Louise Doughty. Photograph: Linda Nylind
This
is an article my father would rather I didn’t write. "You want to watch
it, you know," he has said to me, more than once. "If you’re not
careful, you’ll get a brick through your window." In the working-class
area of Peterborough where my father grew up during the 20s and 30s, it
probably wasn’t wise to mention that you had Romany blood, however
distant.
At that time, my father and his family had no idea
about the horrors about to be perpetrated against the Roma and Sinti in
Europe under Nazi occupation but prejudice they understood, all right,
even from within their own family. "My mother used to hit me when I was
bad," one of my aunts once told me, "and she always said to me, ‘I’ll
beat the Gypsy out of you, my girl.’" When my father first told me
about our Romany ancestry, he asked me not to mention it to neighbours
or friends at school – a suggestion no doubt at the root of my abiding
fascination with what is, after all, only a small part of our family
history. Even so, he finds it hard to accept that had Germany
successfully invaded Britain during the second world war, he and his
family would have qualified for shipping to the gas chambers alongside
British Jews.
This would have happened despite our family
having been settled since the turn of the 20th century. In common with
many English Romanichal Gypsies, my ancestors found the traditional
ways of earning a living – horse-dealing, harvesting – were coming to
an end with increasing agricultural mechanisation. At that time, an
astute social commentator could have been forgiven for predicting that
English Romany culture would rapidly become assimilated into that of
the majority population. "We’re just going to fade away," a Romanichal
man told me at the Barnet Horse Fair, as recently as 1993. "It’s all
going to go."
Instead, the opposite seems to be happening. In
Europe, Roma and Sinti people now number close to 10 million and are
the fastest growing ethnic minority. In this country, there is an
increasingly vocal and visible class of Romany and Traveller activists
and intellectuals, including the poet David Morley, journalist Jake
Bowers, storyteller and playwright Richard Rai O’Neill and artists such
as Delaine and Damien Le Bas, who appeared in the first ever Roma art
pavilion at last year’s Venice Biennale. Across Europe there are now
Roma newspapers, radio and television stations and a Roma MEP, Lívia
Járóka, of the Hungarian centre-right party Fidesz.
Despite this,
and the growing politicisation and cross-cultural awareness of many
disparate Roma groups, there is no denying that the majority of this
huge and various group live in the most appalling economic conditions,
with an estimated 84% across Europe below the recognised poverty line.
In this country, the lack of site provision for Travellers has forced
many into conflict with local planning regulations and straight on to
the pages of the tabloids.
The site provision crisis in this
country can be traced directly back to 1994, when John Major’s
government abolished the Caravan Sites Act, which obliged local
authorities to provide adequate sites for Travellers. At the time,
Romanies and Travellers were urged to buy their own land to settle.
Many duly did, only to find themselves refused planning permission to
park their trailers on land that they legally owned. One Traveller who
has fallen foul of planning regulations in this way is Bernadette
Reilly from Brentwood. She can remember very clearly what it was like
when the family was forced to camp by the side of the road. "We didn’t
have what most people would call a normal life, although it was normal
for us," she says wearily. "We had no water, no sanitation, no
electricity, and no healthcare other than going to A&E." In 2007,
she and her family were granted five-year permission to live in their
trailers on land they had bought between the villages of Mountnessing
and Ingatestone. "At least we have water and flushing toilets now, if
not electricity or a land line," she says.
Brentwood council –
backed by the local Conservative MP, Eric Pickles, who lives near the
site – went to court and overturned the decision. But the Travellers
were later granted permission to appeal and the judge told the council
to stop wasting public money fighting the case. Pickles did not respond
to my requests for an interview, but directed me to his website
statement opposing the site on the basis that it falls within the
metropolitan greenbelt.
Professor Thomas Acton of the University
of Greenwich is this country’s first professor of Romany studies and an
internationally renowned expert on Romany culture and history. He also
spends a great deal of his own time helping and advising Travellers
such as Reilly. "Eric Pickles has responsibility for Gypsy sites in the
shadow cabinet, yet he has denied the existence of a long-established
Traveller community in Brentwood and urged the local council to ignore
their obligations until a Conservative government abolishes them."
