On 16 September, a conference was held in Brussels to explore, discuss and develop an appropriate plan of action regarding the future of the Roma people in Europe.
There have been many initiatives taken by the EU up till now with little or no effect on the lives of Europe’s 3.5 million Roma – roughly 35,000 of whom currently reside in Ireland. They can often be seen on the side of the street begging or selling copies of Big Issue magazine, while the vast majority of us prefer to ignore their existence.
For most people in Ireland, and indeed Europe in general, ignorance of the Roma’s plight, aspirations and nebulous origins is about as profound as their hopeless illiteracy and subhuman indigence. So we continue to ignore them in the arrogant hope that one day they will simply disappear. After all, we have a tradition of institutional ethnocentrism in this country, with our own fair share of people we refer to as ‘itinerants’.
The most fundamental point that can be made about the Roma people is that they are not only poor, but also universally despised. No other ethnic group in European history has suffered such universal hatred. During the Second World War, the criminals running the Third Reich came up with a definitive solution for the Roma people: murder them all. Hundreds of thousands of men, women and children would perish in the infernal concentration camps of Poland and Croatia.
Later, the ultra-Catholic Ustasha regime in Croatia, thousands of Roma and Jews were ruthlessly exterminated. The apostolic vicar of the Croatian army at the time was a priest by the name of Alyosius Stepinac. Justly imprisoned by the communist government of Yugoslavia after the war, Stepinac was made a cardinal by the Vatican and later canonised by Pope John Paul II. No wonder Europe hasn’t come to terms with the Roma question.
Just a week before the Brussels Roma forum, the selfstyled leader of Europe’s forgotten conscience, Pope Benedict XVI, was dining in the Élysée Palace in Paris with the French president Nikolas Sarkozy. Needless to say the plight of the Roma was not on the agenda.
Ninety percent of all Europe’s Roma live in abject poverty, with illiteracy, malnutrition and widespread discrimination impeding any viable chance of escaping their gloomy fate. Worse still, since the fall of the Soviet Union and the death of egalitarian ideology in eastern Europe, there have been a series of secret government-sponsored extermination schemes, the most nefarious of which occurred in the former Czechoslovakia, where a sterilisation programme was devised to wipe out the entire Roma population.
The most recent government scandal occurred in Italy, where Silvio Berlusconi’s right-wing government, with a severity not seen since the time of Mussolini, proposed that all Roma should wear tags so that they could be identified.
But the real problem has its origins in Romania, which holds the largest Roma minority. It has been mainly due to their inhuman treatment in their home country that the Roma have been forced to wander throughout Europe.
The continued plight of the Roma people raises deep and serious questions about the values so pompously propagated by the European Union. This ancient ethnic group, originating in Rajasthan over a thousand years ago, speaks a myriad of dialects tangentially related to Sanskrit. For centuries they were sold into slavery, and once released found themselves forced to scrounge for a living in countries where they were treated as subhuman. Ironically, the word Roma actually means ‘man’.
Due to the advances of technology, the traditional crafts and trades of tin and metal construction pursued by the Roma have become obsolete. Lacking any access to education and decent accommodation, they have no other choice but to beg and scavenge for a living. Permanently expatriated and perpetually destitute, the Roma people are the waifs of 21st century Europe, and their struggle to survive is a potent symbol of the inhumanity that underpins the ever-burgeoning ideology of modern capitalist societies.
