The Roma Cafe

Human Rights and the Plight of the Romani People

Istvan Pogany

• Publisher: Pluto Press
• Year: 2004
• ISBN:
  9781783715657
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: Human Rights
• Index: Politics & International Relations

The plight of Eastern Europe's Roma is one of the greatest challenges facing the continent. Largely hidden, this book offers an eye-opening, poignant and intriguing analysis of the diverse problems facing Central and Eastern Europe's gypsy populations, including the largely unacknowledged legacy of the Roma Holocaust. Engaging with a broad range of issues including racism, stereotyping, and political and economic transition in ex-Communist states, Istvan Pogany challenges the most common preconceptions about the Roma. He looks at the specifics of indiviual Romani lives, particularly in Hungary and Romania. Highlighting the difficulties that all marginal peoples face, Pogany explains how the Roma have been devastated by the economic transition from Communism to open markets since 1989. Poverty, lack of education, as well as widespread anti-Roma discrimination and inadequate legal protection, have left the Roma facing intense hardship since the collapse of welfare states. However, this book is not just a catalogue of the challenges that the Roma face -- it is also a celebration of Roma cultures and of the acceptance of difference -- something that is more important than ever in our multicultural societies.

1

Introduction

THE TRANSITION FROM COMMUNISM

Since the collapse of Communist regimes in Central and Eastern Europe (CEE) the region’s 6 million Roma, or Gypsies, have rarely been out of the news.¹ There has been a disturbing pattern of unprovoked assaults on Roma, of severe beatings inflicted on Romani suspects in police stations – several of which have resulted in fatalities – and of ‘pogroms’ in which Romani-owned houses have been set on fire and their inhabitants variously beaten, lynched or chased from villages in which they were settled, sometimes for generations.²

The squalor and destitution in which a large proportion of the Roma have lived in the CEE countries, particularly since the end of state socialism, has also attracted attention.³ All too often Gypsies are to be found in overcrowded tenements in the poorer parts of towns and cities across Central and Eastern Europe. In rural areas, Gypsies frequently occupy substandard houses many of which are located, pariah-like, at the edge of villages.

Hundreds of thousands of Roma, particularly in Slovakia, Romania, Bulgaria and in parts of the former Yugoslavia, live in settlements with limited access to clean water, sanitation or basic medical care.⁴ Many of these settlements, like the one at Pata Rât on the outskirts of the city of Cluj-Napoca, in Romania, pose additional health hazards for the Gypsies living there. Known as ‘Dallas’ by its residents, who have evidently not lost their sense of humour, Pata Rât is located next to Cluj-Napoca’s sprawling rubbish dump.

Lacking running water or flushing toilets, the shacks of Pata Rât are built of thin planks of wood, scraps of tarpaulin, anything that comes to hand. Women fetch water in buckets from a couple of water taps installed a few years ago with aid from a foreign charity. Mouldering piles of rags, plastic bottles and rusting cans delineate part of the settlement’s boundary; half-wild piglets scamper amongst the refuse. Pata Rât resembles a Third World shanty town transplanted to the heart of Europe.

‘There are 386 people living at Pata Rât right now’, Géza Ötvös told me when I interviewed him in Cluj-Napoca in the cramped basement offices of Wassdas, the Roma rights NGO that he has run since it was founded in 1997. ‘Clean running water is available from two taps and there are eight communal toilets.’ The water pipes and toilets were paid for by Médecins sans Frontières.

1 Romani children at the Pata Rât settlement, Cluj-Napoca, Romania

The Gypsies of Pata Rât earn a precarious living by picking through the refuse at the nearby dump. They collect glass bottles, metal, cardboard, anything that can be sold for recycling. Until a few years ago children worked alongside their parents, combing through the mounds of stinking rubbish for items of value. Now most of the children attend an elementary school built by Wassdas in Someşeni, a nearby suburb of Cluj. ‘There are currently 56 pupils from Pata Rât attending the school, aged between eight and 15’, Géza Ötvös said, reeling off the figures from memory. In all, there are 76 children studying at the school; several of the teachers are Roma.

The severe problems experienced by millions of Roma in Central and Eastern Europe, since the ousting of Communist regimes in 1989, cannot be viewed simply as a function of the abandonment of centrally planned economies and of the switch to often exploitative forms of capitalism. Down the centuries, poverty, low levels of literacy and social marginalisation have characterised the lives of most Roma in the region. A poem entitled ‘Childhood’, published in 1937 by the Hungarian poet Antal Forgács, vividly conveys the semi-destitute conditions in which many Gypsies lived as late as the eve of World War II, and the irrational dread that they evoked amongst Gadje or non-Gypsies:⁵

Until now I haven’t mentioned the Gypsies,

Oh, how I feared them as they came round, dressed in their rags!

