Another Darkness, Another Dawn Page 24
Here it is worth reflecting on the need to understand the changes experienced by Roma across the Eastern Bloc in the context of broader shifts in society that were affecting the whole population. Moves towards urbanization and industrialization and opportunities for education and training profoundly affected what had still been primarily rural populations across the whole region. And although socialist regimes generally existed within an economy of shortages, it is undoubtedly the case that for the majority of their populations material prosperity and opportunities for social advancement through free education and the party system were greater than in the pre-war period. Sedentarization might have been experienced as a repressive policy by Roma – notably in Poland and Czechoslovakia where it was backed up by the confiscation of horses, wagons and other property – but might also have been seen as an opportunity. The changing socio-economic climate was making nomadic lifestyles more difficult, and many Roma, particularly in the Soviet Union and Bulgaria, had been moving towards a position of (semi-) settlement. In such cases loans and subsidies for housing and land supported moves that Roma communities were already making. And settlement did not necessarily mean assimilation – indeed, across the Balkans and Hungary in particular, there had been a long tradition of identifiably settled Roma communities – and nor did engagement in new forms of economic organization:
In Hungary, there is a small number of blacksmith cooperatives which are run by Roma on their own behalf. The blacksmith cooperative of Nogradmegyer . . . has existed since 1951. The village had been inhabited by Gypsy nail-smiths and musicians, both groups through a long process established the cooperative, which today produces a multiplicity of products.29
And yet not all regimes were so open to the idea of difference: the insistence in Poland on sedentarization, for example, was simply one manifestation of a broader policy of cultural homogenization. In Bulgaria, state emphasis on cultural and ethnic homogeneity was pursued through active ‘Bulgarization’, which, while primarily focusing on the country’s Muslim population, was to hit Muslim Gypsies doubly hard. We must not see this, however, as a particularly ‘communist’ measure, but rather something that had been a feature of Bulgarian life since independence. Although now backed up by the bureaucratic weight of a totalitarian regime, the removal of Turkish influence had been a persistent theme in national life, and the state’s initial encouragement of a positive Roma identity had been one way to halt the perceived integration of Roma into the general Turkish minority. As well as heavily pushing Muslim Roma to Christianize their names, Bulgarization was behind the granting to all Jews of exit visas in 1948 and the official encouragement of a quarter of a million ‘Turks’ (Muslim Bulgarians) to ‘return’ to Turkey in 1950.30 Revealingly, not only did Muslim Gypsies form an important part of the exodus but their presence caused considerable diplomatic difficulties. The Turkish authorities swiftly warned the Bulgarians against including Gypsies among the ‘Turks’, and after a trainload of deportees containing 97 Roma tried to enter Turkey, the Turks closed the border. Istanbul argued that the Roma had no claim to Turkish origins and therefore could not be granted entry. Although official Communist Party records indicate that only fifteen Roma emigrated in 1950s, in reality the Bulgarians continued to force both Turks and Roma across the border in isolated areas, with up to 5,000 Bulgarian Gypsies entering Turkey in this way.31 Such actions proved that despite the rhetoric of equality, Gypsies were still somehow less Bulgarian than their Bulgarian comrades.
If socialist regimes teetered between trying to treat Roma in the same way as their majority populations, and implementing special measures aimed at specifically changing their way of life and relationship with society, then they were not alone. On the other side of the Iron Curtain exactly the same dilemmas were being acted out. By the 1960s the West had moved on from its initial post-war preoccupation with reconstruction. The unexpected prosperity which started to blossom from the mid-1950s brought on a wave of full employment, urbanization, expanded university education, rising consumerism and higher expectation, heralding what the French called the Trente Glorieuses (the years 1945–75, which followed the end of the Second World War), which across the Channel was encapsulated in the observation that Britain had ‘never had it so good’. For Gypsy populations we see two contradictory trends – one reinforcing marginalization, the other promoting inclusion.
