gypsies in the news~
Cuz someone in anon asked me to do a ~gypsy news~ round-up again, lol :3
as ever, pls use "romani" to refer to us even if you really really want to use "roma" or "roma/sinti" (lol), and pls try and keep your "omg you used the word gypsy, that’s a slurrrr let me whitesplain racism to you, gyppo" comments to yourself too bc omg THAT HAPPENS IN EVERY SINGLE GYPSY POST UGH PLS CONTROL YOURSELVES _F
Anti-Romani demonstrators marching towards a gypsy ghetto in Hejoszalonta with torches.
Romani Children In European Union
rest @ lolo diklo: rromani against racism
Less than half of Roma children living in the European Union finish school, according to the EU Justice Commissioner Viviane Reding. As part of a new EU-wide strategy, Reding says their access to education must improve.
More jobs, better housing and improved access to education - those were the goals outlined by EU Justice Commissioner Viviane Reding in Strasbourg on Tuesday as part of a new common EU strategy for the mainstream integration of Roma.
"To my mind, the most important goal is that all Roma children get a school education," said Reding.
Of the 10 to 12 million Roma living in the European Union, just 42 percent finish their education. That compares with an average of 97 percent for all children. Reding said if Roma children had more access to education, they would have a better chance on the job market.
EU member states have until the end of this year to lay down an integration strategy, the implementation of which would be examined annually by the commission.
Nele Meyer of Amnesty International, who works in Brussels on the Roma issue and lobbies the EU to improve their measures for integration, welcomes the strategy, but says it doesn't go far enough to address the issue of discrimination.
"We fear that it will only focus on socio-economic aspects of the situation for the Roma today," Meyer explained to Deutsche Welle. "And while it is very important to address the poverty of Roma, it is just not sufficient. We have to also look at discrimination with regard to the citizenship of Roma.
"Some of them are not allowed to vote and they don't have identity papers," Mayer added. "We see discrimination in law enforcement, we see discrimination in society… and we fear this won't be addressed in the framework… and if so that would be a severe and significant gap."
The State of Democracy in Hungary: "the illness has advanced to a new stage"
rest @ eu observer
A gypsy girl of maybe eight, nine years old holds onto her little brother tightly. Looking out over the chicken-wire fence at the end of their mud garden in the Roma ghetto in the village of Hejoszalonta, they stare at the around 600 members of Hungary's fascist party, Jobbik, and its paramilitary wing, the Magyar Garda, dressed in black or camouflage or just leather jackets, marching right past where they live with torches aloft and nationalist heavy metal music blasting.
An hour and a half north of Budapest, the village, home to just 850 people, 350 of them Roma, was the site last week of the murder of a 50-year-old woman. Jobbik immediately exploited the crime, declaring ahead of any arrest of suspects that the woman's two Roma tenants were guilty and announced they were to come to the village and protect it from "gypsy terror".
As the jack-booted marchers file past, Roma-rights activist Agnes Daroczi leads villagers in a chant from behind police lines that for all its moderation and reasonableness is shouted with no less ferocity: "Peace! Rule of Law! No fascists!'
The protest, which took place on Saturday (2 April), is the second such demonstration by the far-right vigilantes in a month. At the beginning of March, Jobbik and its allied blackshirts went to the village of Gyongyospata, also claiming to protect it from the crimes allegedly perpetrated by their Roma inhabitants. There the numbers were larger. According to human rights groups, quoting the local community, some 2-3000 marched repeatedly up and down the streets of the town with torches and whips.
Also see: Jobbik Demonstrates Against Gypsy Crime in NE Hungary
Brussels to keep an eye on Roma integration in EU Member States
rest @ romea.cz
"The chronic exclusion of Roma people in a 21st-century Europe founded on the principles of democracy, equality and the rule of law is unacceptable. The living conditions of the majority of the Roma population and their relationships with majority societies have deteriorated even further in recent years," said EU Commissioner for Employment and Social Affairs László Andor.
