Another Darkness, Another Dawn Page 25

  We see similar efforts in Bulgaria during this period, although here the policies were part of a specific package of measures aimed at eradicating Roma lifestyles and the anti-socialist individualism it was seen to foster. The decree of November 1958, directed solely at the Roma population, stated that ‘the vagrant way of life is forbidden in every form’, outlawed begging, and made illegal the unauthorized settlements that had grown up on the outskirts of all the major cities. Residents of these shanty areas were consequently ordered to return to ‘their place of permanent residence’.44 In the same month a decree set out a concerted programme of enforced settlement and assimilation. Mobilizing long-standing stereotypes but couched in the new language of bureaucratic socialism, this decree made no bones about the problems the Gypsy population caused to the wider population:

  they do not work, do not settle, beg, tell fortunes, steal and commit other violations of public order. In many cases the Gypsy population spread illnesses and are the bearers of huge underdevelopment . . . The cure is to settle the Gypsy population, to make them work, and to make their culture and everyday life higher.45

  Those drafting the decree had also made sure that it specified exactly who was to do what: the Ministry of Agriculture and Forestry was obliged to ‘find not less than 1,000 jobs and to build homes for the workers’; the Central Union of Labour Producer Cooperatives was expected to create cooperatives and to include in them ‘Gypsy people who do hand-craft work such as basketry, iron-smithery and others’; while the Executive Committees of People’s Councils were tasked with tackling the ‘regulation, development and sanitation of the Gypsy quarters’.46 The ‘most stringent measures’ (essentially internment in a ‘correction’ camp) were to be applied to officials who ‘fail to act’ and Gypsies who refused to comply.

  Central to the programme was the principle that any new homes for Roma were to be ‘dispersed in different parts of cities or regions in order to prevent their concentration in compact groups’. As in the past, allowing them to live and socialize together was seen as potentially undermining the good work promised by settlement. So Gypsies were to be offered new apartments in Bulgarian neighbourhoods, with only one or two families housed in each development.47 Often apartments were made available to Party members as a perk, and were ‘showpieces’ for state policy, meaning that Gypsies often accepted the new apartments willingly, even though they knew it was tied to a policy of dispersal. As the Gypsy activist Manush Romanov observed, ‘when you live in bad conditions, you want to move’.48 Overall the policy of supported ‘resettlement’ had a significant impact, in good part due to the fact that money was made available via loans and from central funds. In total around ‘20,000 families . . . received plots of land and low-interest loans to build their own houses and numerous settlements [were] created on collective farms’.49

  Unlike the housing schemes, which were based on a premise of dispersal, from 1964 the state aimed to tackle the low standards of formal education and literacy amongst Gypsies through the creation of a network of designated Roma schools. These special, often boarding, schools – of which there were 145 at their height – targeted pupils from ‘the poorest families’ or areas in which there was deemed to be a ‘bad social atmosphere’. By the early 1970s there were approximately 10,000 Gypsy children in these schools, with a majority in mainstream Bulgarian institutions. And yet, by 1978 an investigation concluded that ‘only 30% of Gypsy children completed primary school, while the number who finished secondary school was negligible’, contributing to more than half of Roma aged over 30 being illiterate.50

  Other socialist nations were even most explicit in their intentions to deconstruct Roma culture. Along with Poland, Czechoslovakia had a rigorous policy of dispersal and settlement. In 1965 a decree was issued aimed at the destruction of Roma quarters, mainly those of eastern Slovakia where the majority of Roma still lived. Gypsy villages were emptied and their populations dispersed to Slovak villages and towns, as well as to the industrial Czech regions. Soon after this a sterilization decree was passed in 1972, authorizing the ‘voluntary’ sterilization of women who had given birth to more than four ‘mentally retarded’ children. While neither technically coercive nor directed specifically at the Roma population – and therefore distinct from Nazi sterilization policies – it was backed up by heavy persuasion from officials, as well as a significant financial incentive, and more than half of those sterilized in the 1970s were Roma women. Rather than this being a particular feature of totalitarianism, however, we need to remember that it was very similar to contemporary practices across Scandinavian countries and Switzerland. Consequently we can see it as more in line with eugenicist and ‘national efficiency’ ideas of social engineering that had a pedigree stretching back to the late nineteenth century. And yet, as with many theoretically mainstream policies, its impact on Roma was disproportionate and discriminatory in practice. Roma remained some of the poorest in society, and therefore most likely to be affected by the financial benefits, while ongoing poor educational attainment of Roma children rendered them disproportionately liable to be labelled as ‘retarded’. Romania took a less draconian route to trying to reduce the number of children in Roma families, only giving allowances to families with fewer than five children.51

