Slovakia, formerly a part of Czechoslovakia, became an independent state in 1993. At that time, the transition to a market economy which started after the “Velvet Revolution” of 1989 was already under way. One of the first effects of the process was mass unemployment, which started at a meager 1.6% in 1990, but grew to almost 12% by 1991 and reached a historic high of 19.2% in 2001.

The Roma minority, which has been living in present-day Slovakia for centuries, was especially affected by the economic transformation. Under the Stalinist regime (1948 – 1989), many of them occupied unskilled positions in agriculture, manufacturing and construction. The regime pursued various paternalistic social policies intended to fully integrate them into the economy and forcibly assimilate them into the Stalinist version of a “civil society”.

On the one hand, these authoritarian policies included forcible dispersion of the Roma communities among the population, compulsory wage work, the promoting of sterilization as a form of planned parenthood among Roma women, and the education of many of their children, irrespective of their abilities, in “special schools” intended for intellectually disabled children. On the other hand, the policies led to increases in urbanization, literacy rates and life expectancy. The single-party state also suppressed open racism in employment relations or public culture. One of the goals of the Stalinist regime was to completely do away with Roma settlements in the countryside (some of which lacked sanitation) by 1990 and to provide their former inhabitants with the kind of standardized housing that had become symbolic of the former Eastern bloc.

With the fall of the regime, such centrally planned policies were abandoned. Collectivized agriculture and state businesses were quickly privatized or went bankrupt. Roma workers, many of them unskilled or less qualified, were some of the first to face mass layoffs. Racism and discrimination (including from the police), which went hand in hand with rising Slovak nationalism that led to the dissolution of Czechoslovakia, came back with a vengeance.

Many Roma people found themselves out of work, unable to find any new jobs, and in a more and more precarious housing situation. Therefore, the population of Roma settlements, including ones that are geographically segregated and lack basic amenities, swelled during the 1990s. By 2004, the unemployment rate was 51% among Roma women and a staggering 72% among Roma men. Put briefly, most of the Roma were among the defeated in the transformation process.

The welfare cuts of 2003

After a period of nepotist transition under Vladimír Mečiar, Slovakia resumed the process of integration into the world market and transnational political structures. In the 1998 election, a left-right coalition government led by Mikuláš Dzurinda toppled Mečiar with broad popular support. It opened the country to foreign investment and introduced some reforms, including in the labor market. In 2002, it was replaced by a more openly right-wing government (led, again, by Mikuláš Dzurinda), which introduced a flat tax and implemented a series of “neoliberal” reforms in welfare, health care, education, the pension system, public transportation, and labor legislation.

The reform of the welfare system (passed in 2003, effective since February 2004) included elements of “workfare” and steep cuts in welfare provisions to the unemployed. These could reduce an unemployed family’s income by 22 to 53%. Poor Roma families were among the most affected by these measures.

The protests

At the beginning of February 2004, as the unemployed all over Slovakia received official notices from the government informing them of the changes, demonstrations broke out in the southeastern and eastern parts in Slovakia. On February 11, the first supermarket was looted by about 80 people in the historical town of Levoča. In the following days, the protests quickly spread to at least 42 towns and villages. Some took the form of peaceful assemblies and demonstrations, others involved the looting of supermarkets and grocery stores and clashes with the police.

The media quickly reported on the alcohol and cigarettes that the looters allegedly were most keen on. Less reported were banners like “We want work, not food stamps” and “We’ve had enough of capitalism”, or the fact that some of the early, peaceful protests were also attended by unemployed members of the “white” majority. Unfortunately, the media operation succeeded in establishing the image of hordes of barbarians asking for “free stuff”. After all, such a view was fully in line with the dominant racist discourse. As a result, the protesters had little support, if any, from the general population – even though the total unemployment rate stood at about 18% and the various reforms were generally disliked and opposed by trade unions.

The reaction

At first, the government denied any link between the unrest and the welfare reform. Only as the protests spread did officials admit that some of the municipalities were inadequately prepared to provide “activation jobs” (i.e., mostly unskilled jobs, often in community service, as part of “workfare”) to the unemployed. As the protests turned into looting, the government quickly became nervous and decided to clamp down.

