Another Darkness, Another Dawn Read online

  Having spent four decades needing to accommodate the regulations imposed by socialism and adapting to an economy of shortages, as well as becoming used to state-subsidized housing, education and benefits, the shift to a market economy was socially traumatic. While affecting all of society, these changes inevitably hit the more vulnerable the hardest. There was a disproportionate impact on ethnic minorities, who had sometimes benefited from targeted programmes, which in the new climate were often entirely withdrawn, reinforcing marginalization and exclusion. The loss of the wider social benefits which had been tied to waged work was compounded by long-term unemployment. Rural Roma, such as those in Bulgaria who had benefited from the collectivization policies of the 1950s, were now dispossessed under land restitution programmes. Dispossession not only removed access to land but entitlement to pensions and other social benefits, leading to rapid impoverishment and mass out-migration.88

  Those in urban areas also suffered, with widespread anecdotal evidence suggesting they faced renewed discrimination in the workplace, that they were denied promotions due to their identity or that they were the first to lose their jobs in factories forced to make cutbacks.89 By 1995, against a national average of 20 per cent, among Bulgarian Roma of working age over three-quarters were unemployed.90 It was a similar story across the region – unemployment levels habitually hovered around 80 per cent for most of the 1990s and into the 2000s. Although the role some Roma had played in the informal economy under socialism had meant that they were well placed to benefit from the freeing of economic controls, overall a lack of education, social marginalization, high levels of engrained prejudice and massively reduced state support meant that the already low standards of living of the majority of Roma in the region fell to levels social investigators routinely found shocking:

  During winter and early spring, more than half of those living in town relied mainly on the possibility of using discarded fruit and vegetables . . . rotten, disintegrating and nitrate-blackened vegetables smell bad, look bad, and are bad for the health. In spring, they survive on the fresh spring growth of weeds; the women and children pick nettles, docks and sorrel, and this becomes their staple food for 2–3 months. Things are easier in the summer and autumn; they ‘privatize’ some of the agricultural produce of the neighbouring population, sometimes so successfully that they can sell some of it on the market . . . While carrying out research . . . we were appalled by the appearance of the people in the village. The women and children, as well as a large number of the men were disfigured by facial eczema. It turned out that a quantity of discarded pork and mince had been found on a rubbish dump near Sliven three days before our arrival . . . there was hardly a house where someone had not had food poisoning. In Stara Zagora we were told of a family with seven children who had all died after eating a dead sheep, also found on a rubbish dump.91

  Responding to the difficult economic conditions, for many Roma what often emerged was a patchwork of livelihoods, part of the ‘economy of makeshifts’ which was to become a major feature of so many people’s lives. So some families migrated to the towns, where the men had a better chance of finding temporary work, others to the mountains, where ‘entire families gather[ed] mushrooms, herbs, wild fruit and snails’. A sense of this mix of strategies was given by Roma from the Kŭrdzhali region of south-central Bulgaria:

  We’ve been doing odd jobs for the Bulgarians since we got laid off from the factories five years ago. We beat their carpets, split their logs, render their stonework, and beg from the Turks. The Turks give a lot. The Bulgarians are more stingy.

  Fathers have often had to leave the home together with the boys to find casual work in some bigger town. We met many such ‘lone’ men, accompanied by two or three boys up to 16 years old . . . If the father succeeds in being hired for some job, his sons help him and acquire various skills in this way. If the father stays on the square hoping to be taken on for some employment, the boys wander around sizing up the neighbourhood, at the same time collecting scrap iron and waste paper, empty bottles, discarded clothes and food . . . The girls always stay with the mother. They look after their younger brothers and sisters and the old and the sick, while maintaining order and cleanliness in the home. They are given permanent duties as from 5–6 years old: laundry, cleaning, cooking, baby-sitting etc.92

