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Pogroms against Gypsies

01 January 1991

Pogroms against Gypsies
artdoc December=1992

Romania, says German interior minister Rudolf Seiters, is now
`politically safe', so the two governments have agreed that
Germany will send back most Romanian asylum-seekers, starting at
the beginning of November. Estimates of how many people this
involves vary - from 26,000 to over 55,000 - but one thing is
certain: the majority of them are Gypsies. And Gypsies cannot
feel safe.
Since 1 990, thousands of Gypsies have fled from Romania,
where they make up about 10% of the population, after a series
of pogroms against them. But in Germany, they are still not safe
from racist violence. The violence in Rostock, where the hostel
under siege held Gypsies and Vietnamese, hit the headlines. But
hostels all over Germany have seen such racist violence.
But it is not only in Germany and Romania that Gypsies are
hated. Two hundred Gypsies recently demonstrated in Prague
against racist violence. Since the beginning of the year 12
Gypsies have been killed in racist attacks in Czechoslovakia.
In Hungary, in Ketegyhaza, petrol bombs were thrown into the
homes of Gypsy families, their horses burnt alive in the stables.
In Britain, too, Gypsies are not immune from racism and
attack. And now the government is further encouraging the
harassment of Gypsies. It recently proposed that camping without
permission become a criminal offence and that the duty on local
authorities to provide sites be abolished. This duty, which was
won only after a hard-fought campaign in the 1960s, has never
been adhered to by many local authorities - and many of those
that have supplied sites have put them in desolate areas and with
inadequate facilities. But to abolish it, say Gypsies,
represents a concerted attack on their way of life. `A form of
ethnic cleansing' is how Paul Mercer, president of the Gypsy
National Council, has described it.

CARF magazine, November-December=1992 Europe