  While superficially the measures taken by socialist governments were far more coercive than those in the West, in fact the late 1960s and early ’70s also saw the emergence of particular policies directed at Gypsies in western Europe, as governments accepted that straightforward assimilation or strategies based around ignoring the mounting problems faced by Gypsy Travellers were not working. In France the ongoing tension between localities wanting to remove nomades from their jurisdiction, and more general principles of equality were revealed in increasing pressure over stopping places in the 1960s. In a particularly high-profile case the prefect of the wealthy Alpes-Maritimes département prohibited stopping in more than 79 of it municipalities. However, this was overturned by the Council of State, which found ‘that such a permanent and absolute ban on stopping on all or part of the territory of a department infringed upon individuals’ liberties’.

  Its decision was to have far-reaching impacts, leading to minister for the interior calls for respect for people stopping (1966) and for local government to build sites for both short- and long-term stopping (1968). The aim was to create new sites in order to preserve public peace by limiting where Gypsies could stop and ensuring that they could ‘become accustomed to remaining several months in the same place and also to carrying out regular work’.52 The following year saw the anthropometric booklet finally being abandoned and replaced by the ‘law relating to the exercise of ambulant activities and to the regime applicable to people circulating in France without a fixed abode or residence’. This aimed to enable ‘the progressive integration [of nomads] into the national political life’ through enshrining a ‘right to itinerance’, which was no longer seen as ‘errance’.53 The anthropometric booklet was replaced by three different documents: ‘circulation cards’ which were to be validated at a police station every quarter and were issued to those unable to prove their employment or income; annual ‘circulation booklets’ for those able to prove their trade but unregistered with the Repertory of Trades or the Registry of Commerce; and the ‘special booklet’ for registered traders which only needed renewing every five years.

  Meanwhile Britain, where the government finally accepted that the status quo was unsustainable, passed the Caravan Sites Act of 1968. This was similar in both intention and outcome to the French legislation. The act required local authorities to provide official sites for ‘Gypsies residing in or resorting to’ their area, but once provided, councils were granted stronger powers to evict those resorting to unauthorized sites in their district. Not only did the law fail to set a date by which sites needed to be constructed, but it also failed to resolve a fundamental difference in attitude over the function of sites. Local authorities had grudgingly accepted th
em on the understanding that they were a step towards long-term settlement and assimilation, while site users welcomed them as a means of enabling them to continue their traditional patterns of life in an increasingly circumscribed world.54

  While both the British and French responses to the existence of Gypsies, and particularly travelling families, appeared to be different to those under Communism in that they apparently supported rather than undermined nomadism, in fact the motivations were remarkably similar. Whether an apparently liberal democracy or a socialist state, the emphasis was on trying to ‘normalize’ the relationship between Gypsies and wider society by expecting Gypsies to change and conform, often deploying prejudicial attitudes in the process. In part the French law of 1969 confirmed ongoing state insistence to treat Gypsies on the basis of behaviour rather than ethnicity. The nomades or ‘person of nomadic origin’ of the 1950s and ’60s became after 1969 someone sans domicile fixe (SDF – ‘no fixed abode’), and over the 1970s were gradually replaced by gens du voyage (travelling people).55 The title may have changed, but behind official insistences that difference was no deeper than lifestyle there were lingering traces of racialized attitudes. The new circulation documents still kept space for a photo, height and ‘particular signs’, and regulations set out that Gypsies were not to comprise more than 3 per cent of any particular commune due to supposed fears of electoral manipulation.