  Many turned to the informal sector for the first time, while others, who had already been active in the black market under socialism, extended their activities. Although they were widely depicted in Bulgarian society as the archetypical black-marketeer, and a law of 1991 targeting the illegal economy was seen as being directed solely at Gypsies, in fact black-market activities were common right across the social spectrum. Similarly, the drastic impoverishment and marginalization of a growing proportion of the population combined with an under-funded and ineffectual police force, led to a sharp increase in crime across the region. This was popularly understood to be concentrated among the Roma: the government adviser on ethnic policies in the early 1990s declared that over a quarter of crimes could be ‘traced to the Roma’.93 In-depth research did reveal the extent to that Roma families depended on theft, begging, prostitution and other forms of illegitimate activity for basic survival.94 However, biased reports in the media rarely contextualized their activities within their extreme poverty, limited employment prospects and extreme social marginalization.

  Added into this mix of difficulties was the resentment felt by those in mainstream society, who perceived that under socialism Roma had received disproportionate resources from the state: socialist propaganda had often emphasized the new programmes targeting Roma, without reflecting their partial nature or limited impact. When this became combined with the upsurgence in nationalist politics, particularly in the Balkans, but also the Czech and Slovakian republics and Hungary, it very quickly became translated into anti-Roma prejudice, harassment and violence. In 1992 a group of twelve Bulgarians in Plovdiv staged a hunger strike in protest against being housed amongst Gypsies, but often the hatred was expressed through more violent means. Reports of Gypsy quarters of towns being burnt or attacked by right-wing groups, shootings and stabbings of individuals and of police raids, harassment and brutality became a depressingly familiar feature of life after 1989, as this catalogue of incidents from the Czech Republic suggests:

  Two Romanies were killed in 1993 in the space of one week in September. Also in 1993 Tibor Danihel was drowned, fleeing from a skinhead gang. In 1994 skinheads attacked Gypsies in Breclav and on a train . . . Tibor Berki was killed in May 1995 . . . Roman Zigi was killed in the same year . . . In 1995 altogether more than eighty attacks by skinheads and right-wing groups on Romanies were reported . . .95

  While there was a particular concentration of anti-Roma violence in the first years of transition, when economic changes, mass unemployment and uncertainty across the region was rife, it by no means disappeared with the gradual bedding down of new political and economic systems. Hungary, for example, which sentenced relatively little anti-Roma activity in the 1990s, experienced a sweep of violence in 2008–9 in which fire bombs and handguns were used in attacks across the country, leading to the deaths of six Roma, and the injury of many more. One of the most notorious events occurred on 23 February 2009 when a 27-year-old man and his five-year-old son were shot dead as they ran out of their burning home in the village of Tatárszentgyörgy. The man’s wife and their two other children suffered from severe burns.96

  The fall-out of anti-Roma feeling was not limited to ex-socialist countries as the combination of the lifting of travel restrictions, a search for better economic conditions and freedom from racial persecution led to large numbers of Roma moving abroad. Despite the noise made by the British tabloid press over the large number ‘flooding’ the United Kingdom, in actual fact, figures suggest that Germany and Italy attracted some of the largest numbers. While difficult to gain exact figures, 2004 estimates for the Sinti and Roma population of Germany stood at approximately 70,000, with an a
dditional 100,000 Roma carrying foreign citizenship. They were concentrated in the main cities, particularly Berlin and the conurbations around Hamburg, the Rhine–Ruhr region, the Rhine-Main and Rhine–Neckar areas.97 As in the post-1945 years, their movement was part of a far bigger migration from Eastern Bloc countries to the West, which included the resettlement of ethnic Germans from former communist states.

  Their arrival in western Europe revealed the often very partial nature of wider society’s acceptance of the presence of Roma and Sinti. Although politically the German state had moved towards full recognition of their persecution under Nazism, this did not translate into more open attitudes towards them.98 Very quickly virulent anti-Gypsy prejudice became tied up with intensifying debates over both immigration and integration. Owing to its high living standards and relatively liberal refugee laws, Germany saw an increase in immigration and asylum claims from Asia and Africa, at the same time as it was experiencing the socio-economic traumas of reunification. Between January and September 1991 about 91,000 Romanian citizens entered Germany, with Roma activist Nicholae Gheorghe estimating that 81 per cent of them were Roma, and the following year 33,600 Romanian Roma arrived in Germany. By late 1991 the beginning of the conflict in former Yugoslavia had ensured that a steady stream of Roma immigrants entered Germany as asylum seekers.