Reilly
and her family would like to enjoy their temporary reprieve from
eviction, but the threat of being moved on in the future still weighs
heavily upon them. As part of the planning process, they were allowed
to see some of the bile-filled letters written against their
application by local residents. "The children have local friends and go
to clubs now, but I won’t let them out wandering around town on their
own, it’s too dangerous for them, " she says. What is it like to have
the MP on your doorstep campaigning against you? Reilly’s reply is
blunt. "We live in fear all the time." Opponents of Traveller sites are
quick to criticise Travellers for being wary or hostile to outsiders
without any understanding of the siege mentality the constant sense of
threat engenders. After viewing the hate mail the planning office
received, Reilly wrote a poem entitled I Am a Traveller:
"I bring up my children the best way I know how.
They are all I own, they are all I have now.
They have manners, they are kind, they are my delight.
But that’s not what you shout as you drive by at night."
The
climate of fear among Travellers in rural areas will not have been
eased by the Red, White and Blue rally held last month by the British
National party in Denby, Derbyshire. One of the guests invited to speak
at the event was Petra Edelmannová, chairwoman of the Czech National
party, a tiny fringe movement from the Czech Republic notable mainly
for its overt antagonism towards the Roma. Edelmannová has written a
pamphlet entitled The Final Solution to the Gypsy Issue in the Czech
Lands, which advocates repatriating the Czech Republic’s Roma
population to India. In the event, Edelmannová did not show up for the
rally, but she seems a strange choice of speaker for what the BNP
insists was a weekend of family fun with bouncy castles.
When I
raised this with BNP deputy leader Simon Darby he conceded that the
phrase "final solution" was "not exactly the best title for a document"
but added, "there is a Gypsy problem there. There is a problem in this
country as well." What did he regard as the nature of our Gypsy
problem? "Some of the Travelling community have been here for a very
long time. They keep themselves to themselves and sort out their own
problems within their own communities. They have the same morals as me.
I don’t have a problem with them." He identifies the "problem" as being
foreign Roma who have immigrated into the UK since European
enlargement, along with an undefined group of what he calls "homegrown
pseudo-Gypsies".
This artificial distinction between different
groups of Romanies and Travellers in order to justify discrimination
was something I also encountered when I spent time in the Czech
Republic as a writer in residence at the Masaryk University in Brno. I
was told that the problem with the Roma was not "our Gypsies" but the
Slovak Gypsies, many of whom moved to the Czech lands to fill labour
shortages in factories after the second world war. The gadje
(non-Gypsy) world seems to have less of a problem with Romany people as
long as they stay in a folkloric pigeonhole and don’t grow too numerous
– ie, don’t appear to be real people with real housing needs, hunger
and educational ambitions for their children.
The invitation
extended by the BNP to Petra Edelmannová is significant because the
historical treatment of the Roma in the Czech Lands provides an
instructive example to modern Europe. In more than one European
country, the roundup of Roma and Sinti people under Nazi occupation was
made much easier by pre-existing legislation. In Czechoslovakia, as it
then was, restrictive legislation against Gypsies was brought in as
early as 1927. Law 117 required all Gypsies to be fingerprinted and to
provide details of their movements around the country. The evidence
gathered under Law 117 facilitated the internment of Bohemian and
Moravian Roma when the occupying German army decided the time had come.
In August 1942, under the guise of a so-called Registration Day, the
Roma and Sinti were rounded up and imprisoned in two camps, Lety in
Bohemia and Hodinin in Moravia. After a year, most of the inhabitants
of those camps were sent on to Auschwitz, where they were murdered. Of
the 6,500 Roma in the Czech lands at the start of the war, fewer than
500 survived. What began with fingerprints in 1927 ended 16 years later
in the gas chambers.