On the one hand, Gypsies were pushed increasingly towards city edges, partly following general patterns of urbanization, but also resulting from the growing scarcity of stopping places caused by the physical expansion of towns and urban zoning limiting use of open spaces. Such physical marginalization reinforced increasing disparities between nomades and Gypsy Travellers’ standards of living and those of wider society. In the late nineteenth century, and even in the inter-war period, there might not have been much difference between the standard of living of Gypsies and the urban and rural poor: lack of electricity, running water or washing facilities was common, and for both groups standards of schooling might be low or non-existent. More than this, evidence shows that they lived side by side in areas of cheap urban housing, worked alongside each other in the fields for fruit, vegetable and hop harvests, and met face to face through door-to-door selling and other interactions. Indeed, the high level of cross-over in folk songs sung by British Gypsy Travellers and the wider working-class population suggests that there was meaningful social interaction too. However, this did not mean that they were fully accepted by their neighbours and fellow workers. The Stewarts had lived in the Scottish town of Blairgowrie for at least three generations by the 1960s, and as one of them put it, ‘I’ve worked in this toon, Blairgowrie, as a labourer, as a bricklayer, as an electrical engineer, and they liked me as far as my work was concerned, but at the end of the day, ye’re still a Tink.’32
Such discrimination and social distancing was reinforced by two key factors. The first was the arrival of new, more visible Roma or Traveller groups, which increased pressure on the already over-stretched network of stopping places, and made travelling populations generally more visible. In France it was the significant migration of Yugoslavian Roma, such as the Kosovan Xoraxané Roma, who arrived along with large numbers of other Yugoslavs seeking prosperity when border controls were lightened by the Titoist regime. In Britain, it was the migration of large numbers of Irish Travellers, who crossed the Irish Sea following concerted state action against ‘Itinerants’ from 1963. While in France some Roma managed to secure space in sites allocated to Gypsies, most ended up in shanty towns on the edge of the cities; in Britain Irish Travellers joined British Gypsies in living on a succession of insecure roadside stopping places.33
The second factor was the changing economy: many of the visible ‘Gypsy’ occupations – horse dealing, peg making, hawking, field labour – were becoming more marginal or even obsolete. And while Gypsy Travellers diversified their work into almost anything where mobility, versatility, negotiation and self-employment were central features – the Stewarts worked as builders, for example, on the new towns, and erected pylon lines across Britain; others worked on the nuclear power plant at Dounreay, or moved into car and furniture dealing, scrap metalwork, tarmacking, ‘lopping and topping’ – these were not acknowledged by the majority population as ‘legitimate’ trades for Gypsies. The shortage of stopping places, in combination with increased motorization, meant that people stayed in one place for longer, and in often larger numbers than in the past. To this was added the modernization of nomadic lifestyles – new motor-drawn caravans, generators providing much-valued electricity – reinforcing the lack of visible ‘Gypsy’ markers such as bow-topped caravans, horses, peg-making around an open fire.
These factors were to coalesce in a peculiarly toxic mix of stereotypes over race, lifestyle and perceptions of unfitness for the modern world. In both France and Britain, as we have seen, there was a long-established tradition of the state denial of difference, meaning that all citizens in theory were to be treat
ed the same. West Germany, in an attempt to distance itself from its Nazi past, similarly moved towards explicitly non-racial legislation. In the context of the post-war world this combined with the seemingly relentless expansion of state control over people’s lives, and a changing socio-economic context in which Gypsies no longer seemed to fulfil an obvious function. Put simply, a rejection of ethnic difference in combination with the denial that ‘real Gypsies’ still existed in the modern world resulted in civil servants insisting that while ‘true’ Gypsies might be free to live how they pleased, compulsory housing, regular employment and education were the best means of solving any lingering ‘nomad problem’.
This position involved deploying racialized and spurious definitions of ‘Gypsies’: ‘true’ Gypsies, who carried an inescapable wanderlust, did not want or need official intervention, while racially impure ‘didikais’ (Travellers of mixed Romani heritage) and other Travellers – ancestors of the Tudor ‘counterfeit Egyptian’ – could be subsumed under the wider ‘caravan’ problem and the housing programme. Rather than examining the structural reasons behind repeated evictions, officials dismissed their importance by denying they involved true Gypsies:
From time to time there are articles in the Press and questions in the house about Gypsies being evicted from their customary camping sites . . . In all these cases the people are referred to as ‘Gypsies’, though the Romany element seems to have been diluted, with Irish tinkers in Cardiff, and with scrap metal dealers in Iver and Brierley Hill [my emphasis].34
Concentrating on living style and economic occupation allowed British civil servants to suggest that all those affected by the Act of 1947 were ‘not Gypsies at all’, but rather ‘people who without any special claim, choose to live in a way which does not harmonize to the local pattern’.35 We see a similar process at work in Germany as bureaucrats were aided by the official adoption of the label Landfahrer [Traveller]:
many people that are travelling around today are not real Gypsies anymore but Wandergewerbetreibende [people whose profession is itinerant trade], or fairground and showpeople, who differ in their outer appearance and their demeanour from Gypsies; they don’t have a deep-rooted affinity with travelling and therefore it is possible to make them settle down permanently again, perhaps through a permanent obligation to report to the authorities . . . One problem is that many Landfahrer have vehicles and can escape quickly in them.36