  Often depicted as acting in flagrant defiance of German bourgeois values of stability, order and cleanliness, no other immigrant group attracted the same level of negative attention as the Roma. They were routinely accused of aggressively begging in the street, mugging those who refused to part with their money voluntarily, with Rostock locals, for example, complaining how they ‘left rubbish in the streets, stole from shops and threatened shopkeepers’. More generally they were seen as ‘poisoning the atmosphere through their misbehaviour’. In common with the actions of far-right groups across Europe, this general atmosphere was used to justify assaults on individuals, attacks on property, arson and harassment: Rostock saw the torching of a building housing Roma asylum seekers in August 1992, an act that received vocal local support.99 Such ‘potent manifestations of racism’, which included an increase in support for extreme right-wing parties and ‘an enormous upsurge’ in the number of racial attacks – from 270 to 1,483 attacks and three deaths in six months in 1991 alone – were not exclusive to Germany.100

  In Britain, the influx of particularly Bosnian Roma in the early 1990s, while creating a predictable furore in the tabloid media, remained overshadowed by the worsening situation of the British Gypsy Traveller population. Numbers on the road had been swelled by the emergence of growing numbers of ‘New Travellers’, whose roots lay in the 1960s free-festival movement, but whose numbers increased in the 1980s due to high unemployment and homelessness. By the early 1990s ‘New Traveller’ culture crossed over with the growing free party scene, adding to public panic about anarchic hordes of ‘nomads’. Pressurized by hysterical media reports the government saw a crackdown on travelling as a popular means of reinforcing its position as ‘the party of law and order’. Its subsequent 1994 Criminal Justice Act targeted a range of ‘unacceptable’ activities and lifestyles, and hit the Gypsy Traveller community in fundamental ways: travelling or stopping in groups of more than six vehicles became a criminal offence and crucially the act removed the obligation of local authorities to provide public sites. In its place was the requirement for Gypsies and Travellers to take responsibility for buying and developing their own land, with government asserting that the planning system was ‘perfectly capable’ of facilitating adequate site provision.101

  Developments in human rights legislation, the rise of local health and education initiatives sympathetic to Gypsy Traveller culture, and a new wave of research-based political lobbying led by the Traveller Law Research Unit, demonstrated that it was possible for settled society to open up new approaches to Gypsy Travellers. And yet overall these positive developments were outweighed by the post-1994 planning and enforcement regime that proved a disaster for Gypsies and Travellers. Local authorities, many of whom had already proved reluctant to give permission for council-run sites under the act of 1968, were now expected to decide individual planning applications in the face of intense community hostility. On average 90 per cent of Gypsy Traveller applications were rejected and a rapidly growing number faced eviction from their own land for breach of planning regulations, so by 2006 there were around 1,200 such sites subject to council enforcement action.102 High-profile evictions of Gypsy Travellers from their own land which had not been granted planning permission, such as that of 80 families from Dale Farm in Essex in the autumn of 2011, were the inevitable outcome of leaving site provision in the hands of local authorities driven more by a concern to pacify other residents than to provide stable accommodation options for some of Britain’s most marginalized citizens.