The Commission wants each EU Member State to adopt a new strategy including binding targets for Roma integration in four areas: Education, employment, health care, and housing. Brussels will then oversee the fulfilment of each country's plan and will evaluate each country annually in collaboration with the EU Fundamental Rights Agency (FRA) which is already publishing evaluations similar to those envisioned by the Commission. The Czech Republic almost never avoids criticism from this agency over discrimination.
The Commission also wants to release more EU money to support Roma integration. Without the cooperation of the Member States, of course, it will be very difficult for that to succeed. Brussels is therefore calling on governments to adjust their Operational Programmes, designed for drawing on EU funds, such that they will do more to meet the needs of Roma people.
Better Roma integration could have tangible economic benefits for some Member States. Roma people represent a growing share of those living in the EU who are of productive age - their current average age is 25 (the age of the average EU resident is 40 years). In Bulgaria and Romania, one-fifth of all new job seekers are Roma. According to World Bank research, the full integration of Roma people could bring roughly half a billion euro to some economies because it would improve the countries' productivity, lower social welfare costs, and raise tax revenue.
An estimated 150 000 - 250 000 Roma people currently live in the Czech Republic and comprise not quite 2 % of the population. In the 2001 census, less than 12 000 people officially declared Roma nationality.
Public Asked For Views on Official Stopover Sites for Travellers
rest @ the courier
Sites at Cairneyhill, Crossgates, Cardenden and Crail are to be created by Fife Council to address the problem of large illegal encampments costing businesses thousands of pounds.
The council has spoken to councillors and intends to meet community councils this month. Next month, council officers are set to hold public information sessions to hear the concerns of residents.
Last year, problems arose when large encampments of gypsy travellers descended on private land.
The council says it is trying to prevent private land owners and businesses having to shell out thousands on taking legal action to have travellers moved on and clearing up after they have gone.
As well as proposing stopover sites, the council set up a working group, which has submitted a paper to the Convention of Scottish Local Authorities and the Association of Chief Police Officers calling for more powers to take enforcement action when travellers pitch up illegally.
Housing management and homelessness senior manager John Mills said the council would find it difficult to take legal action without offering travellers drop-off sites as an alternative.
"We've been talking for some years about creating stopover sites and this is the first of four sites in Fife," he said.
"If the council doesn't set up these sites, it would make it more difficult in the future to take legal action against unauthorised encampments."
AFP: Roma in Hungarian Schools - Are Classes Mixed or Segregated?
rest @ romea.cz
AFP reports that over the years at the elementary school in Csobánko, a village northeast of Budapest where many members of the Roma minority live, there have been fewer and fewer faces of majority-society children in the class pictures hanging on the walls of the school. The so-called "white" children started leaving the school in 1989 when it became possible for Hungarians to choose where to send their children to school. This year, the school has only a single pupil from the majority society.
"We are an institution that is open to everyone," declares school director Andrea Papp. "However, the non-Roma people living here don't send their children here anymore." While the facility has been striving for integration, everything has ended up segregated.
Yesterday the European Commission called on the EU Member States to do better at integrating Roma people, particularly through school attendance. Tomorrow the European Platform for Roma Integration, which brings together Commission and NGO representatives, will meet to discuss the issue.
Hungarian PM Viktor Orbán made Roma integration one of the priorities of the Hungarian EU presidency, which the country has held since January. There are as many as 700 000 Roma living in Hungary, which has a total population of 10 million. The estimated number of Roma people living throughout the EU is 10 -12 million, 80 % of whom live in former Soviet bloc countries. Roma are the EU's largest ethnic minority.
"Segregation is forbidden by law. It is bad for the economy, because as a result of segregation, Roma children become unemployed adults dependent on state support," complains Erzsébet Mohácsi, who heads a foundation for Roma children.
Her foundation is striving to make sure Roma children have the same opportunities as everyone else and sues elementary schools where Roma children are separated into special classes. As a result, as many as 3 000 Roma children have gotten places in facilities that respect their integration, Mohácsi says.
Even though the official policy is to integrate Roma children, they are still separated from other children in roughly one-third of Hungarian elementary schools. This proportion keeps rising - Hungarian Minister for Social Integration Zoltán Balog says the incidence of such segregation has risen 30 % since 2005.
