Gypsies put EU to the test

THIS MONTH the European Union swells by another 28 million people. With the inclusion of Romania and Bulgaria into the European fold, there's cause for celebration in the streets of Bucharest and the courtyards of Sofia. For two of Europe's poorer countries, inclusion in the ranks of the Western power structure brings innumerable benefits, not least roads, recognition, grants, travel access, but also a sundering of the Soviet past.

Yet for others -- in Paris, Dublin, Brussels, and perhaps even in Bucharest and Sofia themselves -- it spells the inclusion of 3 million potential problems: more Gypsies.

In a week that also heralds 2007 as "The European Year of Equal Opportunities for All," the word "Gypsy" still holds freight, even amongst those to whom it applies: the Roma.

Newspaper editors are stumped by how they should address the largest minority on the European continent. Town mayors all over the former Soviet satellites talk of "whitening out" their inner cities. Skinheads are happy to call for flame-throwers in rock songs on the radio.

If a society recognizes itself, and ultimately critiques itself, on how it treats its most downtrodden, then surely the most significant acid test for the Union is its ongoing treatment of the Roma. They can be found living in the housing projects of Paris; the toxic dumps of Kosovo; the ruined outskirts of villages in eastern Slovakia; the gray flatlands of Dublin. Each place has its own -- sometimes tiny -- community, but collectively these groups form a 10-million-strong mosaic of poverty and exclusion.

There are, of course, Romani doctors, ethnographers, poets, and scholars who have called for a new era of consciousness. They point to Romani contributions to the arts, politics, and music by figures of Gypsy descent as diverse as Picasso, Django Reinhardt, Bob Hoskins, Charlie Chaplin, the Polish poet Papusza, Carmen Amaya, and even Bill Clinton. But for the large part, theirs is an echo chamber that doesn't pierce the old clichés of lying, cheating, stealing, breaking curfew with violin.

"The persistent, relentless portrayal of Roma as rootless, lawless, immoral, childlike thieves . . . will ensure that anti-Gypsy prejudice will remain firmly a part of Euro-American attitudes," says Ian Hancock, a Romani scholar from the University of Texas.

In Bratislava one afternoon -- while researching the situation of the Roma in Slovakia -- a young intellectual engaged me in a debate on American civil rights. He knew of the Weathermen, Martin Luther King, Stokely Carmichael. He was an eloquent defender of the marginalized, but when I asked him about contemporary issues of sterilization, school discrimination, and burnings of Romani houses in his own country, he said without rancor: "Of course, yes, but they're just Gypsies."

Malice is sometimes another name for silence.

The young girl paddling through the polluted streambed in Kosovo isn't likely to have heard of the "Year of Equal Opportunities." The boy huffing glue in the broken elevator of the Saint-Denis project will probably not be aware that the decade from 2005 to 2015 is supposed to be "The Decade of Roma Inclusion."

It is important, of course, not to turn any culture into a list of sorrows and benedictions. Even the Roma themselves have a deep ambivalence about their own identity. While they are as internally diverse as any other group, it's the roving gangs, the scams, the illiteracy, the violence -- and the silence -- that often get the headlines.

Scholars like Ian Hancock have called on governments, poets, journalists, activists, and the general public to remember that the Roma, like African-Americans, were enslaved in Central Europe only 150 years ago. The Holocaust sent Gypsy ash up the chimneys. This, and other bedrock history, is the story that must unfold into a larger understanding if the 3 million Roma from Bulgaria and Romania are not to be considered "just Gypsies."

"The struggle of man against power is the struggle of memory against forgetting," says Milan Kundera.

The moral direction of the European initiatives is decent and right. Why not be in the habit of hoping for a better world?

Yet so much about Romani history is still wrapped up in a willful forgetfulness. It is not that Europe or America doesn't care -- dozens of conferences and non-governmental agencies confront "The Roma Question" in capital cities each year, and 2007 promises to be a bonus year -- but the prevailing attitude still echoes the old Slovakian joke: "What is small, dark, filthy, and knocking on the door?"

The answer is not just the future, but the past as well.

Source: boston.com