GYPSIES: BLACKS OF EAST EUROPE
Entrance to Suto Orizari or Shutka municipality, Republic of Macedonia /Photo by Ivana Perić/
The article "Gypsies: Blacks of East Europe" was writen by Grattan Puxon during his stay in Skopje, Macedonia, it was originally published in "The Nation" magazine on April 17, 1976. This is a reduced version of the original article.
Gypsies are the blacks of Eastern Europe. Or rather, I should say we are where "niggers" were before the decade of civil rights and Black Power agitation. Thirty years of socialism have done nothing to alter the relative position of cigani, socially or economically. They are still at he bottom, in fact often beyond the admitted fringes of the so-called classless society. Most inhabit a twilight zone of forgotten ghettos and neglected villages, grossly underprivileged and often underfed.
To be personal for a moment, consider my mother-in law. In the early stages of the last year, here in Yugoslav Macedonia she worked as a child char for a Jewish family. When Skopje's Jews were liquidated she joined Tito's partisans. Today her job, which she "shares" with her husband, is in the private sector sweeping stairs at $20 a month. Another 4,000 Gypsy women from our neighborhood do similar chores, bring home a wage that compares' with that of blacks in South Africa, have Social Security and are hired and fired at the will of the white gadje (non-Gypsies).
We have been living, incidentally, eleven of us in a three-room quonset barracks building erected as emergency accommodation by U.S. Army engineers after the Skopje earthquake disaster in 1963; recently my wife and I moved into rented rooms. The barracks have become the slum end of the Romani township of Suto Orizari, a community of 35,000 Roma on the outskirts of the city.
In America this would be labeled a ghetto, and in some ways it is, especially in its psychology. There is a pervasive inferiority complex, the blight of low racial status. Neverfheless, there are important differences and signs of growth. Before the earthquake, Gypsies occupied squalid hovels in the old quarter of Topana, a district which had existed since earliest Turkish times. Suto Orizari is a modern suburb with a sewer system, where 4,000 families, allocated free plots, have built private houses. The town runs its own council and elects a member to the Macedonian Parliament. Like any other place its size, it has schools, a cinema, football club, dance hall, and so on.
On May Day the Romani national flag flies alongside those of Yugoslavia and the Communist Party. As a Gypsy community Suto is unique in the world and has been called half jestingly "the Romani state."
It is certainly in advance of the sizable ghettos at Sliven, Sumen and elsewhere in neighboring Bulgaria; at Kosica in Slovakia those in the Hungarian province of Novgrad. Two thousand Gypsy-inhabited hamlets are spread across Eastern Hungary. Half of them have no wells and two-thirds are without electricity. Conditions are similar in East Slovakia, where Gypsies constitute 8 per cent of the population, and in some districts as much as 12 per cent. In addition, the capital cities Sofia, Bucharest, Budapest and Belgrade, each contain more than 50,000 Gypsy citizens. Many live in shanty dwellings and dilapidated buildings. And most are employed, if at all, in the menial tasks of cleaning and garbage collection, as unskilled labor, or domestic help by the new middle class.
In the region of southeast Europe bordered to the north by Slovakia and to the south by Macedonia, there will be in the next decade close to 5 million Gypsies among a total population of 50 million - approximately the ratio as blacks to whites in the United States.
Like blacks in the Southern states before civil rights, Gypsies are oppressed by lack of legal status, by malpractices in the administration, and by common prejudice which amounts at times to race hate. There is no Ku Klux Wan and no law-enforced segregation. But there is, on the other hand, the myth that in the Socialist countries racial discrimination is unknown. For Gypsies the contrary is a matter of everyday experience. Meaningful social and political power, a monopoly of the gadje, is uhquestionably out of their reach. And the corollary to the myth is that, except in Yugoslavia, it is taboo to question current attitudes, let alone to organize and agitate for reform. Politics is the prerogative of the Communist Parties and they will do little nothing about an injustice which does not officially exist.