Czech Agency for Social Inclusion in Roma Localities adds 10 more towns and villages
rest @ romea.cz
The Czech Government Agency for Social Inclusion in Roma Localities is expanding its work to another 10 towns and villages throughout the Czech Republic. Members of the Agency's Monitoring Committee selected the locations at the end of a day-long meeting yesterday. The Agency will start working in the new localities at the start of July. The towns and villages are: Děčín and Kolín (in the category of municipalities with populations above 30 000 people) and Duchcov, Hodonín, Kadaň, Krupka, Mělník, Sokolov, Vejprty and Větřní (in the category of municipalities with less than 30 000 people living in them).
"I am glad the leaderships of 20 municipalities throughout the Czech Republic are interested in the systematic approach to social inclusion the Agency offers. This fact is especially pleasing at a time when many towns are calling for stricter rules and quick, radical solutions, a time when there is a recurrent rise in the activities of right-wing extremist groups that are appropriating the resolution of this question," commented Czech Government Human Rights Commissioner Monika Šimůnková, the executive director of the section of the Office of the Government where the Agency operates. A total of 21 towns and villages applied for the program.
"The Agency is offering three years of collaboration with the municipalities that were selected. In July we will begin mapping their needs, preparing strategic plans and project requests for support for integration actions, and then implementing the projects in the field," says Agency director Martin Šimáček. "I am not glad that we cannot help those who were not selected. They all showed significant motivation and determination to handle these problems constructively. I believe that in the future we will have the capacity to completely cover the demand from the municipalities. We will at least do our best to stay in contact with those who were not selected this year and to help them in the event of a critical situation."
Czech Society Unaware of What Life is Like for Institutionalized Roma Children
rest @ romea.cz
Czech documentary filmmaker Hana Ludvíková is interested in what Roma teenagers living in children's homes experience. She is a graduate of the department of dramaturgy and screenwriting at FAMU and is currently continuing her Master's studies at the Center for Audiovisual Studies there. In 2008-2009 she worked at a children's home as a teacher of English using the experiential / therapeutic method. The following is an interview with her.
Q: The heroes of your graduate film "Ghetto Borders" ("Hranice ghetta") are Roma teenagers living in a children's home who create hip-hop videos about their lives. How did you come to this subject matter?
A: The work being done through one of the non-profits impressed me. It was teaching English through the experiential/therapeutic method, not classic instruction, but instruction through play. I applied for the job, they selected me, and I then taught for two years at a children's home. One of the principles of this method is to work with children in such a way that they relax and don't feel pressured to learn something, that it just entertains them. For me it was both beautiful and very difficult. These children are amazingly intense, which I really like, but at the same time that complicates things because their behavior is often troubled. It was a great challenge, sometimes I had to fight with them, but we became friends and thanks to our work together on the hip-hop video, the children calmed down a great deal. For them, I was the person that made it possible for them to devote themselves to their hobby.
Q: Why hip-hop in particular?
A: What I liked about it was the connection to a text in which the children can say what makes them angry and what they love. If it had only been about dance, they couldn't have expressed themselves clearly enough. In hip-hop the communication is verbal, and most of all, teenagers accept it.
US Ambassador Warlick on the Roma Cause in Varna
rest @ sofia echo
The US to Bulgaria, James Warlick will give a lecture at the Varna Free University on "Creating a more tolerant environment for the Roma in Bulgaria," Dnevnik daily reported.
"The Roma community in Bulgaria is voiceless, which is why they are often being taken advantage of," Warlick has said of the minority group.
In the lecture, Warlick will stress on the "social and political aspects of the environment in which the Roma community is forced to live in the country, as well as the opportunities for their integration in contemporary Bulgarian society," the report said.
Following the lecture, Warlick will engage in a discussion with students and professors on the matter. This is not Warlick's first initiative on the Roma issue in the country.
At the end of February, Warlick spoke of the plight of the Bulgarian Roma and the need for the country to integrate them better into society.
"The Roma are also Bulgarian citizens, and they are entitled to their rights and deserve the protection that you can offer them," Warlick said during a meeting with leaders from the Roma community, Bulgarian television channel bTV reported on February 28 2011.
