A SKIRMISH ON THE ROAD TO LIBERATION
Participants at the First World Roma Congress, 1971, from left to the right: Dr Jan Cibula, Zarko Jovanovic, Bedzet Cuna, Grattan Puxon, Slobodan Berberski. Behind: Mirolsav Holomek, Vanko Rouda, Juan de Dios Ramirez Heredia.
With this extract, it is intended to promote Europe-wide action on 8 April 2015.
The Military Police are looking for me but we’re already out in the Irish Sea on the night ferry from Holyhead. Hours later, a lily-white dawn lightens the quayside in Dun Laoghaire harbour when the gang plank goes down and stepping ashore with seagulls screeching their warnings I breathe for the first time the free air of the Irish Republic.
It was the summer of 1960. A refusenik cocking a snook at the British Army, I had little money and needed a place to live, and a way of living in country of high unemployment and mass emigration. Turbulent years lie ahead. The beginnings of a new life with the Travellers, confrontations with the gardai and ever bigger forced evictions.
Only when locked up in the Bridewell on charges that could have cost fourteen years, is there time to reflect on t. he road chosen. Of responsibilities taken on in a campaign and of the irresponsibilities of my private life. Yet thinking back I still know the youthful innocence and fresh idealism that burned in my heart when I hit Dublin at the age twenty-one.
The terrors of 1944 are what set me permanently against war and the military. Our home was close to Lotts Road Power Station, targeted during the blitz on London. In a final fling the Grossdeutsche Reich sent conventional bombers, unleased the pilotless doodlebug and launched the unpredictable stratospheric V2 rocket. Burning incendiaries, a blown out window, falling shrapnel. My father, meanwhile, inducted into RAF became a number in Bomber Command, aiding in the kill of hundreds of thousands of German civilians.
The Cold War that followed?I was against that too. Intensely so after kissing the girl from Irkutsk. Who could sashay along with the doctrine which said come the nuclear exchange she along with millions in the Soviet Union should in a second be vaporized? I came back from Moscow’s 6th World Youth Festival, at Easter 1960 joined the Aldermaston to London Ban The Bomb march, and shortly after took off for Ireland.
Ireland too was jittery about the Cold War. There was a scare over the contamination of milk due to nuclear tests. Pertinently, bombs and guns lingered in its political life. Anyone in that era could get mixed up in the physical force dilemma. Non-violent principles were rawly tested. In the heat of brute-force evictions, violence and non-violence became impossible to separate. And there were men about who, for a cause or malevolent intend, would put a gun in your hand.
The rights and wrongs of those times may be debated. Today we are striving for a third way which might remove, or reduce, confrontation. All I know is that those merciless assaults, officially sanctioned, or adopted by uncivil society extremists (the two inextricably linked), are becoming ever more frequent in the life of Gypsies. They promotes rage and despair. The bulldozer is there. Your house is coming down. Your children are screaming. You are ordered to leave. You want to hit back. It’s only human to pick up a stick or a stone.
At one of early move-on, a well-known Republican, Peadar O’Donnell (1) came onto the field urging us to adopt guerrilla tactics. Being the first eminent person to address Travellers that way, our column of horse-drawn wagons set off down the road flying an Irish tricolor. We had the flag, and unbeknown, a crew of Maoist militants, a breakaway from the IRA, ready next time, for better or worse, to gather at our back.
Nobody at that camp had heard of the Romani movement then coming together in continental Europe. Vaida Vojvod (2) visited two years later at the legendary Cherry Orchard Camp, bringing word of the activities of the CMR (3) in Paris. Eight years later came the lst World Romani Congress in London and adoption of the universal Roma national flag.
The year 1961 proved seminal for the Travellers. Expectations raised by the Report of the Commission on Itinerancy and aired by newly-created Telefis Eireann, was the spark which set off their campaign. Happenings outside Ireland were, of course, more significant for the wider world. The Bay of Pigs invasion of Cuba, the execution of Adolf Eichman and the bombing of a Freedom Riders’ bus in Alabama, all struck a lasting chord. Late in the twelve-month came the publication of Franz Fanon’s The Wretched of the Earth.