…

They begged and they sold all kinds of goods

Mushrooms, iron nails and huge wooden bowls;

…

They eat children, or so it was rumoured!

And if they turn their gaze on you, you’ll break a limb;

Their skin has turned brown from drinking blood, it was said!

Whenever I could I ran away from them.

…

Elderly Romani men and women whom I met in Hungary while researching this book recalled that, as children in the 1930s and 1940s, they had lived in crude dwellings consisting of a single room carved out of the bare earth with a simple roof placed on top. Entire families were squeezed into such gloomy, subterranean hovels. Rózsi, a Vlach Romani woman, recounted the following details of the dwelling in which she was born after her parents settled in the Hungarian village of Patakrét where she has lived most of her life:⁶

[My parents] moved from Elek to Patakrét. They didn’t live in a house, it was just a hovel. It was a hovel that they’d built underground. And there they had 18 children…of the 18 only four survived…There was a row of such hovels where the Gypsies lived when they settled here.

In terms of literacy, the gulf between the Roma and much of the rest of the population of Central and Eastern Europe was already apparent in the 1890s. In 1893, a detailed census of the Gypsies living in Hungary – an area that then encompassed Transylvania, Slovakia and Serbian Vojvodina, in addition to present-day Hungary – was carried out. This found that whereas over 60 per cent of all men in the territories controlled by Hungary could read and write, the equivalent figure for Romani men was 6.54 per cent.⁷ The proportion of Romani women who were literate was fractionally under 5 per cent, as against 46.5 per cent of all women in Hungary. In territories further to the east, levels of literacy amongst the Roma would have been appreciably lower.

The harsh reality of Gypsies’ lives in much of Central and Eastern Europe – as well as ideological unease at the entrepreneurial habits and/or nomadic lifestyle of some Gypsy ‘tribes’ or subgroups – prompted newly installed Communist regimes to institute programmes of forcible integration for the region’s Roma, beginning in the late 1940s. As a result, the bulk of the Roma were provided with jobs, improved housing and access to public services, including health care and education.⁸ Even so, by the 1970s, levels of Romani illiteracy remained high.⁹ A long-held scepticism amongst the Roma about Gadje notions of education, as well as Gadje teachers’ low expectations of their Romani pupils, go some way towards explaining this phenomenon.¹⁰

Since 1990, in the transition from command to market economies, Roma poverty and social exclusion have worsened dramatically, swiftly reversing the painstaking socio-economic gains experienced by many Gypsies during the socialist era.¹¹ Levels of unemployment amongst Gypsies in the CEE states have soared since 1990. In Hungary, for example, it has been estimated that 70 per cent of Romani men of working age are currently unemployed as against less than 10 per cent of the non-Romani male population.¹² The extent of Romani unemployment in other CEE states with significant Roma minorities,¹³ such as the Czech Republic, Slovakia, Bulgaria and Romania, is comparable.

Spiralling unemployment amongst the Roma – particularly at a time of economic transition when former Communist states have been shedding many of the subsidies and welfarist structures that were introduced during the socialist period – has impacted massively on Roma living conditions throughout the region.¹⁴ Unable to keep up the rent on apartments or to meet the rising cost of utilities many Roma have vacated their homes, moving to flimsy shacks in overcrowded settlements or squatting in unoccupied buildings that often lack proper sanitation, water or electricity.¹⁵

During the latter years of the socialist era most of the Gypsies now living at the Pata Rât settlement worked as labourers for agricultural co-operatives in the locality.¹⁶ As well as paying the Gypsies modest wages, co-operatives, which were established by the Communists throughout the CEE states, using land and livestock ‘voluntarily’ contributed by peasants, provided simple housing for the Gypsy labourers and their families. During the 1990s many of Romania’s agricultural co-operatives were disbanded as a result of legislation permitting the restitution of land to the peasants.¹⁷ In the process tens of thousands of Gypsies, including most of those who eventually drifted to the settlement at Pata Rât, lost their jobs, their homes and the only way of life that they knew.¹⁸

