For Roma, discrimination, abuse are normal

The story of Leonarda Dibrani’s expulsion from France took a surprising turn. Hundreds of French students and supporters flooded Paris streets to demand that she be allowed to return in what many saw as a turning point in deeply negative views Europeans hold of their centuries-old neighbors.

But such hope disappeared within days when news outlets reported that a Greek Roma family might have abducted a blond girl whom police found when they searched a Roma settlement north of Athens as part of a drugs and weapons investigation.

A Greek children’s charity official quickly noted: “This case has reinforced our suspicions of Roma involvement in child trafficking. … Blond, blue-eyed children are clearly being targeted.”

It was a stereotype that stretches back centuries. The Spanish author Cervantes made child theft the theme of his 1613 story “The Little Gypsy Girl.”

Rome-based human rights attorney Claudia Tavani said the recent European economic crisis has increased discrimination. When times are tough, people want scapegoats, and the Roma, who are thought to have originated in northern India but have lived in Europe since the 1300s, are an easy target.

In Slovakia, city governments build walls around Gypsy camps. In the Czech Republic, neo-Nazis lead protests against their presence. Famously tolerant Norway banned outdoor camping in Oslo to keep homeless Roma away.

In Romania, a right-wing political party recently offered cash to any Roma woman who would get sterilized. In France, Gilles Bourdouleix, a 53-year-old member of Parliament, this summer said of the Roma: “Maybe Hitler didn’t kill enough of them.”

Hitler’s Germany killed between 250,000 and 500,000 Roma (and Sinti, another branch of the people known as Gypsies).

Standing next to the year-old memorial to those killed by the Nazis, Romani Rose, chairman of the Central Council of Sinti and Roma in Germany, said the hatred remains widespread. It has been only 25 years since the official German dictionary definition of the term for all Roma and Sinti was “wandering criminals.”

“Even after the Holocaust, our minority still encounters racism and discrimination,” he said, noting that they are Europe’s last hired, first fired. He said poor villagers come to Berlin and find only overcrowded apartments where unscrupulous landlords overcharge them for a mattress on the floor. “Such overpopulation leads to conflicts with the neighbors, and old prejudices come up again,” he said.

A far-right political party recently capitalized on those prejudices with the slogan “Geld fur die Oma, nicht fur Sinti und Roma,” or “Money for grandmas, not Gypsies.”

Cordula Simon, the commissioner for Europe and International Affairs in the Berlin district of Neukoelln, is consumed with helping Roma immigrants. She recently wrote a paper on how her neighborhood is coping, and she believes it might be a blueprint for Europe.

“The Roma people, they live in mythology,” she said. “Europeans see them as either happy dancers and fiddlers or as dangerous criminals. The reality is that they are just people, and in dealing with Roma immigrants there are many positive stories to tell.”

The model is simple: Help immigrants when they arrive, help their children get into school, help the adults find shelter and jobs. Don’t create Roma ghettos.

In a nation facing a demographic emergency, with too many aging adults who will soon need pensions and too few children to become workers and keep that pension system alive, the Roma should be seen as part of the solution, she said.

Among the most positive aspects of Roma immigration, she said, is education. Teachers in her district tell her that after years of losing faith in the system they are re-energized. Young Roma children from desperately poor rural areas of Romania and Bulgaria arrive in Berlin woefully behind. Many have never been to school.

“But their energy level, their hunger to learn, is enormous,” she said. “Teachers again and again are telling me they believe in education again.”

Mitek, 37, is a Roma immigrant from Bulgaria. He lost a job and found no prospects at home, so he left his wife and children behind and came to Berlin. He’s too embarrassed by his circumstances to let his last name be published.

When Mitek isn’t sweeping clean the patch of abandoned factory in central Berlin that he’s called home for six months, he’s either out scavenging plastic bottles for refunds or sitting and thinking about the good life that will come. And he still believes, though his “home” is a scrap-wood hut inside an abandoned factory that he must defend every night from hipsters who see the ruin as a place for wild parties and graffiti.

“My hope is still to find a job, and to bring my wife and children to live with me,” he said. “It hasn’t happened yet. But I have hope. My life will be better soon.”