His damning dissection of colonialism had an immediate influence in Francophone countries at a time when Vaida was active in France, where he had been joined by Vanko Rouda (4) from Algeria, which was then in the midst of an anti-colonial war. A long war that impacted on Algiers’ own Romani quarter at Maison-Carree.
Parallels between colonial policy and the treatment of Roma, and the psychological impact of such treatment, have been highlighted by blogger Qristina Zavackova. Born in Slovakia but growing up on the Scottish border, she views conduct towards Roma as little different from the centuries of subjugation in India. As a girl, her grandmother toiled alongside Indian maids shipped from Bengal to Britain, scrubbing floors for the nabobs. Roma elsewhere were often reduced to slavery and the servant class. In 1970s Macedonia Ciganica was synonymous with a poor-paid domestic cleaner. My wife then had, for a while, been one of them.
Much in Fanon is as relevant for us as for the North Africans alongside whom he fought during the wars of liberation. He stated: the ideological essence of colonialism is the systematic denial of all attributes of humanity of the colonialized people. Such dehumanization is achieved with physical and mental violence.
Roma have long lived in a dual world similar to that which Fanon knew. It’s a hinterland describes by him as ‘the Negro village, the medina, the reservation …. a place of ill fame, peopled [according to the colonialist] by men of evil repute’. He tells us (5) the native town is a hungry town, starved of bread, of meat, of shoes, of coats, of light. Across Europe today, the Roma settlement, a hamlet, or a city mahala, is metamorphosing into a migrant village, whose inhabitants move on wheels, camp in tents and build temporary shanties wherever they can.
I came to Fanon late, introduced to him by another blogger-activist, journalist Bianca Pascall, who gave me her copy of The Wretched of the Earth. She had underlined this passage in red: ‘A national culture is the whole body of efforts made by a people in the sphere of thought through which that people has created itself and keeps itself in existence’. Although frequently denied, it’s precisely this which the gadjo, the hostile non-Rom, seeks to destroy. His tools are the hate media, harassing police action, eviction and deportation, vigilante neo-Nazi attack. The Romani language is kept out of schools, the values of community life neglected or totally supressed. All this pushes many into depression, mental illness.
No wonder that the gadjo, or in Pavee speak the buffer, comes across as a stickybeak. He’s the authority figure regarded with a wary eye. The outsider also features as the mark. Fair game to be bested. In short both opponent and fool. Such relationships are not unique to Rom and gadjo .They have existed across the world between native and colonizer. A yawning separation opens. A mutual negation of respect. Within the Romani movement it has become fashionable to drop the termgadjo. After all like cigan, gipsy, it is derogatory. So it’s been hidden way, smothered, kept out of hearing, particularly in official dealings. Some see this as a tactical error.
That little word, of noble etymology and bearing the patina of long distilled resentments, should not be surrendered. It must be let live. Let it flame again into life. It is the flame of liberation. Rightly harnessed, the energy of anger is just as necessary to self-emancipation as the power of reason.
Fanon saw mass revolt as indispensable to the process of true liberation. Freedom can be achieved only through the people’s fullest participation. Without it the old colonial mind-set will not be erased. The individual remains in chains, a prisoner of that heritage of inferiority long instilled by thecolonizer. Fanon warns too against a false break out. A sleight of hand by outsiders in collusion with safe-hands serving their interests. Down that path vitality drains away. The very sovereignty of the people may be compromised.
Clearly this is not amaro chachuno drom, the authentic road forward. Avoidance of that pitfall is everyone’s responsibility. That cup handed to the Rom, Romani – especially the activist – is a poisoned chalice. Remember! A vessel defiled must be treated as melalo. It should be ritually smashed in every household, in every camp and caravan. To the floor and the fire with all attempt at usurpation! Manipulation! Pride grounded in self-respect; a domain worth fighting for.
Do Fanon’s teachings relate to the European Union vis-à-vis the Roma nation? I believe they do.Predicated on the welfare state, the EU must promote social justice. A safety-net for all with free business its underpinning generator. Equality among citizens and free movement are on paper guaranteed. Then why confronted by ten million Roma at the bottom of the ethnic pile does the system fail? Could it be because it is a club mostly of former imperial states, served by whitepoliticians and functionaries? They view Gypsies the same why colonialists regarded kaffirs.
