How Europe's Brutal Crackdown on Roma Is An Opportunity For History

Italian officials are moving full speed ahead to demolish Roma settlements across the country. Their efforts come as French President Nicolas Sarkozy ramped up his own efforts to deport the Roma and destroy their settlements. Meanwhile, in Eastern Europe's Slovakia, six members of a Roma family were murdered in a targeted shooting spree.

These stories may come as news to many Americans, but anti-Roma activists have been on the rise in Europe for years, only the latest chapter in centuries old oppression heaped on the Roma.

As international attention starts to turn toward Italy and France's respective crackdowns, human rights activists should seize the moment to write the Roma into European history.

Sarkozy's opponents claim he's using the Roma as a scapegoat to shore up votes, an accusation similar to what critics say about Italian Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi. Potential political motivations are only part of the story, though, because Roma have long been a complicated topic for European powers.

Poland's post-War socialist government referred to the Roma as "The Gypsy Problem," using the pejorative "Gypsy," a term applied early in the Roma's history, when people believed they hailed from Egypt.

In fact, Roma, itself only one branch of the Romani people, hail from what is today India, and began migrating to Europe in the 1300s. They were immediately marginalized, with some states enslaving them, and others enacting strict anti-establishment laws, meant to keep Roma on the run and out of their borders. Thus, millions of people were sent wandering, making money the best they could, often by playing music.

The gravest exhibition of anti-Roma activity came during the Holocaust, when Adolf Hitler and his cronies killed at least 220,000 Roma, a fact too often made a footnote in history.

That's the problem: having never been accepted into European culture as a whole, particularly in Western Europe, the Roma history has been swept away or outright rejected.

For generations illiteracy ran rampant, and the majority of Roma still lack access to education and opportunity. Few records were made of the Roma's collective struggle, unless you count oppressive ethnolographies like those kept by the Nazis. The Roma have, as journalist Isabel Fonseca notes in her book Bury Me Standing: The Gypsies and their Journey, lived "outside history."

Poland and other post-War governments attempted to solve this "problem" through assimilation programs and, when that didn't work, with government offices like the "Office for Gypsy Affairs." Assimilate or get out; those were the choices given Roma, although often only in theory: European citizens still weren't very welcoming, and innumerable amounts of Roma continue to roam Europe, looking for a place to settle.

The European Union (EU), too, has tried to integrate Roma into the coalition's collective culture, and established a specific non-discrimination branch to work with member nations toward an amiable solution. One of the key pieces of EU involvement are "Freedom of Movement" laws ensuring that EU members cannot deport an EU citizen without due cause. There are, however, ways around such regulations.

In Italy, the government overrode that rule by passing a law that says citizens can be deported after three months if they're not earning a living. A year later, authorities were given power to deport citizens over "public safety," the justification being used in the most recent wave of demolitions. Sarkozy has claimed that Roma camps breed prostitution and other illicit behaviors, as well as violence, leading to the expulsion of about 1,000 Roma since July.

United Nations and EU officials have already decried the crackdowns in France and Italy, more international news outlets -- like the AP, the New York Times and Washington Post -- are covering the stories, and the public has started protesting in France. It's important that European, Western and international activists use all this attention to take note of an often ignored civil rights struggle, and record it for history.

Vaclav Havel, former President of the democratic Czech Republic, where Roma were routed out and murdered during the Second World War, once insisted the Roma posed an essential challenge for liberal democracies. "The Gypsy problem is a litmus test not of democracy but of a civil society," he said. "The two are certainly two sides of the same coin; one is unthinkable without the other. One means legislation to enable the people to vote and make them the source of power. The civil society is related to human behavior."

If we want our international democracies to exist, we have to make sure our human behavior includes all of society's populations, whether they be gay, black or the too-often neglected Roma.

Photo credit: Jean-Baptiste-Camille Corot's "Gypsy Girl with Mandolin" via Nostri Imago's Flickr