  Prejudice was expressed in other ways too. The law created the concept of a ‘commune of attachment’ to which nomades were obliged to return to fulfil administrative tasks (which are not few under the French statist model), but rather than the standard six months’ residency qualification, Gypsies needed to be attached to a municipality for three years in order to be able to vote. Here we see the reality behind French state assertions of equality: the provision of sites and a loosening of the yoke of the anthropometric notebook went hand in hand with significant reservations about, and specific powers over, Gypsies. As Interior Minister Fouchet argued during the presentation of the legislation to the National Assembly, ‘the means available to the police and the gendarmerie allow us to take this liberal measure without risk to public order’. It was the expansion of the technologies of state control, rather than a shift in attitudes towards Gypsies, which ensured the new measures were passed. They remained the only French citizens whose liberty to come and go was conditional and conditioned.56

  It is important here to pause and pay attention to how this period saw the emergence of a more publically audible Gypsy voice. The 1960s saw the beginning of a rising tide of what might be thought of as ‘Gypsy Power’ movements, as across Europe Roma, Gypsies and Travellers began to organize politically. This was not completely unprecedented: the Roma workers of Sliven, for example, had long been politically active and organized, although more often as part of national and international labour movements than as ‘Gypsies’;57 and in the early 1900s Bulgarian Roma came together to protest about their loss in relation to the removal of the Muslim male franchise. While they were unsuccessful, it created the seeds of a Roma movement, which, aided by increased literacy levels, led to the emergence of civic organizations in the inter-war period. These years also saw political movements inspired by Zionism, with the Polish Roma leaders Michal and Janusz Kwiek arguing for the creation of a Gypsy state – Romanestan – in the newly conquered Italian Abyssinia.58 Any progress made in Continental Europe, however, had of course been profoundly disrupted by the destruction of Roma and Sinti communities during the Second World War.

  Initially then, the germs of political activity in the post-war period across Europe came from non-Gypsies. In Britain, the MP Norman Dodds, whose constituency contained the long-established Belvedere Marshes site, initially led the way in arguing for the provision of officially sanctioned sites, and in fact established one of the first licensed sites of the post-war period. In France, Father Fleury, who had visited the Poitiers internment camp in 1942 and become concerned about the social position of Gypsies, worked with Pierre Join-Lambert to form the ‘Inter-Ministerial Commission for the Study of the Question relating to Peoples of Nomadic Origin’ in 1948. It aimed ‘to assure the quality of life of the Gypsies’ through improvements in accommodation, education, health and work, as well as ending ‘the opposition between two civilizations – the nomadic and the sedentary’. As with Norman Dodds’s work, the Commission was reformist rather than radical, aiming to help nomades ‘adapt to the real world’, with its assumption that Gypsy lifestyles were inherently opposed to modernity seeming to reinforce the idea that assimilation was the only answer to the ‘Gypsy problem’.59 Yet from its work came a realization of the lack of basic knowledge about Gypsy society, culture and experiences, which in turn prompted the founding of the journal Études Tsiganes in 1955. This rapidly developed an analysis that lobbied for a new approach to Gypsies, in which they were treated as a specific minority with particular needs who might be included within the idea of a larger, national community.

  Yet, very quickly, Roma and Gypsies began organizing themselves. During this period, led by Ionel Rotaru, a French-Romanian Rom, the Communauté Mondiale Gitane (World Gypsy Community) was established, which published a magazine, The World Voice of the Gypsies, and reawakened the idea of Romanestan as well as calling for war reparations from Germany. Although it was banned by the French government in 1965, its influence was felt as far away as Bulgaria, where it inspired more clandestine political activity:

  In 1963, we learned from the Serbian Gypsies in Yugoslavia that there was a world Gypsy organization with its office in Paris . . . We were classmates. We chose people we could rely upon because we were afraid of spies. We gathered at various homes. We met every Sunday at 10 a.m. We met until 1968. We discussed such themes as is there a Gypsy alphabet or not. Through the barges that came from Yugoslavia, we collected information and magazines.60