To draw analogies between the
Nazi-perpetrated Holocaust and the current situation for European Roma
may seem alarmist, but in 1927 anyone who predicted the fate of the
Czech lands in the 1940s would certainly have been regarded as alarmist
to the point of lunacy. Czechoslovakia was a thriving democracy that
had shaken off the shackles of the Austro-Hungarian Empire to emerge as
one of the top 10 economically developed countries in the world.
The
true numbers of Roma and Sinti people murdered by the Nazis will never
be known – official estimates vary between one quarter and half a
million, although many Romany experts believe a million might be nearer
the mark. What is indisputable is that the Roma and Sinti were
persecuted to roughly the same percentage of their population, around
85%, as Jewish people – and for the same racial reasons. Where the two
genocides differ is that although the Jewish Holocaust was always
openly racist, the Roma and Sinti were initially persecuted for being
"asocials" and, for many years, successive German governments refused
to recognise the racial element of the Nazis’ actions.
This
insistence that the exclusion of and discrimination against Gypsies has
more to do with lifestyle than race has found its echo in recent events
in Italy. In May, a woman in Ponticelli, outside Naples, reported that
a Gypsy woman had attempted to abduct her baby. Whether the report was
true or not made no difference to the thugs who descended with iron
bars and torches upon local camps and slum housing. The response of the
Berlusconi government and its allies was breathtakingly cynical. First
came the announcement in June that all Gypsies, children included,
would be fingerprinted and, crucially, identified by their ethnicity –
a move unprecedented in postwar western Europe. Terry Davis, the
secretary general of the Council of Europe, responded that such a
scheme "invites historical analogies which are so obvious that they do
not have to be spelled out". Even Berlusconi proved sensitive to the
international outrage that ensued and the plans have now been modified
so that all Italian citizens will be fingerprinted by 2010. The
authorities have stated that ethnicity will not feature in this
nationwide census, but their idea of reassurance is to present the
measure as a general anti-immigration measure, rather than one aimed
specifically at the country’s 150,000 Roma and Sinti.
These moves
would be sinister enough on their own, but they come accompanied by
repeated and unpunished attacks upon Italy’s estimated 700 camps. In
July, the world was shocked by photographs of the bodies of two drowned
Roma girls left lying on a beach outside Naples, while people sunbathed
and picnicked nearby.
Of the many chilling quotes that have been
forthcoming from Italy’s political leaders since the attacks began in
May, possibly the most frightening is that from Umberto Bossi of the
far-right Northern League, a minister in Berlusconi’s government. "The
people do what the political class isn’t able to do." The clear
implication is that the politicians endorse "ethnic cleansing" and
rather wish they could get away with formalising the arrangement.
Italy’s
Romanies, many already living in the most appalling economic
circumstances, can be forgiven for feeling under siege. "Have you come
to hunt us or help us?" asked Rogi, a resident of a small camp just
outside Rome. He was speaking to a group of 10 Red Cross volunteers who
arrived at the camp in July to conduct a census. The volunteers were
not fingerprinting but they were asking each resident for their name,
age, nationality, if they had been vaccinated and if their children
were going to school – and they were photographing them. According to
the news agency AFP, the Red Cross was insistent that this was not a
police operation, rather aimed at providing the camp residents with
health cards. "Mostly they have worms, gastro-intestinal illnesses and
bronchitis," one worker reportedly said. "As for the authorities, we
can provide them with anonymous information so that they are able to
assess the camps, hygiene and health conditions."
Whether or not
the Red Cross operation is going to help the inhabitants of such camps
or the authorities who would like the camps cleared remains to be seen,
but no one can blame the residents, many of whom are Romanians without
papers, for feeling deeply suspicious of people in uniform who want to
take their photographs and ask a lot of questions. Such suspicion has
wide historical precedent.
