Sixty-Five Years Later, The Roma Nightmare Continues

They were arrested for being a “social menace,” forcibly sterilized for posing a “racial threat,” and deported to concentration camps for slave labor, where thousands died of exhaustion, hunger, and disease.  They suffered physical abuse, rape, and torture; they were shot by Einsatzgruppen in the Soviet Union; and gassed in Auschwitz.

Sixty-five years after the Holocaust, Europe’s Roma continue to face persecution seemingly unthinkable in free, democratic societies.

France has shocked the world in recent days by deporting thousands of Roma refugees back to Bulgaria and Romania.  Claiming they are a source of “public disorder” merely for occupying unclaimed, unwanted wastelands, the persecution by French authorities of these Roma reifies the very stereotype used to legitimate anti-Roma actions:  that they are rootless vagabonds, uncivilized, miserable, and unwilling to work.  Never mind that many of these Roma left their native countries for other, richer EU states in the hopes of escaping racism and finding better employment opportunities and quality of life. 

The central irony is that French President Nicolas Sarkozy himself comes from immigrant stock.  His father belonged to the Hungarian aristocracy and entered France as a refugee fleeing the communists—and for twenty-five years lived as an officially “stateless person”; Sarkozy’s mother traces part of her ancestry back to Greek Jews.

He should know better.

And so should France’s Minister of State for European Affairs Pierre Lellouche, who had the nerve to scold Romania for not integrating its Roma.

France is not alone in its anti-Roma zeal.  Hungary’s Jobbick party, the third-largest in parliament, has threatened to establish internment camps where Roma would be detained indefinitely, perhaps for life.  In Italy the Roma community, both native and immigrant, have over the past three years suffered numerous attacks.  In several locations their houses have been burned; some have been murdered, and, in 2008, no one made any effort to save two drowning Roma girls. 

That same year police officials took finger-prints and created files for all Roma.  Gianni Alemanno, the mayor of Rome and former member of that country’s fascist party, has begun bulldozing Roma shanties as part of what he terms “Operation Nomad.”  Simultaneously, Roma attempting to enter Italy from France are being turned away.  Echoing the language used by Germans and Romanians during World War II, Alemanno claims the destruction of the shanties is legitimated by the “health threat” they posed.  Yet, like the charge of “public disorder” used in France, “health threat” is simply a canard meant to disguise racial discrimination by playing on popular stereotypes and fears.

In condemning these current events, we must also put them in context.   Just as the destruction of over six million Jews in the course of World War II ravaged the whole of Europe, so too was the persecution of the Roma a continental phenomenon.  225,000 Roma died between 1939-1945 as a result of genocidal policies pursued by Nazi Germany, its satellites, and allies. This is a conservative estimate.

To a still unknown extent, thousands of Roma were sterilized, a practice which continued in some communist states, such as Czechoslovakia, long after 1945.  Indeed, the ideas used to legitimate such barbaric treatment have survived, even thrived, in the postwar order to a disturbing degree.  The current plight of Roma in Europe cannot be understood, much less ameliorated, without recognizing the painful legacy of the Holocaust and how racist thinking has continued to shape perceptions of Roma and the policies affecting them.

As France, Hungary, Italy, and other states come to grips with what it means to belong to a united Europe, the issue of how Roma are treated within this broader society constitutes a litmus test for the European Union’s commitment to democracy and human rights.

Even as you read this, Roma are being deported from France, their homes destroyed in Italy, their right to co-exist debated in the Hungarian parliament.  True democracy can no more tolerate such deeds than a dictatorship can freedom.  France’s government, sadly, has made its decision.

The real test of the West’s commitment to human rights now rests in the responses of the European Union, United States, and United Nations.  The recent criticisms of the EU and UN are noble, but fall far short of justice.  Were a third-world dictatorship to engage in such a program, political pressure and public outcry, one suspects, would be swift, as would discussion of more serious measures.  It is far more difficult, it seems, to accost one’s neighbor, particularly one whose revolutionary commitment to the ideals of equality, liberty, and fraternity once inspired the entire world.  The Roma, at least, must now look for inspiration elsewhere.  In the meantime, one can only hope that the painful example of France’s deportations will convince Americans of the folly of Arizona’s immigration law.