In the largest police and armed forces operation since 1989, over 2000 troops were mobilized and sent to the affected regions. Army helicopters patrolled some of the demonstrations. The most significant confrontation occurred on 23 February 2004 in Trebišov (southeastern Slovakia), where police attacked an “unauthorized” Roma demonstration, attended by about 400 people. Using teargas and, in the freezing February cold, water cannons (reportedly for the first time since 1989), they pushed the protesters out of the town center.

Early next morning, around 240 policemen attacked a settlement the protesters were suspected to live in. Conducting house-to-house searches without providing any form of warrant or authorization, they beat people (including pregnant women, children, and persons with disabilities) using batons and electric cattle prods, leaving burns on their skin. During the 12-hour raid, up to 40 people were detained, only to be further abused while in custody.

Using force where necessary, the unrest was subdued in all of Slovakia by March 2004. In total, 200 Roma people were arrested (111 of them women), of which 42 were later convicted.

The impact

Although the protests failed to develop into a real movement and were swiftly defeated by brute force, they shook the country and had a lasting impact. Soon afterwards, the government made important concessions. It increased the so-called activation benefits by 50%, introduced scholarships and various subsidies for pupils and students from poor families, and increased funding for placement opportunities for the unemployed.

These changes affected all of the unemployed in Slovakia, regardless of their ethnicity. By putting up a fight and bearing the brunt of inevitable repression, the Roma unemployed, these losers of the transformation process, managed to secure at least somewhat better conditions for all.

This article is dedicated to the more than 70 000 of our working class brothers and sisters living in segregated settlements across Slovakia (as of 2013).

Source: Libcom.org

Date: 11.05.2023

Liberty has warned that the Government’s new criminal justice legislation risks stifling dissent, criminalising Gypsy and Traveller communities, and subjecting marginalised communities to profiling and even more disproportionate policing.

The Policing, Crime, Sentencing and Courts Bill, announced today (9 March), introduces a raft of eye-catching changes to the criminal justice system. These changes include dangerous measures including restrictions on protest, new stop and search powers, a “Prevent-style” duty on knife crime, and a move to criminalise trespass.

Gracie Bradley, Liberty Director, said: “It’s a primary duty of Government to ensure that our communities are safe and free. But parts of this Bill will facilitate discrimination and undermine protest, which is the lifeblood of a healthy democracy. We should all be able to stand up for what we believe in, yet these proposals would give the police yet more powers to clamp down on protest. They risk stifling dissent and making it harder for us to hold the powerful to account.

“If enacted, these proposals would expose already marginalised communities to profiling and disproportionate police powers through the expansion of stop and search, and Gypsy, Roma and Traveller communities may face increased police enforcement through the criminalisation of trespass.

“While we are still in the grip of a pandemic that has changed all our lives and handed enormous powers to the Government, it is shocking that this executive has chosen now to launch such a broad assault on our rights under the guise of safer communities.

“We must reject the politics of division that the Government is proposing through this Bill, and protect each other and our ability to stand up to power.”

Source: Liberty

Date: 21.03.2021

On May 16th, 1944, the Auschwitz-Birkenau concentration camp saw a spark. That spark set a whole continent aflame.

That day, SS Guards surrounded the Zigeunerlager, or “Gypsy Camp,” at Auschwitz II–Birkenau with machine guns, ready to liquidate the camp and murder nearly 7,000 people.

The Roma and Sinti prisoners, however, despite being engulfed by the daily reality of death in the camp, chose life. When the SS commando unit called for Roma and Sinti to leave the residential blocks, they were met with prisoners who refused to come out, barricading the doors and fashioning work tools, handcuffs, knives, and rocks into weapons.

Romani Holocaust survivor Hugo Hollenreiner recalled his father shouting, “We’re not coming out! You come in here! We’re waiting here! If you want something, you have to come inside!” The SS unit called an end to the stand-off and retreated, and the “Gypsy Camp” at Birkenau maintained their survival until August 2nd.

After many of the Roma and Sinti prisoners fit for labour were moved to Auschwitz or other concentration camps, the nearly 3,000 remaining—comprised of mostly the sick, elderly, and children—were slaughtered in the gas chambers. The Roma and Sinti victims of the Holocaust have been estimated from 220,000-500,000 (with some scholars estimating upwards of 1.5 million). In some countries, like the Czech Republic, 90 per cent of the Romani population perished under the Nazi regime.

