Dilip Simeon's blog

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...

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...

January, 27, 1945, was the 70th anniversary of the liberation of the survivors of the Nazi concentration camp at  Auschwitz. We should never forget the crime of genocide committed by the Hitler regime, the essence of state terrorism.  We should also remember the Romany, who too were sought to be annihilated by the Nazis. Hitler's annihilation of the Romanis (the Gypsies of Europe) "We are Europe's misery" - plight of the Romany people in France They had come back, some three hundred of them, but this was not the Planet Auschwitz they remembered. The Auschwitz of their memories was a place where the rules of normal life were upended, where the moral laws of gravity were reversed, where good was deemed evil and evil deemed good – a place scholars came to speak of as an alien planet. One even writes of “the Auschwitz universe”. That place was cold and desolate, the very sound of the word – Auschwitz – seeming to contain a bitter frost. It was terminal...

The Police, Crime, Sentencing and Courts Bill currently making its way through parliament attacks the very existence of Britain’s last nomadic communities, namely Romany Gypsies (like me), Irish Travellers and Scottish Travellers. Over the years, Conservative government policies have shut down sites and accommodation for Gypsies and Travellers nationwide, leading to a massive shortage. Now, this new bill intends to criminalise us when, because of this shortage, we inevitably can’t find a formal site and have to stop on another patch of land.  We’ll face fines of thousands of pounds, three-month prison sentences and seizure of our goods, including vehicles. Which means our trailers – our homes. In short, the bill makes our very way of life a criminal offence…. https://www.opendemocracy.net/en/opendemocracyuk/priti-patels-war-on-britains-last-nomads/

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...

Photography:  ‘The moment a country lost its sense of self’:  On 19 August 1968,  Josef Koudelka   returned to Czechoslovakia from Romania, where he had been living among and photographing Romany Gypsies. The following day, Soviet tanks appeared on the streets of Prague. For seven days, the 30-year-old Moravian-born photographer roamed the city with his East German Exakta Varex camera loaded with movie film, the only stock he could find at short notice.  The resulting images , some of which were smuggled out of the country, but many of which were not seen until decades later, captured the tumult of a traumatised city. They are recognised as one of the most powerful photo-journalistic essays of the 20th century. Koudelka photographed teenagers blocking the paths of Soviet tanks, old people imploring the young Soviet soldiers to return home, flag-waving youths clambering over army vehicles. He returned to his apartment only to find more film or succumb to ...

A new wave of female politicians and protesters are offering an alternative to the Hungary PM’s macho politics  When the speakers took the stage to address the  crowds of protesters  in front of Budapest’s imposing parliament building on Sunday, they had two things in common. They were all staunch opponents of Viktor Orbán, Hungary’s far-right prime minister. And they were all women. In a country where Orbán’s populist politics have a distinctly macho flavour, and debates about women often come in the context of child-bearing and family life, the political opposition is being voiced in a united and distinctly female front. Hungary's protests have united the country's opposition against Viktor Orban. “We wanted to send a message that female parliamentarians, and women in  Hungary , should be heard,” said Ágnes Vadai, an MP from the Democratic Coalition, who said it was a conscious decision from opposition parties to send female MPs to speak to the crowd. Hu...

Budapest:  From the far-right to the left, opposition parties across Hungary's political spectrum have been showing unity against what they consider the increasingly authoritarian rule of Prime Minister Viktor Orban and his ruling Fidesz Party. Thousands of Hungarians have marched through Budapest -- some chanting "Vik-ta-tor" (an amalgamation of Viktor and dictator) and waving pro-democracy placards -- since the government passed several laws on Wednesday that critics say will tighten Orban's grip on power. One of the new laws will allow employers to demand up to 400 hours of overtime annually; critics have dubbed it the "slave law." Another will create a new government-controlled court system. But what began last week as a rally against the overtime law has expanded into several days of demonstrations against Orban's government. On Monday evening, thousands protested outside the headquarters of Hungary's state-run broadcaster MTVA, cha...

NB : Who will compute the costs - not only of slavery, but of colonial atrocities spread over centuries? Not only those committed by British imperialism, but by Spanish, Portuguese, Dutch, French, Belgian, German and Russian imperialism as well? Who will pay for the millions of lives lost under what one researcher has named  late Victorian Holocausts ? What price the Arab slave trade? The Inquisition and burning of so-called witches by the Catholic Church? The genocide of Native Americans by European settler regimes in North America and Australia? The mass expulsion of Palestinian Arabs in 1948? How may we assess the cost of Hitler's genocide of European Jewry, not to mention the annihilation of and the ongoing atrocities committed against the Romany people? Who will compute the costs o f Japanese crimes in China, Korea, and South East Asia in the second World War? Of ongoing Chinese atrocities upon Tibetans and  Uighurs ? What reparations can be paid for  Hiroshima ...

....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...

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...

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...

Rather than being repelled, a new generation is being attracted to right-wing extremism Hungary’s democracy is in mortal danger – and whether it survives will help determine the future of our embattled continent. This weekend the  main opposition newspaper – think of it as a Hungarian Guardian – was closed down by its owners after six decades of existence . Its digital archive vanished from the internet; its workers were shut out of their offices and left  unable to access emails . Publicly, it is presented as a commercial decision: in Hungary’s increasingly repressive society, there is widespread private cynicism about such a claim. Here was a newspaper that dared to challenge the government – whether on policy, corruption, or its onslaught against democracy. Authoritarian rightwing populism is sweeping the western world: Hungary is an acute example. We all know history turned a corner after the 2008 financial crisis: we are beginning to see how sharp that turn w...