by Joshua Losinger
The European Roma Holocaust Memorial Day, on 2 August, was the occasion to commemorate the suffering of the Roma people in Europe during World War II. A ceremony took place at the Council of Europe, allowing for a short time to reflect on what happened – and what should never happen again. Most importantly, the central question is: “How can we prevent the repetition of atrocities?” In most places in Europe, discrimination, violence and segregation are still well in place and directed at minorities, migrants or “unadaptable” communities, reflecting nativist and nationalist attitudes. Roma people fit the target group of these growing xenophobic trends in Europe, with substantial growth in Central and Eastern Europe. This article tries to connect disinformation, misrepresentation and lack of recognition of the Roma minority’s past suffering with the lack of effective measures against their present persecution all around Europe, accepted by some while ignored by most.
Roma Genocide Remembrance
On 2 August 2024, the Council of Europe in Strasbourg organized an event for the 80th anniversary of the European Roma Holocaust Memorial Day. On the green grass outside the famous Palais d’Europe, several of the Council’s officials took turns reading speeches to commemorate the atrocities committed by Nazi Germany and its allies on Roma communities during World War II.
All three speakers started by reminding the audience of the context of this ceremony and why this date became a Remembrance Day. On 2 August 1944 at the Auschwitz-Birkenau death camp, over 3,000 Roma deportees, including men, women, and children were exterminated in gas chambers. These killings are part of the Holocaust, and more precisely, Porajmos, the genocide of the Roma and Sinti peoples during World War II. This chapter of history has been largely disregarded and overlooked, fitting some 200,000 to half a million Roma victims into the larger Jewish death toll. Let’s not forget that the extermination of the Roma people was recognized by Germany as an act of genocide only since 1982. Confusion and disinterest are part of the collective memory of the Roma Holocaust, which is a reason for the lack of acknowledgement today in the private and public spheres of the suffering of the Roma people. More importantly, it is lacking in education, as emphasized by the Head of the Steering Committee on Anti-Discrimination, Diversity and Inclusion and Ingrida Šimonytė, Lithuania’s Prime Minister, both speakers at the event. Education on this difficult part of our history, and the participation of the youth, especially the Roma youth, in raising awareness on the matter, are valuable tools which can improve how we remember the Holocaust, and also how we end the discrimination still being faced today by Roma communities in Europe.
Decisions like the “Roma Holocaust Remembrance and Education – RomaMemory” Program, jointly launched by the Council of Europe and the European Union in June this year, aim at raising awareness about Roma history and culture while combating discrimination against Roma communities and antigypsy feeling in Europe today.
“Cultural ignorance, hate speech, disinformation” – these words justify the Council’s restless action in education to tackle anti-Roma feeling. It becomes clear why this ceremony or such initiatives are important, and using education as a canal for tackling the issue of antigypsyism seems like a first and important step.
However, is it enough to remember? As said previously, discrimination against Roma people is a deeply gangrened problem in Europe; it has been for centuries and continues today, despite what we learned from the Holocaust. Whereas antisemitism, if not suppressed, has at least been recognized and fought against both at the institutional and private levels, antigypsyism is alive and well. More than overlooked, it is commonly accepted to segregate, negate, and discriminate against Roma people, especially in the private sphere.
During the ceremony, the Roma Civil Society representative and guest speaker went further than elaborating on the past and how to remember it. He emphasized how we must not repeat it. The Roma Civil Society recognizes the importance of setting a goal in the present, underscoring the ineffectiveness of remembrance as the only tool.
Are remembrance and education enough?
To effectively uphold human rights and democracy, there needs to be more action, and not only from institutions. Awareness and education are great for the long run. They should be encouraged, developed, and financed. However, they pose two problems: first, they are not able to affect the situation on short terms, leaving it to worsen; second, they do not engage with every stratum of the extremely diverse European society. It is from the same European institutions that value human rights’ protection – the Council of Europe and the European Court of Human Rights (ECHR) – that we can learn about the ongoing pandemic that has been striking Europe for centuries. A quick search in the ECHR’s database with the word “Roma” takes the user to a variety of cases of human rights violations taken by applicants – here Roma individuals – to the Court against one of the 46 member states. These cases include inhuman treatments, forced labor, unfair trials, forced sterilization, pogroms, violation of property, as well as infringements on freedom of expression, medical care, education, and many more liberties any citizen of any member state shall enjoy from the European Convention on Human Rights, which states have each ratified. However, these crimes against Roma minorities could well enough be events dating back to Nazi Germany and its racial policies against Jewish and Roma people. Unfortunately, history does seem to repeat itself.