Warlick was present at a conference of Roma leaders from the Balkans entitled "Roma Leadership for Regional Co-operation".
Warlick said that the Roma are "the most marginalised ethnic group in the country" and that he was deeply involved in the issue since he had met personally with Roma leaders and families.
Dale Farm Travellers eviction: the battle of Basildon
rest @ the guardian
As the rain fills the potholes in the rough track outside, Mary McCarthy sits beneath a towering vase of burgundy and cream artificial roses and gestures around her immaculate living room. "This might look like a house to you but it's a chalet. It can be broken down into two pieces and moved."
Broken down and moved is the fate that awaits McCarthy and 86 Traveller families who have made a secluded field in the Essex countryside their home for the past decade. This month Basildon council voted to devote up to £8m, one third of its annual budget, to evict the families of Dale Farm and destroy the community they have created in an old scrap yard on green belt land.
The battle over Dale Farm, one of the largest unauthorised Traveller sites in Europe, shows how Gypsies and Travellers are being pummelled by a perfect storm. The Channel 4 documentary My Big Fat Gypsy Wedding confirmed popular prejudices that Gypsies are wealthy, vulgar freeloaders and spawned a rash of "My big fat Gypsy . . ." headlines. Public sector cuts are hitting Traveller education services while squeezed budgets mean local authorities are even less willing to provide sites for Gypsies. Temporary planning permissions, issued to many Travellers five years ago by councils desperate to make controversial caravan sites disappear, are expiring. This year, temporary permissions for 50 Gypsy families will run out in South Cambridgeshire alone - leaving Travellers mired in an expensive and chronically insecure planning tangle. And now, most alarmingly of all for Travellers, councils are evicting them to a clamour of supportive comments from David Cameron and Eric Pickles, the Conservative local government secretary - who is fast turning his personal track record of vehement opposition to unauthorised Traveller sites into government policy.
Roma Hunting Season Set To Continue
rest @ press europe
Ever since forests were re-privatised in 1992, the Roma have been deprived of the right to gather mushrooms and collect firewood. "In exchange we were promised work cleaning up the forests. Then the owners blocked that idea,” explains Mr Farkas. “But we have been living here for five centuries, our ancestors defended this country against the Turks, we are Hungarians first and Roma second!"
Crime is on the increase in the Hungarian countryside, where residents feel they have been neglected by the authorities. A number of murders have had a major impact on public opinion: they include the 2006 killing of a teacher in Olaszliszka (Northeastern Hunagary) who was lynched in front of his children, when he knocked down a 12-year-old Roma girl. Jobbik has a erected a monument to his memory. However, the 2009 series of Roma murders perpetrated by a group of neo-Nazis, who are now on trial in Budapest, has failed to move the country’s population.
In Gyöngyöspata, the conflict appears to have been prompted by the purchase by the Hungarian Red Cross of number of houses that it intended to use to re-house Roma families who had been left homeless by the floods in 2010. The plan to move Roma families into the centre of the village met with stiff resistance from locals who wrote to Gabor Vona, explains Oszkar Juhasz, the president of the local branch of Jobbik (which obtained 26% of the vote in the constituency in 2010).
Mr Juhasz is a wine-grower and a descendent of one of those low-ranking noble families which were barely better off than the serfs, but which believed themselves to be the lifeblood of Hungary. In the hall of his house, there is a map of country with its pre-1920 borders. For the extreme right, which is obsessed by the historic loss of two-thirds of Hungary’s national territory, the high Roma birth rate is a serious threat: "Since 1898, their numbers have increased by a factor of more than 100,” he says. “We are not racist, but more often than not the policy of Roma integration simply results in lower living standards for non-Roma."
On Saturday 2 April, Oszkar Juhasz put on his black uniform to march in the streets of Hejöszalonta, a village in the Northeast of the country which has a population of 900, alongside other "Hungarian patriots." In a press conference on the previous day, the leader of the Fidesz parliamentary faction, Janos Lazar, raised the question of liberalising gun control laws to facilitate self-defence - a measure that is one of Jobbik’s political demands.