  This form of clandestine organization needs to be seen as separate from the formation of Roma organizations in Yugoslavia, where they were primarily state sponsored. There, in 1969, as a result of the actions of Slobodan Berberski, a Roma with a long and impeccable pedigree as a resistance fighter, communist functionary and member of the Central Committee of the Union of Yugoslav Communists, a Roma Association was formed. A decade later there were more than 60 branches and affiliated Roma organizations that sponsored cultural events, Romani-language television and radio broadcasts.61 Outside of Yugoslavia, however, socialist governments worked against allowing the expression of separate identity politics, unless it worked within the carefully controlled sphere of party-sponsored organizations, either within or between nations.

  We see a more direct form of international cross-fertilization in the formation of the Gypsy Council in Britain in 1966. The active and growing resistance by Gypsy Travellers and people from wider society to a number of high-profile evictions was in no small part encouraged and organized by the activist Gratton Puxon who had experienced resisting evictions alongside Travellers in Ireland. Coming out of this groundswell of resistance, in December 1966, the Gypsy Council held its first meeting: in a Kentish pub displaying a ‘No Gypsies’ sign. The council’s manifesto was a combination of practical requests and demands for an end to prejudicial treatment. It asked for sites in every county, ‘equal rights to education, work and houses’ and ‘equal standing through respect between ourselves and our settled neighbours’.

  In its early days non-violent direct action was used repeatedly throughout England at this time to prevent evictions: in Kent, Essex, London, Leeds, Oxford, Birmingham and Bridgewater. In addition, by 1968, more than 300 complaints had been made under the new Race Relations Acts against pubs barring Gypsies and Travellers.62

  British activism was able to draw strength from, and feed into the growing contemporary international Roma movement through Britain’s hosting of the first World Romani Congress in 1971, which showed Gypsies and Travellers not as ‘a small minority, as many think, but a proud people 12 MILLION strong, scatter
ed in every country’.63 By this point the idea of Romanestan had shifted to reflect this, and for many Romanestan now meant, as the Canadian Gypsy activist and writer Ronald Lee put it, ‘where my two feet stand’. Lee, as with others, was influenced not only by post-colonial thinkers such as Frantz Fanon, but by the Black Power movements which stressed the importance of pride in their separate identity as well as the importance of radical action to generate change: ‘To raise the standard of Rom nationalism is like suddenly shouting a secret in a crowded room.’64 The Romani congress, which received delegates from fourteen countries, was key in making explicit the need for international unity in both the fight against social marginalization and in striving for a positive future. In a reflection of the breadth of issues it aimed to tackle, commissions were established to consider war crimes, social and educational conditions, as well as the language and culture of the Roma. The leading role of Yugoslavian Roma in this, and the two subsequent international congresses, was something of a vindication of the benefits of communist state-sponsored support for minority populations. While still experiencing the internal divisions common across the international Roma movements, it was undoubtedly the case that Yugoslavian Roma were better placed than others to articulate their agenda and to take the lead within the International Romani Union up until 1990.

  Coming from a different context, within Germany, the role of the state also became important in moulding the shape of its Roma and Sinti civil rights movement. Here, activism was both charged with and motivated by the history of the Holocaust, and as with the demands of the student activist movements of 1968, activists demanded both the German state and individuals to face up to the crimes of the Nazi era. Stimulated by the First World Romani Conference, activists such as Romani Rose and Rudko Kawczynski, who did not carry the silencing shame of their parents’ generation, began to organize. The commitment of the German state to make reparations to the victims of Nazism meant that although Roma and Sinti were originally excluded from its terms, a political context existed in which the argument over claims and entitlement might be made. Central to their political agenda was an insistence that they be granted recognition for their special ethnic status and recognition that they were a German minority. Initially organization was through the Society for Endangered Peoples, which became instrumental in challenging the use of the word Zigeuner, demanding that it be replaced by Sinti and Roma. It also argued strongly that they should be treated as an ethnic group with particular needs rather on the basis of a presumed deviant lifestyle.65