The Roma Cafe: Human Rights and the Plight of the Romani People - Softcover

Pogany, Istvan

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0745320511 ISBN 13: 9780745320519

Verlag: Pluto Press, 2004

Inhaltsangabe

Written in a lively and accessible style, and illustrated throughout with photographs, The Roma Cafe is a 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 the ex-Communist states, Professor Istvan Pogany challenges the most common preconceptions about the Roma. He also looks at the specifics of individual 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 in Central and Eastern Europe since 1989. Mass unemployment, poverty, lack of education, as well as widespread anti-Roma discrimination and inadequate legal protection, have left the Roma facing intense hardship and marginalisation since the collapse of state socialism. 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.

Über diesen Titel

Über die Autorinnen und Autoren

Elaine C. Hagopian is Professor Emerita of Sociology, Simmons College, Boston.

Istvan Pogany is Professor of Law at Warwick University. He teaches courses in comparative human rights and international law. He has written extensively on constitutional transition, human rights and minority rights in Central and Eastern Europe. His previous books include Human Rights in Eastern Europe (Edward Elgar, 1995) and Righting Wrongs in Eastern Europe (Manchester University Press, 1997).

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The Roma Café

Human Rights and the Plight of the Romani People

By István Pogány

Pluto Press

Copyright © 2004 István Pogány
All rights reserved.

ISBN: 978-0-7453-2051-9

Contents

Acknowledgements, vi, 
1 Introduction, 1, 
2 The Hairy Thing that Bites, or why Gypsies shun Gadje, 22, 
3 The Devouring, 35, 
4 Maybe Tomorrow there Won't even be Bread, 48, 
5 The Czardas, 63, 
6 Nomads, 84, 
7 Anikó, 104, 
8 The Lambada, 127, 
9 The Roma Café, 147, 
Notes, 161, 
Bibliography, 188, 
Index, 194, 

CHAPTER 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. 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.

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. 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. 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.

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 Someeni, 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:

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:

[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. 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. Even so, by the 1970s, levels of Romani illiteracy remained high. 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.

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. Levels of unemployment amongst Gypsies in the CEE states have soared since...

Details zur Ausgabe

• Verlag: Pluto Press
• Erscheinungsdatum: 2004
• Sprache: Englisch
• ISBN 10: 0745320511
• ISBN 13: 9780745320519
• Einband: Taschenbuch
• Anzahl der Seiten: 208
• Kontakt zum Hersteller: Nicht verfügbar
• Verantwortliche Person: preigu; mail@preigu.de; ; Lengericher Landstr. 19; Osnabrück; 49078; Deutschland