Members of Szebb Jövoert surround a gypsy home.
as ever, pls use "romani" to refer to us even if you really really want to use "roma" or "roma/sinti" (lol), and pls try and keep your "omg you used the word gypsy, that’s a slurrrr let me whitesplain racism to you, gyppo" comments to yourself too bc omg THAT HAPPENS IN EVERY SINGLE GYPSY POST UGH PLS CONTROL YOURSELVES _F
Anti-Romani demonstrators marching towards a gypsy ghetto in Hejoszalonta with torches.
Romani Children In European Union
rest @ lolo diklo: rromani against racism
Less than half of Roma children living in the European Union finish school, according to the EU Justice Commissioner Viviane Reding. As part of a new EU-wide strategy, Reding says their access to education must improve.
More jobs, better housing and improved access to education - those were the goals outlined by EU Justice Commissioner Viviane Reding in Strasbourg on Tuesday as part of a new common EU strategy for the mainstream integration of Roma.
"To my mind, the most important goal is that all Roma children get a school education," said Reding.
Of the 10 to 12 million Roma living in the European Union, just 42 percent finish their education. That compares with an average of 97 percent for all children. Reding said if Roma children had more access to education, they would have a better chance on the job market.
EU member states have until the end of this year to lay down an integration strategy, the implementation of which would be examined annually by the commission.
Nele Meyer of Amnesty International, who works in Brussels on the Roma issue and lobbies the EU to improve their measures for integration, welcomes the strategy, but says it doesn't go far enough to address the issue of discrimination.
"We fear that it will only focus on socio-economic aspects of the situation for the Roma today," Meyer explained to Deutsche Welle. "And while it is very important to address the poverty of Roma, it is just not sufficient. We have to also look at discrimination with regard to the citizenship of Roma.
"Some of them are not allowed to vote and they don't have identity papers," Mayer added. "We see discrimination in law enforcement, we see discrimination in society… and we fear this won't be addressed in the framework… and if so that would be a severe and significant gap."
The State of Democracy in Hungary: "the illness has advanced to a new stage"
rest @ eu observer
A gypsy girl of maybe eight, nine years old holds onto her little brother tightly. Looking out over the chicken-wire fence at the end of their mud garden in the Roma ghetto in the village of Hejoszalonta, they stare at the around 600 members of Hungary's fascist party, Jobbik, and its paramilitary wing, the Magyar Garda, dressed in black or camouflage or just leather jackets, marching right past where they live with torches aloft and nationalist heavy metal music blasting.
An hour and a half north of Budapest, the village, home to just 850 people, 350 of them Roma, was the site last week of the murder of a 50-year-old woman. Jobbik immediately exploited the crime, declaring ahead of any arrest of suspects that the woman's two Roma tenants were guilty and announced they were to come to the village and protect it from "gypsy terror".
As the jack-booted marchers file past, Roma-rights activist Agnes Daroczi leads villagers in a chant from behind police lines that for all its moderation and reasonableness is shouted with no less ferocity: "Peace! Rule of Law! No fascists!'
The protest, which took place on Saturday (2 April), is the second such demonstration by the far-right vigilantes in a month. At the beginning of March, Jobbik and its allied blackshirts went to the village of Gyongyospata, also claiming to protect it from the crimes allegedly perpetrated by their Roma inhabitants. There the numbers were larger. According to human rights groups, quoting the local community, some 2-3000 marched repeatedly up and down the streets of the town with torches and whips.
Also see: Jobbik Demonstrates Against Gypsy Crime in NE Hungary
Brussels to keep an eye on Roma integration in EU Member States
rest @ romea.cz
"The chronic exclusion of Roma people in a 21st-century Europe founded on the principles of democracy, equality and the rule of law is unacceptable. The living conditions of the majority of the Roma population and their relationships with majority societies have deteriorated even further in recent years," said EU Commissioner for Employment and Social Affairs László Andor.
The Commission wants each EU Member State to adopt a new strategy including binding targets for Roma integration in four areas: Education, employment, health care, and housing. Brussels will then oversee the fulfilment of each country's plan and will evaluate each country annually in collaboration with the EU Fundamental Rights Agency (FRA) which is already publishing evaluations similar to those envisioned by the Commission. The Czech Republic almost never avoids criticism from this agency over discrimination.
