaign to close Britain's borders to immigration from the EU's new members.

 

While deploring the tone of the tabloid press, Prime Minister Tony Blair's government nonetheless followed the lead of other EU members and reneged on its pledge to allow unfettered immigration, supposedly one of the EU's fundamental freedoms.

 

But fears of invading Gypsy hordes are unfounded, according to most experts. Eastern Europe's Roma are quite literally too poor to go anywhere.

 

"If you want to immigrate, you need education, you need skills, you need money," said Jarmila Vanova, a Roma activist who also works as a teacher's aide in eastern Slovakia, where most of the country's 500,000 Roma are concentrated. "Some [Roma] are saying that they will leave after the first of May, but whatever idea they have, it's only in their imagination."

 

Jan Balog, a 41-year-old Slovak Roma, said he would happily go to Britain or anyplace else where he could find work, but he doesn't see how he could make it happen.

 

"To go to England, a plane ticket costs 14,000 crowns [about $415], and when you get there you have to pay 500 pounds [about $880] for an apartment and 300 pounds for food, and by the time you are finished paying, there's is nothing left," he said.

 

Balog lives in Michalovce, a grim industrial town in the east. The unemployment rate among "whites"--the term Slovaks apply to themselves--is about 28 percent; among the Roma, it is more than 90 percent. Balog, a powerfully built, energetic man with an olive complexion, has been out of work for 12 years.

 

Job discrimination

 

"Here in eastern Slovakia, it's almost impossible to get a job if you're Roma," he said. "When you talk to someone on the phone [about a job], they'll say, `Sure, come in and see us.' When you get there, and they see who you are, they say, `Sorry, the job has already been taken.'"

 

During the communist era, when Czechoslovakia boasted of full employment, Balog worked nine years for a state agricultural collective. But when the old system collapsed, so did the jobs. In the new economy, Roma were always the first casualties.

 

Balog started a business making and installing roofing materials, but it failed after two years. He has tried repeatedly to get public-sector jobs, "but they all go to the whites," he said.

 

Balog, who is married and has three children, lives in a clean but bare-bones apartment in a dilapidated concrete high-rise, part of a large complex segregated along ethnic lines. The windows in public areas are broken and the walls are covered with graffiti, but the families there are better off than the estimated 150,000 Roma who live in so-called settlements--squalid, trash-strewn shantytowns where sewage pools in unpaved streets and water flows from a single pipe.

 

Some of the settlements are remnants of work camps set up by the Nazis after they confiscated Roma property during World War II, according to Kristina Magdolenova, a Slovak sociologist. The Nazis sent tens of thousands of Roma to the gas chambers.

 

Czechoslovakia's postwar communist regime tried to assimilate the Roma by banning their migratory habits. In some instances, police removed the wheels from Roma caravans. Roma children were required to attend school and receive vaccinations against polio and other diseases. Almost everyone had a job. The Roma language was officially discarded.

 

"Materially, it was better. Culturally it was horrible," Magdolenova said.

 

The fall of communism brought few benefits to the Roma. Unemployment soared, the vaccination rate for children dropped to 74 percent from 100 percent and two-thirds of Roma youngsters left school before 8th grade. Instead of forced assimilation, they were confronted with skinheads and blatant discrimination.

 

Educated, still a pariah

 

"At least under the communists, you didn't worry about getting beat up in the street," said Rastislav Pivon, 30, a Roma studies scholar at Charles University in Prague. Urbane, educated and fluent in several languages, Pivon is hardly a typical Roma, yet he knows firsthand what it feels like to be sucker-punched by skinheads.

 

"Even today, it's completely possible that I could go into a restaurant and be told, `Get out of here. We don't want your kind,'" he said.

 

In 1999, the small Czech town of Usti Nad Labem drew international criticism when it erected a wall to seal off a Roma ghetto from the rest of the community. Local officials explained their rationale: Roma were dirty, loud, thieving and a general public nuisance. Under pressure from the Czech government and the EU, the wall was removed.

 

Earlier this year, when the Slovak government announced steep cuts in welfare benefits, Roma communities went on a two-day rampage, looting supermarkets and other stores. Troops were sent to restore order.

 

Undermining themselves

 

The episode underscored the profound alienation of the Roma community from mainstream society and also its uncanny knack for acting in its own worst interests.

 

Unable to help themselves, they remain suspicious of help from the outside. What do the Roma want? How can they fit in?

 

"I don't need Roma culture, Roma language, I know I'm a Roma. I just want to live like everyone else. I want a job," said Miroslav Balog (unrelated to Jan Balog), a 32-year-old electrician who has been unable to find steady work. He was attending a recent conference that was supposed teach Roma activists how to interact with non-Roma.

 

Wish for integration

 

"We've got our Roma culture, but we have also adopted Slovak culture," said Vanova, the teacher's aide. "I consider myself to be a Slovak Roma, and I want to be able to live in this country like a normal citizen."

 

Most Roma are "deeply connected with the societies in which they are living," said Ladislav Fizik, head of the Roma Parliament, a civic organization in Bratislava, the capital of Slovakia.

 

"In Slovakia there are 30,000 mixed marriages and 90,000 children from these marriages. The Roma people are integrating. We all want to be part of the European Union," he said.

 

But their voices rarely are heard, mainly because they never have found a unified voice.

 

Bad enough that the Roma are scattered across nearly every nation of Europe, but even in Slovakia, where they make up nearly a tenth of the electorate--and have 18 fractious political parities of their own--the Roma never have succeeded in electing a single representative to the national parliament.

[BrandoFan]

Django could sure pick 'em strings, though.

[Texsox]

I guess we know where the next Air Jordans will be made. US corporations need to get there and fast. Labor at pennies per day.

[Texsox]

Gypsy - Fleetwood Mac

So I'm back...to the velvet underground

Back to the floor....that I love

To a room with some lace and paper flowers

Back to the gypsy...that I was...to the gypsy...that I was...

 

And so it all comes down to you

Well you know that it does, well....

Lightning strikes, maybe once, maybe twice

Oh...and it lights up the night

And you see your gypsy....

You see your gypsy.....

 

To the gypsy...that remains....

Faces freedom...with a little fear....

I have no fear....I have only love

and if I was a child...and the child was enough.....

Enough for me to love....

Enough to love.....

 

She is dancing...away from you now

She was just a wish...she was just a wish

And her memory is all that is left for you now

You see your gypsy.....

You see your gypsy.....

 

Lightning strikes...maybe once...maybe twice

(And it all comes down to you....)

Well it all comes down to you

(Lightning strikes...maybe once...maybe twice)

Oh.......

And I still see you bright eyes...I've always loved you...

And it all comes down to you

 

 

Sorry you say Gypsy and I see Stevie Nicks

[BrandoFan]

Sorry you say Gypsy and I see Stevie Nicks

 

When you say Stevie, I think a drinking straw and a hapless pa on all fours.

 

:puke