RIGHTS: UN Steps up Fight to Defend Gypsy Rights

By Gustavo Capdevila Reprint | | Print |

Gustavo Capdevila

GENEVA, Aug 23 2000 (IPS) - Discrimination against gypsies persists throughout Europe, thus governments must take steps to protect this minority against racial violence and to help improve their standard of living, say two United Nations human rights forums.

The UN Sub-Commission on the Promotion and Protection of Human Rights proposed that specialist Yeung Sik Yuen expand on his preliminary report, which concludes that gypsies – also widely known as Roma – “across the whole of Europe are still generally poor, uneducated, and discriminated against in nearly every sphere of activity.”

The UN Committee on the Elimination of Racial Discrimination, meanwhile, recommended that European countries acknowledge the serious acts perpetrated against this community during the World War II, in which more than a half million of its people were killed, and that they grant reparations to descendants.

The independent experts that make up the two UN bodies declared that Roma – who number approximately 12 million people worldwide – are one of the most persecuted minorities today.

Because of the discrimination they endured following the 1999 North Atlantic Treaty Organisation (NATO) war against Yugoslavia, the vast majority left the Kosovo area. Now just 10,000 to 12,000 of the 150,000 members of these communities remain in the area.

The Albanian population, which is the majority in Kosovo, drove the expulsion of the gypsies, accusing them of collaborating with the Serb forces out of Belgrade.

The non-governmental Society for Threatened Peoples reported that 14,000 homes belonging to Roma, Ashkali or Kosovo Egyptian families had been burned in Kosovo, and 74 of the 314 villages where these communities lived had been completely destroyed.

The international forces under UN command in Kosovo observed for months, doing nothing while abuses occurred and, in fact, encouraged the massive expulsions by escorting the victims of this ethnic cleansing to the border, denounced the Society.

In Greece, where preparations are underway for hosting the Athens Olympic Games in 2004, Roma were forced from the land they had settled as authorities claimed they needed the area to build sports facilities, reports the human rights group Greek Helsinki Monitor.

“Would the international community, including the International Olympic Committee, tolerate a cleansed, Roma-free, greater Athens as the host of those games?” asks the rights organisation.

Discussion of the Roma situation within the two UN human rights bodies, which are holding their yearly sessions this month, comes at a time when interest in the issue is on the rise, especially in Europe.

The greatest concentrations of gypsies are found in central and eastern Europe, countries that are candidates for entry into the European Union sometime in the next few years.

The presence of this minority, estimated at eight to 10 million people in the region, and their efforts to maintain cultural identity have sparked hostile reactions from sectors of the majority population in Europe.

The likely disappearance of borders within the European Union could favour the free movement of gypsies, an estimated 20 percent of who maintain their nomadic traditions.

Concerns about this minority were heightened after media reports claimed that the delegates to the international Roma congress, held last month in Prague, intended to declare a gypsy nation, observed Régis de Gouttes, a member-expert of the Committee on the Elimination of Racial Discrimination.

But Delia Grigore, of the Roma Centre for Public Policy, in Romania, stressed that a “Roma nation” is understood as a cultural community, not a territorial concept.

The aspirations of the gypsy peoples are centred on the creation of a network of institutions that represent their culture, such as universities, museums, television and radio stations. “That is what a Roma nation means,” Grigore stressed.

In that vein, Roma organisations demand recognition of their right to cultural education, which would allow them to protect and preserve their languages and traditions.

One of the recommendations approved by the Committee on the Elimination of Racial Discrimination calls on governments to enforce the inclusion of all children of Roma origin in their school systems.

“The choice of the word ‘inclusion’ leaves a lot of room for interpretation, and can very well be read ‘assimilation’,” protested Faik Serifovic, a leader of the Romani Union.

The school systems in Europe are monocultural and “encourage almost exclusively the majority ethnocentric identity patterns,” he said.

Serifovic argued that Roma children “lose their self-esteem and face a deep and wide identity dissolution” when they are denied the right to learn their mother tongue and are forced into another culture.

The gypsy peoples, whose origins are traced back to the northwestern regions of India, simply want to recover their languages, their history and their cultural identity, as well as their alphabet, he emphasised.