The Commission also wants to release more EU money to support Roma integration. Without the cooperation of the Member States, of course, it will be very difficult for that to succeed. Brussels is therefore calling on governments to adjust their Operational Programmes, designed for drawing on EU funds, such that they will do more to meet the needs of Roma people.
Better Roma integration could have tangible economic benefits for some Member States. Roma people represent a growing share of those living in the EU who are of productive age - their current average age is 25 (the age of the average EU resident is 40 years). In Bulgaria and Romania, one-fifth of all new job seekers are Roma. According to World Bank research, the full integration of Roma people could bring roughly half a billion euro to some economies because it would improve the countries' productivity, lower social welfare costs, and raise tax revenue.
An estimated 150 000 - 250 000 Roma people currently live in the Czech Republic and comprise not quite 2 % of the population. In the 2001 census, less than 12 000 people officially declared Roma nationality.
Public Asked For Views on Official Stopover Sites for Travellers
rest @ the courier
Sites at Cairneyhill, Crossgates, Cardenden and Crail are to be created by Fife Council to address the problem of large illegal encampments costing businesses thousands of pounds.
The council has spoken to councillors and intends to meet community councils this month. Next month, council officers are set to hold public information sessions to hear the concerns of residents.
Last year, problems arose when large encampments of gypsy travellers descended on private land.
The council says it is trying to prevent private land owners and businesses having to shell out thousands on taking legal action to have travellers moved on and clearing up after they have gone.
As well as proposing stopover sites, the council set up a working group, which has submitted a paper to the Convention of Scottish Local Authorities and the Association of Chief Police Officers calling for more powers to take enforcement action when travellers pitch up illegally.
Housing management and homelessness senior manager John Mills said the council would find it difficult to take legal action without offering travellers drop-off sites as an alternative.
"We've been talking for some years about creating stopover sites and this is the first of four sites in Fife," he said.
"If the council doesn't set up these sites, it would make it more difficult in the future to take legal action against unauthorised encampments."
AFP: Roma in Hungarian Schools - Are Classes Mixed or Segregated?
rest @ romea.cz
AFP reports that over the years at the elementary school in Csobánko, a village northeast of Budapest where many members of the Roma minority live, there have been fewer and fewer faces of majority-society children in the class pictures hanging on the walls of the school. The so-called "white" children started leaving the school in 1989 when it became possible for Hungarians to choose where to send their children to school. This year, the school has only a single pupil from the majority society.
"We are an institution that is open to everyone," declares school director Andrea Papp. "However, the non-Roma people living here don't send their children here anymore." While the facility has been striving for integration, everything has ended up segregated.
Yesterday the European Commission called on the EU Member States to do better at integrating Roma people, particularly through school attendance. Tomorrow the European Platform for Roma Integration, which brings together Commission and NGO representatives, will meet to discuss the issue.
Hungarian PM Viktor Orbán made Roma integration one of the priorities of the Hungarian EU presidency, which the country has held since January. There are as many as 700 000 Roma living in Hungary, which has a total population of 10 million. The estimated number of Roma people living throughout the EU is 10 -12 million, 80 % of whom live in former Soviet bloc countries. Roma are the EU's largest ethnic minority.
"Segregation is forbidden by law. It is bad for the economy, because as a result of segregation, Roma children become unemployed adults dependent on state support," complains Erzsébet Mohácsi, who heads a foundation for Roma children.
Her foundation is striving to make sure Roma children have the same opportunities as everyone else and sues elementary schools where Roma children are separated into special classes. As a result, as many as 3 000 Roma children have gotten places in facilities that respect their integration, Mohácsi says.
Even though the official policy is to integrate Roma children, they are still separated from other children in roughly one-third of Hungarian elementary schools. This proportion keeps rising - Hungarian Minister for Social Integration Zoltán Balog says the incidence of such segregation has risen 30 % since 2005.