The slaughter of the second world
war was merely the apotheosis of centuries of persecution throughout
the Roma’s tragic European history. Although awareness of the Romany
Holocaust is now well established, few people know that for five and a
half centuries, thousands of Romanies in eastern Europe were bought and
sold as slaves. According to Ian Hancock in his book, We Are the Romani
People, "In the 16th century, a Romani child could be purchased for
32p. By the 19th century, slaves were sold by weight, at the rate of
one gold piece per pound."
Throughout this history, Roma and
Sinti people have traditionally survived by remaining out of sight as
much as possible. In Poland, a small number of Polska Roma survived the
Nazi genocide by hiding in remote forests. In Bohemia and Moravia, a
few families were sheltered by Czech villagers. On a wider level, many
Romanies or Travellers simply don’t mention their family backgrounds.
On a writers’ tour of Romania in 2000, one friend said to me, "I think
the attitude of most people here would be, we don’t understand why you
talk about having Gypsy blood. If you kept quiet about it, you could
pass." The Roma living in appalling conditions in camps outside Rome or
Naples would probably be happy not to venture out to sell trinkets or
beg were it not for the fact that if they didn’t, they would starve.
Criticism of such subsistence activities rarely takes account of the
economic necessity that underpins it.
Another example of a
Gypsy community under siege is Sulukule in Istanbul. Sulukule is an
historic settlement that has been occupied by a Romany community since
the time of Byzantia and is now part of a Unesco World Heritage Site.
The earliest records for Roma residence in Sulukule date back to 1054
and for centuries it has been famous for its entertainment houses where
the Roma performed music and dance to visitors from all over the world.
The enforced closure of such houses in 1992 pitched the area and its
inhabitants into serious economic decline. Again, the reasoning given
was that of providing safe, hygienic housing. "We have no intention of
getting rid of the Roma but we have to do something about this slum,"
said the local mayor, Mustafa Demir. The local authorities now plan to
demolish the tiny coloured houses in which the Roma live and replace
them with villas that the residents could not possibly afford to rent,
even with the subsidies offered. Homeless, and with no means of
supporting themselves, what options will be open to them?
Seen
within their Europe-wide and historical context, events such as these
have a devastating effect on the morale of the wider Roma population,
not just on those directly victimised – we are, after all, talking
about a people who have genocide in living memory and whom are among
the most poverty-stricken and excluded in Europe. These developments
are viewed by Roma and Sinti people across Europe with mounting
anxiety. For every firebomb thrown into a camp or slum dwelling, for
every municipal move to get Romanies to move on, there are thousand
petty incidents of scorn or prejudice. As one English Traveller
acquaintance once put it to me, "Whenever anyone says to me, ‘Oh it
must be so romantic being a Gypsy,’ I say, ‘What’s romantic about being
spat at?’"
What is undeniable in this picture is that the current
moves by both the government of Italy and British local councils such
as Brentwood will only exacerbate the tensions between Romany or
Traveller and settled populations. The immigrant Roma in Italy are
there because they left countries such as Romania in search of better
lives. The residents of Sulukule will have to go somewhere when the
demolition trucks move in. Travellers turned off the land they own in
Cambridgeshire or Essex will be forced to camp by the side of the road
or on publicly owned recreation grounds. Bernadette Reilly remembers
saying to one police officer who was moving the family on from the side
of the road one night, "Where do you expect us to go?"
"Anywhere," the officer replied. "Just not in my borough."
However
often the Romany and Traveller communities of Europe are moved on, from
borough to borough or across national boundaries, they will not fade
away or melt into thin air. Until there is pan-European political will
to address the poverty and exclusion that many face, the situation can
only worsen, and the right wing will continue to use this marginalised
group as a vote-scoring chip. At my father’s 80th birthday party, I
told my aunt about his remark referring to bricks through windows,
expecting her to agree with me that my father was an incorrigible
worrier. Instead, she said quietly, "He’s got a point, love, hasn’t he?"
·
Louise Doughty’s novels about Roma history and her family ancestry are
Fires in the Dark and Stone Cradle, both published by Simon &
Schuster.