Yet for all its shortcomings, Marxist socialism ultimately offers us a way forward. If we have courage to speak out. I say this because in socialist Eastern Europe minorities that gain nationality status receive automatically specific constitutionally guaranteed rights, and state aid for their realization. These include the formation of national organizations, issue of publications, time on radio and television, and education in the national language. Many minorities already possess and exercise these rights. They have their limitations and the “guarantees” are not beyond party recall. But they would give a starting point from which to tackle the internal and external barriers that are the cause of inequalities. The Communist Parties at present follow radically different policies toward Gypsies, as toward their respective minorities generally.
Only federal Yugoslavia has actually encouraged an emancipation movement among Roma, believing this the soundest way to bring about an equilibrium among its numerous peoples. Bulgaria strains to assimilate Gypsies, along with Pirin Macedonians, Turks and others.
Romania, Hungary and Czechoslovakia each recognizes national minorities ,those groups that have ethnic ties with neighborbig states. These happen to be white European minorities. All five deny nationality status to Gypsies, who are of Indian origin. Numerically, Roma are a larger ethnic group than some of the white minorities, and indeed majority nationalities. Globally, at 8.5 million, Gypsies are equal in number to Bulgarians and vastly exceed Macedonians, Albanians and Slovaks. What, then, is the basis for denial of recognition? It has the hallmark of racism.
Viewed from party headquarters, Gypsies are seen as a mélange of of good-for-nothing, work-shy scavengers and paid-time music makers; a tribe of untouchables outside the proletarian pecking order. In Czechoslovakia, the Marxist theorist Yaroslav Sus describes their way of life as an undesirable combination of “nomadism, tribalism, animism and blood feuds” and the Romani language as a jargon unworthy of preservation. The party line states that, even if Gypsies could be regarded as a national minority, any separate recognition would conflict with “the building of socialist society.”
Sus concludes: “Marxism-Leninism links the final solution of the gypsy question with the need to liquidate gypsies as a people.”
It is ironic, yet not without significance, that in Lenin’s day, and through the prewar years in the Soviet Union, Gypsies received status as a nationality and the realization of their rights as such. Through the initiative of the All-Russian Romani Union, headed by Nikolai Pankov who died in 1959, there came into existence an authentic Romani national movement. City-dwelling Roma in Moscow, Minsk and elsewhere established cooperative workshops based on traditional skills. Twenty-five primary schools, with instruction in the Romani language, were opened. Numerous social clubs and evening classes served the larger communities, while books and journals in Romanes were published on a scale never matched since. In rural areas thousands of Gypsies petitioned free land, and in many cases formed and ran collective farms. The movement vanished, with the coming of Stalin and the war. There remains the Moscow Romani Theatre, but since 1939 only one book - a small collection of poems - has been printed.
Today, Lenin’s example is ignored and the postwar Socialist countries have, as noted, distorted Marxism to justify repression. Outside Yugoslavia, the problem, where it has gained attention at all, has been tackled by heavy-fisted, though piecemeal, attempts at assimilation. Party workers were warned not to fraternize with those Gypsies “who are attempting to make an issue of nationality.” They feared trouble, not from patriarchal headmen who might resist innovation but younger Roma who, under the influence of Communist ideology, were demanding change. Leaders, like Anton Facuna in Slovakia, were denounced as “bourgeois nationalists” and threatened with prison.
The upper strata preferred to abandon the Gypsies, drawing them only as a pool of cheap labor. Class and race self-interest dictated a stop. Other parties and governments have reached the same barrier. They are clearly in the grip of what Lenin called “Great Nation chauvinism,” the domination and exploitation of the smaller peoples by the majority nationalities within the same state. No doubt some ruling Marxists perceive the evil and believe ‘the Gypsy anomaly will be dealt with‘ later.