Czech Agency for Social Inclusion in Roma Localities adds 10 more towns and villages
rest @ romea.cz
The Czech Government Agency for Social Inclusion in Roma Localities is expanding its work to another 10 towns and villages throughout the Czech Republic. Members of the Agency's Monitoring Committee selected the locations at the end of a day-long meeting yesterday. The Agency will start working in the new localities at the start of July. The towns and villages are: Děčín and Kolín (in the category of municipalities with populations above 30 000 people) and Duchcov, Hodonín, Kadaň, Krupka, Mělník, Sokolov, Vejprty and Větřní (in the category of municipalities with less than 30 000 people living in them).
"I am glad the leaderships of 20 municipalities throughout the Czech Republic are interested in the systematic approach to social inclusion the Agency offers. This fact is especially pleasing at a time when many towns are calling for stricter rules and quick, radical solutions, a time when there is a recurrent rise in the activities of right-wing extremist groups that are appropriating the resolution of this question," commented Czech Government Human Rights Commissioner Monika Šimůnková, the executive director of the section of the Office of the Government where the Agency operates. A total of 21 towns and villages applied for the program.
"The Agency is offering three years of collaboration with the municipalities that were selected. In July we will begin mapping their needs, preparing strategic plans and project requests for support for integration actions, and then implementing the projects in the field," says Agency director Martin Šimáček. "I am not glad that we cannot help those who were not selected. They all showed significant motivation and determination to handle these problems constructively. I believe that in the future we will have the capacity to completely cover the demand from the municipalities. We will at least do our best to stay in contact with those who were not selected this year and to help them in the event of a critical situation."
Czech Society Unaware of What Life is Like for Institutionalized Roma Children
rest @ romea.cz
Czech documentary filmmaker Hana Ludvíková is interested in what Roma teenagers living in children's homes experience. She is a graduate of the department of dramaturgy and screenwriting at FAMU and is currently continuing her Master's studies at the Center for Audiovisual Studies there. In 2008-2009 she worked at a children's home as a teacher of English using the experiential / therapeutic method. The following is an interview with her.
Q: The heroes of your graduate film "Ghetto Borders" ("Hranice ghetta") are Roma teenagers living in a children's home who create hip-hop videos about their lives. How did you come to this subject matter?
A: The work being done through one of the non-profits impressed me. It was teaching English through the experiential/therapeutic method, not classic instruction, but instruction through play. I applied for the job, they selected me, and I then taught for two years at a children's home. One of the principles of this method is to work with children in such a way that they relax and don't feel pressured to learn something, that it just entertains them. For me it was both beautiful and very difficult. These children are amazingly intense, which I really like, but at the same time that complicates things because their behavior is often troubled. It was a great challenge, sometimes I had to fight with them, but we became friends and thanks to our work together on the hip-hop video, the children calmed down a great deal. For them, I was the person that made it possible for them to devote themselves to their hobby.
Q: Why hip-hop in particular?
A: What I liked about it was the connection to a text in which the children can say what makes them angry and what they love. If it had only been about dance, they couldn't have expressed themselves clearly enough. In hip-hop the communication is verbal, and most of all, teenagers accept it.
US Ambassador Warlick on the Roma Cause in Varna
rest @ sofia echo
The US to Bulgaria, James Warlick will give a lecture at the Varna Free University on "Creating a more tolerant environment for the Roma in Bulgaria," Dnevnik daily reported.
"The Roma community in Bulgaria is voiceless, which is why they are often being taken advantage of," Warlick has said of the minority group.
In the lecture, Warlick will stress on the "social and political aspects of the environment in which the Roma community is forced to live in the country, as well as the opportunities for their integration in contemporary Bulgarian society," the report said.
Following the lecture, Warlick will engage in a discussion with students and professors on the matter. This is not Warlick's first initiative on the Roma issue in the country.
At the end of February, Warlick spoke of the plight of the Bulgarian Roma and the need for the country to integrate them better into society.
"The Roma are also Bulgarian citizens, and they are entitled to their rights and deserve the protection that you can offer them," Warlick said during a meeting with leaders from the Roma community, Bulgarian television channel bTV reported on February 28 2011.
