Shaun Walker: No voice, no future? Roma ignored as Europe goes to polls
Europe’s 10 million
Roma badly underrepresented at a time when populist forces are trying to
villify communities
Pata-Rât is just a few
miles outside Cluj-Napoca, in north-west Romania, but it feels a
world away from the pretty streets and baroque architecture of the bustling
city centre. Here, rubbish from the city and region is deposited in vast
mounds, and the air is thick with the smell of rotting waste. About 1,800 people
call Pata-Rât home, almost all of them of Roma origin, living in depressing and
unsanitary conditions in a makeshift camp backing onto a landfill site. Many
were evicted from housing in the city centre and forced into the camp’s crowded
huts.
Linda Zsiga, a
37-year-old Roma woman who spent several years living in Pata-Rât after she and
her family were evicted with just two days notice from dwellings in central
Cluj back in 2010, has been campaigning to close the site, and rehouse its
residents in social housing inside the city. So far, she has had little
success, despite government promises and pressure from European bodies. “Nobody deserves to
live here,” she said, waving in the direction of the main dump. “When I lived
here, I couldn’t even open the windows in my own house, because of the smell.
Everyone who needs social housing should be able to get it.”
Zsiga wanted to stand
in this weekend’s European
elections, as an MEP candidate for a newly founded left-leaning coalition,
but the group was not able to collect the 200,000 signatures a new party
requires to register in Romania. Across the European Union, there are only a
tiny number of Roma candidates standing in the polls, and even fewer are likely
to get elected. Pata-Rât is one of
many stark reminders of the poor conditions in which millions of Roma people
live. While some progress has been made on access to education and healthcare
in the past decade, in many parts of Europe Roma are confined to effective
ghettos, and subject to widespread
discrimination.
There are believed to
be as many as 10 million Roma people in Europe, as many as a
medium-sized EU country, and the community’s lack of representation is
particularly alarming at a time when populist forces are stepping up a campaign
to demonise them in many countries... read more:
see more
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