They should understand that it is having appalling consequences within the Romani communities, already alienated, by long neglect. All the symptoms of poverty and low status are evident in the Gypsy ghettos: low aspirations, instability within the family, alcoholism ,and illness. The affliction of inferior racial caste brings with it the pathology of despair and hatred, including self-hatred. One sees social injustice corroding the human personality, robbing it even of hope. Crowning this is the sinister fact that
the gadje, inhibited by their disdain and scorn for Gypsies, regard the outcry for a better deal as revolt
Yet Roma seek only equality and more than the political rights enjoyed by other national minorities. Theirs is the cry of the have-nots. Moreover, the emerging protest movement, such as it is, represents for Roma the single way they can break out of isolation. Governments habitually postpone or dilute necessary reform as a minority remains quiescent. The vocal get attention. In this respect global dispersion can proove an advantage for the Gypsies.
The Pan-Romani movement, dating back more than a century, now has outposts in every European country, in the United States, Canada, Australia and India. The lifting of the iron curtain-which for us was locked both sides-coupled with modem communications, has made it possible for Gypsies to link up internationally. At the same time, the prevalence of national liberation movements and the concept of the Third World have drawn attention to struggles and accelerated the pace of political and economic democracy. Gypsies are part of the Third World, albeit half of them are chained within the frontiers of the Socialist countries. We are the back-yard garbage that has been overlooked.
It is a primary objective of the Romani movement to gain nationality status
In Czechoslovakia privileges, but not constitutional rights, were temporarily extended. In Yugoslavia it is argued that, although classified as an ethnic group, enjoy the same rights as other nationalities. The term however, as Slobodan Berberski, president of the World Romani Congress, has pointed out in the Belgrade press, has no legal standing. As yet there are no Romani language schools, regular television programs, and few Romani publications.
At the World Romani Congress, held in London in 1971, delegates from seventeen countries, including Czechoslovakia and Yugoslavia, had formally demanded for the Romani people recognition as a separate nationality, along with a measure of self-determination.
Gypsies feel particularly bitter about the suppression of their language, especially by the schools. As noted above, in prewar Russia it was used as a teaching medium, and a pedagogical institute was opened to train a cadre of Romani teachers. Today not one Romani school exists in the Socialist countries. Hundreds of thousands of Romani children are handicapped by the obligation to be educated through an alien tongue. It is true that many have a smattering of the language of the gadje, whether Hungarian, Bulgarian or Serbian, picked up outside the ghetto. But according to a UNESCO study, the ban on their own language costs them the equivalent of three years’ schooling in the eight years of primary school. This retardation shows up clearly in educational achievement. The present educational system dumps Gypsies semiilliterate among the unskilled and the unemployed, making of them exploited race. Their low status is thus further reinforced and a breakout from isolation becomes manifestly more difficult.
However, another promising factor is the awakening interest of India in the fate of Roma in Europe. G. S. Dhillon, speaker of the Indian Parliament, said in June “The Roma of Europe originally hailed from Punjab.” Prime Minister Gandhi herself has expressed concern. The fact of the Indian origin of Gypsies, known to scholars since the 18th century, may now take political significance.
For the world must recognize that Roma while possessing their own identity, comprise an historic Indian commuinty. Indeed, in Romanes they have retained their Indian language. Therefore the rationale for refusing Gypsies nationality status on the ground that they are not a national minority is demolished.
There is evident support for the Romani cause in Indian diplomatic corps. Dr. GopaI Singh, former ambassador to Bulgaria, has become a patron of Indian Institute of Romani Studies. The current ambassador to Italy, Apa Pant, is patron of the Romani Institute in London. The ambassador to Yugoslavia, P.N. Menon, has paid a visit to Suto Orizari, where he was told that the red Ashok Chakra symbolized a desire for renewed ties with the motherland. An International Roma Festival has just taken place at Chandigarh, Punjab. Although primarily a cultural event, Roma marked the occasion by reaffrrming, on the territory of their ancient homeland, their demand for recognition.