Dilip Simeon's blog

One of the highlights of Hungary's EU presidency was the launching of the EU Framework for National Roma Integration Strategies. But a closer look at the situation of the Hungarian Roma provides an alarming picture, writes Yudit Kiss. And more than sufficient reason to head westwards. The expulsion of a Roma schoolgirl from France, a hunt for allegedly kidnapped blond girls in Roma camps, a ban on begging in Austria; a series of recent events have shed light again on the groups of eastern European Roma who have arrived in the West since their countries became EU members. They don't arrive in shaky boats or on the backs of lorries, they don't have to face the dangers of illegal immigration, but they are pushed by misery and discrimination, like the illegal immigrants who died on the shores of Lampedusa in October.  Most hope that even the precarious existence they can eke out at the margins of some western society would be better than their situation at home. Some expect...

....At the core of the Roma’s troubles is the fact that they are a people without a land - but with a twist. To say that a people is without a land can mean at least three things. It can mean that, for one reason or another, a people does not in the main live in the land with which it is historically associated. That was true, of course, of the Jews for most of the past 2,000 years. But it has been true, too, for what are sometimes called projection states - states defined by the fact that more members of a particular group live outside their homeland than within it. That was the case for Greeks during much of the 19th century, and it is true for Lebanese and Armenians today. For a people to be without a land can also refer to a lack of sovereign control over a territory or country in which, in fact, most of the national group does live. That is the case today for the many peoples, including the Kurds, Puerto Ricans, Berber, Baloch, Palestinians, Basques, Aymara and Quechua. But t...

Might not the history of the Roma, a group marginalized like none other, reveal a less auspicious aspect of Europe's grand narrative of modernity?  The tendency of existing research to treat the Roma as having first entered European political history with the Nazi genocide disregards a unique six-hundred-year history. It is indeed the case that the Roma, who over long periods of time lived nomadically and possessed no written culture of their own, have left almost no historical accounts of themselves. The heritage and documents therefore do not permit a history of the Roma comparable to that, for example, of the persecuted and expelled French Huguenots. What is available to us, however, is evidence – in the form of literature and art – of the way in which the settled, feudally organized European population experienced a way of life that it perceived as threatening. Despite consisting solely of stories and images that are defensive "distortions", this evidence provid...

On Monday Salvini ordered the census and the removal of all non-Italian Roma – which he called an “answer to the Roma question” – and said he wanted to know “who, and how many” there were. “Unfortunately we will have to keep the Italian Roma because we can’t expel them,” Salvini said on Telelombardia. Salvini is on record as having praised Benito Mussolini, the Italian fascist leader, and his new policy has sparked comparisons by the centre-left Democratic party to ethnic cleansing rules introduced   in the late 1920s that also targeted the Roma. “The interior minister does not seem to know that a census on the basis of ethnicity is not permitted by the law,” Carlo Stasolla, president of the Associazione 21 Luglio, which supports Roma rights, told the Ansa news agency. “We also recall that Italian Roma have been present in our country for at least half a century and sometimes they are ‘more Italian’ than many of our fellow citizens.” Hitler's annihilation of the Romani...

The Roma families who live in the Voltaire settlement in Saint-Denis, near Paris, count themselves lucky. They live on a piece of land owned by the State, they have houses – modest prefab affairs that they built themselves, using materials put at their disposal by a philantropic entrepreneur – and their children go to school. It's early September,  la rentrée , and I'm following the steps of Adriana, a 30 year-old charity worker, who's going from house to house to help parents fill up school forms in French (the ones that say who to call in case of emergency, and whether you want your kid to have school meals). Adriana makes sure parents understand how parent-teacher books work, and I am reminded of my own childhood: a mother holds a notebook covered in yellow plastic, and nods intently to explanations given in Romanian. Here, school is taken seriously too. In Romania, Adriana, who studied psychology, used to work in a bank. She moved to France three years ago and now a...

She is, we have been told repeatedly,  the girl Greece is calling "the blonde angel" . She is certainly blonde – and she is a young child who deserves concern as all children do, particularly those facing poverty or discrimination. Whether or not she is angelic is a matter of stereotype rather than personality. She is angelic in the eyes of the media only in stark contrast to the circumstances in which she was found: in a Roma camp in Greece, with dark-skinned parents who, DNA tests have revealed, cannot be her birth parents. The pair appeared in court on Monday charged with child abduction, but are said by their lawyer to be  distraught at the forcible removal of a child they were raising as their daughter . Whatever the truth of Maria's origins, one element of this case is not in doubt. Even before charges were brought, it was widely reported as a case of abduction. The pursuit of  Gerry and Kate McCann  and the mother of  Ben Needham  for reaction wil...

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 ha...