Warlick was present at a conference of Roma leaders from the Balkans entitled "Roma Leadership for Regional Co-operation".
Warlick said that the Roma are "the most marginalised ethnic group in the country" and that he was deeply involved in the issue since he had met personally with Roma leaders and families.
Dale Farm Travellers eviction: the battle of Basildon
rest @ the guardian
As the rain fills the potholes in the rough track outside, Mary McCarthy sits beneath a towering vase of burgundy and cream artificial roses and gestures around her immaculate living room. "This might look like a house to you but it's a chalet. It can be broken down into two pieces and moved."
Broken down and moved is the fate that awaits McCarthy and 86 Traveller families who have made a secluded field in the Essex countryside their home for the past decade. This month Basildon council voted to devote up to £8m, one third of its annual budget, to evict the families of Dale Farm and destroy the community they have created in an old scrap yard on green belt land.
The battle over Dale Farm, one of the largest unauthorised Traveller sites in Europe, shows how Gypsies and Travellers are being pummelled by a perfect storm. The Channel 4 documentary My Big Fat Gypsy Wedding confirmed popular prejudices that Gypsies are wealthy, vulgar freeloaders and spawned a rash of "My big fat Gypsy . . ." headlines. Public sector cuts are hitting Traveller education services while squeezed budgets mean local authorities are even less willing to provide sites for Gypsies. Temporary planning permissions, issued to many Travellers five years ago by councils desperate to make controversial caravan sites disappear, are expiring. This year, temporary permissions for 50 Gypsy families will run out in South Cambridgeshire alone - leaving Travellers mired in an expensive and chronically insecure planning tangle. And now, most alarmingly of all for Travellers, councils are evicting them to a clamour of supportive comments from David Cameron and Eric Pickles, the Conservative local government secretary - who is fast turning his personal track record of vehement opposition to unauthorised Traveller sites into government policy.
Roma Hunting Season Set To Continue
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Ever since forests were re-privatised in 1992, the Roma have been deprived of the right to gather mushrooms and collect firewood. "In exchange we were promised work cleaning up the forests. Then the owners blocked that idea,” explains Mr Farkas. “But we have been living here for five centuries, our ancestors defended this country against the Turks, we are Hungarians first and Roma second!"
Crime is on the increase in the Hungarian countryside, where residents feel they have been neglected by the authorities. A number of murders have had a major impact on public opinion: they include the 2006 killing of a teacher in Olaszliszka (Northeastern Hunagary) who was lynched in front of his children, when he knocked down a 12-year-old Roma girl. Jobbik has a erected a monument to his memory. However, the 2009 series of Roma murders perpetrated by a group of neo-Nazis, who are now on trial in Budapest, has failed to move the country’s population.
In Gyöngyöspata, the conflict appears to have been prompted by the purchase by the Hungarian Red Cross of number of houses that it intended to use to re-house Roma families who had been left homeless by the floods in 2010. The plan to move Roma families into the centre of the village met with stiff resistance from locals who wrote to Gabor Vona, explains Oszkar Juhasz, the president of the local branch of Jobbik (which obtained 26% of the vote in the constituency in 2010).
Mr Juhasz is a wine-grower and a descendent of one of those low-ranking noble families which were barely better off than the serfs, but which believed themselves to be the lifeblood of Hungary. In the hall of his house, there is a map of country with its pre-1920 borders. For the extreme right, which is obsessed by the historic loss of two-thirds of Hungary’s national territory, the high Roma birth rate is a serious threat: "Since 1898, their numbers have increased by a factor of more than 100,” he says. “We are not racist, but more often than not the policy of Roma integration simply results in lower living standards for non-Roma."
On Saturday 2 April, Oszkar Juhasz put on his black uniform to march in the streets of Hejöszalonta, a village in the Northeast of the country which has a population of 900, alongside other "Hungarian patriots." In a press conference on the previous day, the leader of the Fidesz parliamentary faction, Janos Lazar, raised the question of liberalising gun control laws to facilitate self-defence - a measure that is one of Jobbik’s political demands.
Members of Szebb Jövoert surround a gypsy home.