The Union has half-heartedly take up the integration of Roma. They are supposedly to become, if a sub-class, part of the regular population. That’s the idea behind the Decade (6) and the latest National Strategies. One can only speculate what integration might look like if it actually happened. It has a suspect ring. A choice in terminology that leaves the meaning as unwelcome. Assimilation. The EU has ignored the resolutions of the 5th World Romani Congress (7). Roma are treated as asocial, a social problem, the issue of nationality sidestepped. The 8 of April though celebrated in Brussels has been emasculated; a version known as International Roma Day replaces Roma Nation Day. A nation which nurtured its language and culture for a millennium is, theoretically, to be popped into a would-be European melting pot.
What is the response of our NGOs and leadership? Too many are willing to talk integration, even where no National Strategy exists. There is a trickle of funding. They hope a weak consultative role will in the future become an executive function. Transfer of real power from the gadzo to the Rom will never happen. Not as things stand. Baulked by an asymmetric interface, such revolutionary change is opposed by all member governments, who take up Roma funding and absorb the biggest share.
The anti-Gypsy bullyragging I have witnessed from Dublin to the Midlands of England, Paris to Athens, Greece, has had one over-riding intention; to exclude. Or rather to maintain a marginalization already long achieved. That is the meaning of the ceaseless targeting of migrants, destruction of shack homes, large-scale deportations. The refusal of jobs, housing and education. Behind an obscuring shadow lurks a purpose that persistently, perniciously, outstrips whatever benign policy may temporarily be pursued. Like a bad odour that cannot be dispersed, there exists everywhere a death-curse which would have all Gypsies disappear. The extirpation of an unwanted, scapegoated people goes on unabated.
The Nazi’s New Order genocide, which at a low estimate wiped out 500,000 lives and left generations mentally scarred, was for decades, if not ignored, characterized as a one-off aberration. Today we recognize it as a single episode – the darkest - in a centuries-old cycle. The present era of renewed chauvinistic nationalism runs like an iron-rimmed wheel, cutting painfully deep. Pogroms and murder. And if worse lies ahead? What are people to do? A voice raised, a protest uttered; every skirmish, physical or verbal, won or lost, becomes an item in the effort to achieve liberation. What of retaliation? Escalation bred by provocation must be tempered. At the hard-won Battle of Brownhills (8), I had to disarm a man who out of fury might have shot at police. Negotiation will succeed where unity holds. Experience nonetheless validates the credo of Herbert Marcuse who wrote (9): I believe that for the oppressed and subdued minorities there is a right of resistance based on natural law, a right to use extra-legal means as soon as the legal ones have proved inadequate.
The struggle for political parity commenced many years ago. Its roots are in the 19th century. It is the key to our problem. Every nation on earth must undergo it; prevail or face extinction. A titanic struggle. The Romani movement has made headway, yet clings now on the lowest rung. The bid for influenceebbs and flows. The centres shift; from Paris to Belgrade, Budapest, Strasbourg. In Berlin, Barcelona, London, Istanbul, activity flares. Only to see progress falter. Success appears mercurial. Roma have been reduced to one MEP in Brussels.
The new generation of activists recognizes all this. Feels a new breeze on the face. They are part of a social upsurge. A game change hovers tantalisingly near. The whole world is on the move. Allies must be sought. The margins are travelling towards the middle. Sub-strata is about to become mainstream. Here self-organization rides freer, self-determination unshackled. Arch adaptors, actors in entrepreneurship, Roma are well-placed to participate. It is a self-directed process. We are all stakeholders in fundamental change. There are many strands. Change through democratic transition. Better co-ordination. Belief in the future. For now it’s a way of looking at things. Tomorrow it will exist.
In 1966 I stood on the Dublin docks and watched my trailer caravan loaded onto a ship. Destination Liverpool. I had come under attack from the notorious Archbishop McQuaid. The stand at Cherry Orchard having succeeded, the Catholic Church wanted an end to agitation. Travellers were left out of decision-making. Many departed Ireland that summer. On Human Rights Day 10 December that year the Gypsy Council, founded in a pub displaying a No Gipsies sign, took up a militant anti-eviction campaign.