Communist policies towards the Roma varied significantly from country to country, particularly after the mid 1950s. Nevertheless, there was a general, though far from uniform, effort by Communist authorities to try to integrate the Roma, as far as possible, providing them with jobs, housing and access to public services.¹⁹ Under Communism, the bulk of the Roma in Hungary, Romania and in the former Czechoslovakia grew accustomed to working in factories, as construction workers or as labourers on the agricultural co-operatives. Over time, many Gypsies became increasingly reliant on the state as a source of ready employment and of automatic (if meagre) social provision. As a middle-aged Gábor Gypsy, whom I interviewed in Târgu-Mureş in the Transylvanian region of Romania, put it, most of the country’s Gypsies ‘didn’t have special skills. What the state put in their hands, that was their “trade”.’²⁰

Numerous studies have drawn attention to the fact that, in addition to enduring social exclusion, racist assaults, dwindling employment opportunities and a general deterioration in their standard of living, Roma in post-Communist states are frequently denied full or equal access to public services.²¹ For example Romani children in the Czech Republic have been systematically allocated to ‘special’ schools intended for the educationally subnormal without regard to their individual abilities.²² As a detailed report of the Budapest-based European Roma Rights Center notes:²³

According to reasonable estimates, Roma are at least fifteen times more likely to be placed in remedial special schools than non-Roma. A student who has completed remedial special school has greatly restricted choices in secondary education compared to a student who has completed mainstream primary school. Romani children are thereby effectively condemned from an early age to a lifetime of diminished opportunity and self-respect. In addition, the segregation of Roma in inferior schools is used as constant legitimation for discriminatory attitudes and actions by members of the majority society.

These practices in the Czech Republic are currently the subject of a complaint to the European Court of Human Rights. In Hungary, a recent study of elementary schools found that pressure from non-Romani parents had resulted in the allocation of large numbers of Gypsy pupils to ‘special classes’.²⁴ Researchers, who examined 192 Hungarian elementary schools, concluded that almost 85 per cent of the children in ‘special classes’ were of Roma extraction.²⁵ The teachers assigned to ‘special classes’ are often poorly qualified and the standard of instruction provided to the mostly Romani pupils in these classes is frequently unsatisfactory.

The worsening poverty amongst the Roma in the closing decade of the twentieth century, quite apart from institutionalised discrimination, also contributed to increased levels of educational segregation. As large numbers of Roma were forced to find cheaper housing, whether in rural areas or in poorer districts of towns and cities, the proportion of Romani children studying in elementary schools in the localities affected rose dramatically. This process was accelerated by the ‘flight’ of much of the non-Roma population from the areas subject to increased Romani settlement. For example, in twelve elementary schools located in rundown parts of Budapest the proportion of Romani children rose from 22.7 per cent in 1989 to 49.1 per cent in 1999.²⁶

Poverty and social marginalisation have also affected the degree to which many Roma are able to take advantage of state-funded medical services in the CEE region. For example, Gypsies living on settlements, such as Pata Rât, often face severe difficulties in trying to register with a family doctor, despite chronic health problems compounded by poor nutrition, unsatisfactory housing and adverse environmental factors.²⁷ A report published recently by the Open Society Institute confirms that such problems are commonplace in Romania.²⁸

In the final decade of the twentieth century, following the end of Communist rule, there was a steep increase in crime throughout the CEE states. All too often, the Roma have been blamed for much of this upsurge of criminal activity. In the popular imagination, across much of Central and Eastern Europe, the Roma are seen as work-shy and as having a ‘natural’ propensity for petty crime. Such starkly negative stereotypes, which reflect ancient prejudices, are often reinforced by the local media. Both electronic and print media in several states in the region regularly draw attention to the ethnicity of Romani defendants who have been charged with various offences, thereby encouraging widely held assumptions about the ‘innate’ criminality of the Roma.²⁹

In Western Europe and North America, the Roma of Central and Eastern Europe have come to public attention chiefly as migrants and asylum seekers. Tens of thousands of Roma from the former Yugoslavia, Slovakia, the Czech Republic, Romania, Hungary and elsewhere have sought asylum in the west since 1990.³⁰ Frequently, the western media has chosen to po...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Contents
• Acknowledgements
• Dedication
• 1 Introduction
• 2 The Hairy Thing that Bites, or why Gypsies shun Gadje
• 3 The Devouring
• 4 Maybe Tomorrow there Won’t even be Bread
• 5 The Czardas
• 6 Nomads
• 7 Anikó
• 8 The Lambada
• 9 The Roma Café
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index