littlegreen on Roma persecution
I believe that it needs to start with the younger generation in Europe.
It's going to start with a more tolerant generation of children I think,
and there needs to be tougher laws barring teachers from allowing kids to
beat up on the Rom and chase them out of school. People tell their
children that the Rom are bad, so they turn around and beat up on the
kids and chase them away and it creates another generation of Roma with
very few options in life while everyone else has already built up their
intolerance towards the Rom and are no longer open to seeing them
differently. In America, I think more people need to realize what's going
on. I know everyone hates the U.S. for meddling, but I don't think it's a
bad idea to write to the Romanian and Italian governments in particular
and express outrage against their blatantly anti-gypsy policies that
encourage the violent arrest and expulsion of Roma from their borders.
Perhaps if enough pressure from the international community comes
through, the governments will change their ways. Right now, Italy has
implemented very strong policies that call for all Roma to be registered
and fingerprinted, and for them to live in special government-sanctioned
camps or be exported. Naturally, the Rom are nervous about this because
none of them have forgotten the Holocaust, where we lost a quarter of our
population to the Nazi efforts to better their country. Well, the Italian
government is also doing this "for the betterment of the people" and that
sort of jargon naturally scares everyone involved. One of the biggest
problems is that very few people are paying attention to what's happening
to the Rom. Roma do not make their voices heard properly because part of
our culture is to be separate from non-Romani people to stay pure, so
appealing to the gadje for help is not something most Rom would do. Most
of the people in my family place very little faith in gadje laws, which
generally hurt them far more than help them. This is making things so
much worse, because they're suffering silently and very few people are
noticing or trying to help, so the governments are getting away with
these abhorrent human rights violations and people are allowed to go on
beating, persecuting, and murdering the Rom under the Italian laws urging
them to remove the gypsies from their country.
A lot of countries are implementing policies like these. The European
Roma Rights Centre has a lot of information about it here and this site from the European
Committee on Romani Emancipation is also good in explaining how the
prejudice against Rom is contributing to the societal problems that they
are supposedly discriminated against FOR. Page 33 of this PDF file
discusses actions that must be taken immediately to ensure the safety of
the Romani people in Italy (as well as detailing the whole situation in
the pages previous.)
I dropped a line to the embassies:
Embassy of Italy
3000 Whitehaven Street, N.W.
Washington, DC 20008
Tel.: (202) 612-4400
Fax: (202) 518-2151
Embassy of Romania
ATTN:
1607 23rd Street, NW
Washington, D.C. 20008 USA
You can find the thread here
It's going to start with a more tolerant generation of children I think,
and there needs to be tougher laws barring teachers from allowing kids to
beat up on the Rom and chase them out of school. People tell their
children that the Rom are bad, so they turn around and beat up on the
kids and chase them away and it creates another generation of Roma with
very few options in life while everyone else has already built up their
intolerance towards the Rom and are no longer open to seeing them
differently. In America, I think more people need to realize what's going
on. I know everyone hates the U.S. for meddling, but I don't think it's a
bad idea to write to the Romanian and Italian governments in particular
and express outrage against their blatantly anti-gypsy policies that
encourage the violent arrest and expulsion of Roma from their borders.
Perhaps if enough pressure from the international community comes
through, the governments will change their ways. Right now, Italy has
implemented very strong policies that call for all Roma to be registered
and fingerprinted, and for them to live in special government-sanctioned
camps or be exported. Naturally, the Rom are nervous about this because
none of them have forgotten the Holocaust, where we lost a quarter of our
population to the Nazi efforts to better their country. Well, the Italian
government is also doing this "for the betterment of the people" and that
sort of jargon naturally scares everyone involved. One of the biggest
problems is that very few people are paying attention to what's happening
to the Rom. Roma do not make their voices heard properly because part of
our culture is to be separate from non-Romani people to stay pure, so
appealing to the gadje for help is not something most Rom would do. Most
of the people in my family place very little faith in gadje laws, which
generally hurt them far more than help them. This is making things so
much worse, because they're suffering silently and very few people are
noticing or trying to help, so the governments are getting away with
these abhorrent human rights violations and people are allowed to go on
beating, persecuting, and murdering the Rom under the Italian laws urging
them to remove the gypsies from their country.
A lot of countries are implementing policies like these. The European
Roma Rights Centre has a lot of information about it here and this site from the European
Committee on Romani Emancipation is also good in explaining how the
prejudice against Rom is contributing to the societal problems that they
are supposedly discriminated against FOR. Page 33 of this PDF file
discusses actions that must be taken immediately to ensure the safety of
the Romani people in Italy (as well as detailing the whole situation in
the pages previous.)
I dropped a line to the embassies:
Embassy of Italy
3000 Whitehaven Street, N.W.
Washington, DC 20008
Tel.: (202) 612-4400
Fax: (202) 518-2151
Embassy of Romania
ATTN:
1607 23rd Street, NW
Washington, D.C. 20008 USA
You can find the thread here