And yet, while apparently shorn of racial associations, as these people were not ‘real Gypsies’, the official definition also made it clear that a Landfahrer was someone with ‘a deep-rooted affinity with travelling around, or has a strong aversion against settling down and who travels around especially with caravans, horse-drawn carts and different mobile possessions’. And now, perhaps learning from the Weimar period, having ‘an official permanent place of residency’ was not enough to be excluded from the definition.37 Simultaneously deploying and denying race, while also implying endemic criminality and the ability to ‘escape quickly’, official attitudes towards Landfahrer justified assimilationist policies alongside policies of surveillance and control. In Cologne and Düsseldorf, Landfahrer, many of them in fact concentration-camp survivors, were resettled in the old municipal internment camps, while people parked in unapproved places were evicted and prosecuted. Once again survivors were ‘in barracks surrounded by barbed wire . . . [where] they still live with the filth and most primitive conditions’. There was continuity in other ways too: the Bavarian police managed to retain the records of the Central Office to Combat the Gypsy Menace. Its renamed Landfahrerzentrale [Vagrant Department] continued to use the records to assess restitution and citizenship claims up until it was disbanded in 1970 and its files ‘lost’.38
By the mid-1960s it was becoming clear that post-war policies towards Gypsies across Europe were failing. Britain was experiencing an increasing number of high-profile and violent evictions as many West Midlands local authorities in particular adopted ‘zero-tolerance’ policies towards Gypsy Travellers. Jimmy Connors, an Irish Traveller, recounted the persecution they faced in Walsall:
Twenty-eight times that day I produced my driving licence and insurance. The first day’s summonses totalled sixty-two and the full total was three hundred. Every two minutes of the day we were summonsed for an offence. The persecution went on and on, night, noon and day. The police thought we would move away from the Midlands . . . But the question was where could we move to? All camping sites were banked up with piles of earth, and trenches dug across all open land to prevent us from camping on them . . . A harmless child is blown to bits at the hands of the local authorities; Ann Hanrahan, two and a half years old, crushed to death during an eviction near Dudley, two miles from Walsall. My own little son very badly injured and my caravan smashed to pieces . . . Walsall – during an eviction, three little girls burned to death. Walsall – my wife kicked black and blue by the police in her own caravan three days before her baby was born. Walsall – I was kicked unconscious. Walsall – a sister at Walsall Hospital refused to treat us.39
In the Eastern Bloc it was equally clear that the optimism of the early post-war years was being replaced by the reality of ongoing marginality, socio-economic problems and prejudice. These years saw disillusionment on the part of the regime as they realized that while some Gypsies, primarily those already settled, engaged with Communism, there were still large numbers who did their best to ignore it and tried to maintain more traditional ways of life. An internal document of 1959 tried to give a positive gloss to the progress made by the Bulgarian Roma:
Among the Gypsies there are now doctors, officers in the army, mechanics, etc. There are 3,500 Gypsy members of the organizations of the Bulgarian Communist Party, and tens of thousands of Gypsy members of the Fatherland Front, the Komsomol, and other organizations.40
However, it was admitted that this was not necessarily typical of broader experiences, and that for most Bulgarian Roma the reality was one of leaving school early and often illiterate, and moving between a number of low grade jobs or semi-unemployment:
Certain industrial managers support the theory that the Gypsies are lazy and cannot learn to work and be disciplined, so they are reluctant to give them work in their factories and are ready to fire them at the smallest occasion.41
Laziness and other ‘innate’ characteristics were also the normal explanations given for their poor performance in school and tendency to leave formal education as early as possible. Overall, it was made explicit that the behaviour of Gypsies themselves was central to their failure to progress satisfactorily under socialism. There were still 14,000 nomadic Gypsies across the country who ‘wander from town to town’ and ‘practise begging, fortune telling, stealing’, which may have been understandable under bourgeois and fascist regimes but, ‘today in the conditions of socialism this way of life is harmful and disgraceful’. In Romania, as late as 1977 the official census recorded that there were still 66,500 nomadic Roma, suggesting that despite regulations to the contrary they were able to circumvent restrictions.
In rare cases, regimes accepted that positive measures needed to be taken, and that rather than the problem sitting with the Roma community, majority society bore some responsibility. In Hungary this was partly a result of a gradual evolution of a more proactive policy towards minorities following the 1956 revolution. By 1961 the Central Committee had declared that although its Gypsies did ‘not constitute a national minority’ they should be accorded the same privileges as other groups. This resolution admitted that the major barrier to their progress, particularly in rural areas, was a ‘phalanx of prejudice’, which prevented them from being allocated adequate housing or being hired for work. Research into their conditions over the next decade found that there were 2,100 Roma settlements throughout the country, with 126,000 living in what were described as ‘shanty towns’, over a half of which had no water, and two-thirds had no electricity.42
Often portrayed, particularly in the West, as an e
xample of the repressive policies of communist regimes towards Roma, in fact the effects of targeted housing schemes were rather more complex. Across Hungary, government mortgages were made available to Roma families whose head of household had ‘worked steadily for two years’, and under this scheme in the five years from 1965 2,500 new houses were built. As the shanty areas around the major cities, which housed an estimated 65,000 Roma, were cleared, 3,000 apartments were made available to them. In tandem with the schemes, there were labour-development programmes aimed at semi-skilled Roma: in the Baranja mining area of the south-west officials proactively recruited Roma men at all levels of production, as well as encouraging them to become active in local government bodies. And yet, the impact of such schemes was partial. New housing was insufficient to adequately house displaced Roma, so not only did large numbers remain in shanty accommodation, but they were blamed for failing to take advantage of the benefits of socialism. Similarly, although in some areas Roma were successfully included in the workforce, by the late 1970s only 1.5 per cent were classed as skilled workers, and illiteracy levels among the Roma population remained high. Still largely speaking Romani as their first language, they entered school with limited Hungarian, where they were often treated as ‘retarded’, leading to drop-out rates of 50–60 per cent in the early 1970s.43