  The worsening situation across Europe was not passively accepted by Roma, and indeed the hostility faced by them either within their own nations or as migrants spawned a new wave of Roma activists. Within Germany, for example, coming as they did from a refugee perspective, activists often found their natural constituency within a pan-European Romani nationalism that transcended traditional boundaries of clan structure and country of origin. Fighting to legitimize the presence of Roma in western Europe post-1989, they often worked as much with international organizations – Roma, human rights and governmental – as within the structures of the German state. From here there emerged a radical challenge to liberal state policy questioning the automatic coupling of nationhood, citizenship and ethnicity.103

  Outside the world of activism and within the new parliamentary systems of ex-socialist states, Roma across the region mobilized to form political groupings: the last Czechoslovak elections, held in 1990, saw the Roma Civic Initiative gain two seats in the federal parliament; while in Bulgaria the Democratic Union of Gypsies by May 1990 claimed a membership of 50,000. It was headed by the prominent Roma activist Manush Romanov who won a seat in Parliament the same year, as did a number of Muslim Roma as representatives of the Turkish Party for Rights and Freedom. However, as was the story across Europe, attempts to create a single political voice for Roma rapidly disintegrated; by early 1992 there were three separate Roma political organizations and five more focused on cultural matters. Divisions between Muslim and Christian Roma, and cultural and linguistic differences, continued to ensure that the country’s Gypsies had no one representative voice.104

  Where there was more success, however, was in grass-roots organizations and other NGOs, working as often with national government as in Gypsy quarters, aimed at improving the position of Roma on the ground. This was supported by a new pan-European language of human rights alongside a theoretical respect for minority differences. While often rhetoric rather than reality, human and minority rights legislation within the European Union provided a framework in which activists and NGOs could make claims on national states. It was, for example, through an appeal to the European Court of Human Rights that British Gypsy Travellers on council-run sites were finally granted the same rights as other council tenants. Supported by research and the Council of Europe’s Recommendation on Gypsies in Europe of 1993, official recognition was granted to the existence and special position of the large settled Gypsy populations across the Continent, as well as nomadic groups. Recommendations ranging from the teaching of cultural activities, promotion of the Romani language, to particular housing and educational programmes and measures to encourage the participation of Roma and Gypsies in these processes were backed up by EU, or sometimes American, money.105 While the translation of EU-wide initiatives and money to the local level was not unproblematic, for communities able and willing to act within funding frameworks, they opened up the possibility for material and social improvements.106 Similarly across ex-socialist states these developments spawned a range of initiatives from trying to challenge the under-representation of Roma in the police, to providing funds for small enterprises run by o
r employing Roma, to initiatives reducing school drop-out rates and fostering a new generation of Roma leaders. Education projects that combined placing Roma children in mainstream schooling with providing free school meals and textbooks and extra language tuition gradually began to bear fruit, a process which was aided by the emergence of a new generation of Roma teachers.107 Often piecemeal, underfunded and localized, nevertheless these programmes demonstrated that majority society, as much as the Roma themselves, needed to take responsibility for the long-standing marginalization and discrimination faced by Roma.

  These years also saw the explosion of a new cultural phenomenon amongst Roma, Gypsy and Traveller communities: an assertive Pentecostalism. First emerging in France in the immediate post-war period, and tied to the annual pilgrimage to ‘Saint Sara’ at Saintes-Maries-de-la-Mer in the south of France, the movement was centred around the Mission Évangelique Tzigane (mét) under its founder, Pastor Clément le Cossec in 1958. By 1985 it claimed 30,000 baptized and 60,000 faithful from all different groups of Gypsies, Gitans, Roma and Manouches.108 After 1989 the movement spread rapidly among the Roma of former socialist countries, leading to the emergence of a new ‘Gypsy evangelical’ culture. Unlike nineteenth-century mission movements that positioned Gypsy identity in opposition to Christianity, and where the consequence of conversion was leaving Gypsy culture behind, this movement combined the two. Le Cossec repeatedly emphasized the significance of ‘being Gypsy’ within the Church. In practical terms this meant promoting Romani translations of the Bible and pushing education and literacy, as well as being involved in anti-racist action alongside Gypsies, and providing the organizational tools to arrange festivals and mass summer conventions.109 From Irish Travellers in Galway to the Roma of Macedonia and Greece, the movement prompted the creation of new social spaces and ways of interacting, so that religious seminars and larger conferences of the congregation took the place of fairs and other annual gatherings in people’s social calendars, suggesting that new ways of ‘being Roma’ were beginning to evolve.110