Around 150 Roma – including some 60 children – have been left homeless outside Paris after being forcibly evicted and having their homes bulldozed on Monday morning, Amnesty International said.  The forced eviction in Noisy-le-Grand, in the department of Seine-Saint-Denis east of the capital, is the latest in a string of similar operations in Roma settlements across France in recent months.  “Authorities in Seine-Saint-Denis utterly failed to live up to their human rights obligations when conceiving and carrying out this operation, which amounts to a forced eviction,” said Marek Marczyński, Deputy Europe and Central Asia Programme Director at Amnesty International. " In a scenario that has become all too common for Roma communities across France, scores of families including young children have again been rendered homeless because the local authorities failed to provide alternative housing.” As many as 150 Roma from Romania have been living in shacks in the Noisy-le-Grand...

German Chancellor Angela Merkel has opened a memorial in Berlin to Roma (Gypsy) Nazi Holocaust victims.  The memorial - a circular pool of water with a small plinth in the middle - is in Tiergarten park, near the Reichstag, the German parliament building.  The unveiling comes after years of delays and disputes over the memorial's design and its cost. Experts say between 220,000 and 500,000 members of the Roma and related Sinti people were killed during World War II.  President Joachim Gauck and some 100 elderly survivors joined Mrs Merkel at the opening ceremony.  They observed a two-minute silence around the pool as the triangular plinth was raised from below the surface with a flower on it. Speaking just before, Mrs Merkel paid an emotional tribute to the victims.  "Every single fate in this genocide is a suffering beyond understanding. Every single fate fills me with sorrow and shame," she said.  It was important to remember so that such atrocities w...

17 June 2014 A mob took the 16-year-old from a Roma camp in Pierrefitte-sur-Seine on Friday after he was accused by locals of burglary, a police source said. F ound dumped in a supermarket trolley, the victim is in a critical condition.  The 200 or so people in the camp fled the area the same evening, according to Le Parisien newspaper. Mr Hollande said the attack was "unspeakable and unjustifiable", and he wanted "everything done" to find the attackers.  Interior Minister Bernard Cazeneuve said the judicial police had been mobilised to investigate the attack. The presence in France of thousands of Roma people from Eastern Europe has been a hot political issue since the summer of 2010 when the conservative president of the day, Nicolas Sarkozy, called for the removal of their illegal camps, saying they were rife with crime. Since coming to power in 2012, the Socialists have stepped up the policy of camp clearances, and France has also continued to deport th...

Comrades Roma and Sukalo’s judicial remand extended by another fourteen days today:  New Delhi 13 July 2015  - NTUI National Secretary Roma and All India Union of Forest (AIUPFW) Working People National Committee Member Sokalo who were arrested in Sonebhadra on June 30, 2015 have been remanded to a further 14 days in judicial custody. Comrades Roma, who is also Deputy General Secretary AIUFWP and Sokalo were arrested from the AIUFWP office in Robertsganj on June 30 as they were preparing for the rally of the All India People’s Forum on the basis of three FIRs, with neither of them named in any of these. The charges against them are false, fabricated and politically motivated. Subsequently arrest warrants were also issued against two earlier FIRs that had never been pressed.  In the course of the last fortnight bail has been obtained against two of the five FIRs being pressed. The AIUFPW has been at the forefront of the struggle for land rights of the peo...

The political establishment has a decisive role in determining the place of hatreds in society; with adequate rules, laws and institutions it can marginalise and neutralise or, on the contrary, tolerate and encourage them.   The first urgent step to break the current wave of hatred is to address the crisis with radically different methods that focus on economic recovery, just redistribution and social inclusion. In the long run only fundamental changes in our economic and political system would put a genuine end to the periodically surfacing violent identity politics... In the process of creating feasible alternatives to our present system, which is a long-term, complex and extremely difficult undertaking, consistent, practical steps should be taken to break the mechanisms of hatred at each stage and at every level. According to the Kanun, an ancient set of customary laws dating back to pre-Islamic times that regulated traditional Albanian society, “ The house of an Albanian b...

A centrist MP is facing expulsion from his party and legal action by the state after he allegedly said of French Travellers: "Hitler maybe didn't kill enough of them."  Gilles Bourdouleix, MP and mayor of the town of Cholet in the Maine and Loire region of western France, was reported to have made the comments on Sunday during an encounter with a group of Travellers who had parked over 100 caravans in a field owned by the local authority.  According to the local paper Le Courrier de L'Ouest, the meeting, in which Bourdouleix told the Travellers they would have to move on, was tense, with some Travellers accusing him of racism and a few making a Nazi salute towards him. During the exchange, as reported by the newspaper, a man said to Bourdouleix: "You know how to talk better than [the former president Nicolas] Sarkozy." The MP replied that "the law must be implemented".  There was murmuring and Bourdouleix reportedly said in a hushed tone: "...