Endemic antigypsyism in Central and Eastern Europe
Although it is estimated that approximately a third of the pre-war Roma population fell victim to genocide, mostly in Central and Eastern Europe, the highest concentration of Roma people remained in this region after the war. The highly dense Roma communities in the region are proportionally facing the harshest treatment from “local” populations and the trauma of the Holocaust did not produce much change. Soviet Europe, although not as repressive as Nazi Germany, ostracized Roma communities in the same European fashion that was and is still present on our continent today. With the fall of the USSR in 1991, the newly adopted market economy of the former Soviet bloc continued to fail to accommodate Roma populations, who sought an escape by moving westward. The post-USSR breakouts of former countries like Czechoslovakia and Yugoslavia left many stateless or without citizenship rights, only further isolating them. Furthermore, the 2007 EU accession of Bulgaria and Romania, two of the countries with the largest Roma communities in Europe, saw an inflow of Roma groups migrating in western Europe, fleeing persecutions, only to face the same anti-gypsy feeling there. These historical events shaped the migration flows that operated along Europe’s newly changing borders.
The ECHR’s factsheet on cases involving Roma and travelers’ defendants gives an idea of the levels of anti-Roma feelings in eastern and central Europe, with top countries being Romania and Bulgaria. Terrorism and intimidation has been used in Bulgaria to keep Romani activism low, as can be proven with the murder of Malin Iliev in 2012, a Bulgarian Romani candidate for the Roma political party Euroroma that succumbed to his injuries after a bomb exploded outside the party’s headquarters. Such an attack has been linked with the rise of far-right parties, such as ATAKA in Bulgaria, but the epidemic is far from contained. It is a phenomenon occurring in neighboring countries as well: Jobbik party, a far-right extremist party in Hungary, that encouraged anti-Roma marches and house checks of Roma residences in 2011, aiming at intimidating communities; Golden Dawn in Greece, another far-right, neo-Nazi party whose prominent candidate Alexandros Plomaritis discussed during a documentary in 2012 on how migrants should be put in ovens, turned into soap or skinned to make lamps – a direct reference to Nazi experiments during the war.
One might think these decade-old events must already be in the past and that the situation has changed, but these tragic events keep happening despite institutional action. As a response to growing antigypsyism, in 2011, a first implementation of the EU Framework for National Roma Integration (NRIS) acknowledged the discrimination, violence, trafficking, and social exclusion experienced by Roma communities in Europe. However, these communities still face racially motivated attacks today, fueled by rises in far-right movements that spread to increasingly more countries in Europe. These kinds of official initiatives, in the same fashion as the Roma Holocaust Remembrance and Education program, hold the best intentions, focusing on integration and raising awareness on Roma culture and history, in hope of fostering tolerance and sympathy. However, these objectives fall flat when member states leaders and officials fail to do their part. A prime example is France’s president François Hollande’s failure to fulfill its policy of integration of the Roma people of France in 2012 when encampments were dismantled and populations were, in a majority of cases, not helped to relocate and integrate better, as promised. All over Europe, forced leaves and evictions are still rampant and a common attempt at hunting down Roma communities in hope they would simply disappear. This represents a direct attack on their right to their own way of life and private property, with such cases still being taken to the ECHR today.
Another landmark in the marginalization and abuse experienced by the Roma people is the sterilization of women in Soviet Czechoslovakia and nowadays Czech Republic and Slovakia. From the early 1960’s to 2007, women were subjected to unlawful sterilizations in these countries, often through the signing of documents while or right after giving birth. Sometimes these women were not even understanding what they were signing, or worse, they were facing threats on their lives or the custody of their children. Only in 2009 were these inhuman acts recognized by the Czech government, and in 2021, a bill was to be passed that would allow for the compensation of these women, therefore establishing some kind of path to justice. However, as women ask for reparation, conditions for Roma activists become more dangerous in the Czech Republic as well as in other Central and Eastern European countries, with attacks multiplying and echoing the murder of Malin Iliev twelve years ago. The attempted assassination of Slovakia’s Prime Minister Robert Fico, who was doing country visits as part of the Commissioner’s priority work on the human rights of Roma and Travellers across Europe, was shot in May of this year. This event is set in an atmosphere of slow decline of tolerance and a rise of nationalist and nativist trends, as segregation walls and demolition programs are being launched against Roma settlements in countries like Slovakia.
What is to happen?
So far, Europe failed the Roma – its most marginalized minority. In countless and recent cases, it failed to protect the access to what the Council safeguards for all 675 million citizens of its member states: the right to dignity, to justice, or to protection from torture and inhuman treatment. As it was said on 2 August 2024 in front of the Council of Europe, the “right to remember includes the responsibility to act”. Then and now, Roma communities are facing violent social segregation and attacks, and choosing to overlook the present for the sake of condemning the past would mean ignoring and normalizing the current xenophobic trends in both Europe’s political landscape and private sphere. Especially today, in a world where extremes are coming into more positions of power and systematic human rights violations are becoming habitual scenarios on the international scene, it is important to acknowledge societal patterns that put marginalized minorities at risk. Only then we could eventually break the cycle of stigmatization and segregation.
The Euroculturer 