This radical act of resistance by the Roma and Sinti prisoners of Auschwitz-Birkenau became memorialized as Romani Resistance Day. This event, along with many others that have become the pulse of Romani cultural and self-preservation, stands starkly against a continued narrative that Romani people are agentless victims, objects to act violently against, a focus of pity.

As an early modern race studies scholar, I am constantly working to read against the archive for fragments of subjectivity, agency, and resistance, careful not to conflate these individual concepts. I follow scholar Alexander Weheliye’s call in his book Habeas Viscus to “[bracket] questions of agency and resistance” when it comes to people of colour, “since they obfuscate—and not in a productive way—the textures of enfleshment, that is, the modes of being which outlive the dusk of the law and the dawn of political violence”; in other words, they cannot give us the full picture when it comes to oppressed people.

Despite this desire to bracket agency and resistance from the notion of subjectivity, the nature of the early modern archive often refuses this gesture. As far as I know, the early modern English archives do not have any documents written by a Romani writer: there are court cases with interviews, a recording of Romani language as “Egyptian” in proto-ethnographic texts, but no unmediated Romani voices.

State archives and private collections, thus, only have white voices weaving tales about Gypsies. Some of these tales are romantic and outlandish, some show obvious disdain and fear, some are clearly strategic political narratives to bolster a project of the citizen. While there are quite literally thousands upon thousands of 16thand 17th century English materials on Gypsies, they tell the reader more about the white English writer’s subjectivity and identity than they do about Romani history.

Yet despite the structures and content of the archive, glimpses of Romani resistance to state oppression can be found. Historian David Cressy has noted that early modern Romani people produced counterfeit pardons and seals to dupe government officials, thwarting the threat of death. In his article “Trouble with Gypsies,” Cressy claims, “wandering Gypsies found a friend, or at least an accomplice, in Richard Massey, a Cheshire schoolmaster, who used his literacy to forge licenses and passports that purportedly authorized their travel.”

“Massey’s fake licenses showed up among Gypsies as far south as the Thames Valley,” he writes, adding: “There was evidently a black market in documents and seals, that some Gypsies exploited to fool gullible officials.” When we consider the legal conditions that made these black-market documents necessary—and the punishment if caught travelling through England—these fake licenses can be seen as textual talismans of survival and freedom.

These otherwise banal events, therefore, show a glimmer of agency and resistance in a vast archive that recapitulates the detrimental idea that “Gypsies” are monstrous swarms bent on destroying England—or, as Thomas Dekker put it in 1608 in his Lantern and Candlelight, “caterpillars of the commonwealth.”

These events, of course, get recorded as “criminal activity”—a sentiment that is often reiterated in scholarship about Romani people. But, in the numerous countries in Europe that had early modern anti-Gypsy legislation like England’s Egyptians Act 1530 and Egyptians Act 1554, the very notion of being Romani while living in those countries was inherently criminal, potentially punishable by death. In many of these countries, these state-sanctioned murder laws were not appealed until the late 19th century. In some places, laws existed even later: in Nazi Germany, as we have seen, Roma and Sinti people were legally subjected to torture and death.

Even today, anti-Romani structural and legal racism is not just a relic of the past. Romani people all over Europe are fighting to gain or maintain their civil rights in the wake of state-sanctioned violence and ethno-nationalist regimes that use Romani people as scapegoats for economic decline and immigration issues.

These fights take different forms—in countries like France and the Czech Republic, for instance, Romani people are fighting for the right to desegregated public education. Conversations around immigration control in the UK, Sweden, Denmark, and France (among many other countries, including the US and Canada) have gestured towards the “Gypsy problem”—a narrative which Roma communities must fight against. Throughout Europe, Roma are fighting for the law to protect them and seeking justice for the countless murders that go un-investigated.

Even Holocaust memorials have become sites of political resistance, with concentration camps like Lety the focus of renewed anti-Romani white nationalism. To continue to live and produce intellectual, political, artistic, and cultural work in these conditions is a radical act of resistance.

Yet despite my celebration of Romani Resistance Day, and of the multiple modes in which Romani people express resistance against the paradigms that wish to exploit and destroy them, as a Roma woman, I yearn for a world in which this resistance was no longer a necessary part of our survival. I fight—we all fight—so that our people can one day thrive, not just survive, in a world which does not criminalize our existence.

I fight to live in a world in which our cultural contributions, our intellectual property, and our lives can be recognized as valuable and necessary, for a world in which our subjectivity is not predicated on reactions to political and spectacular violence. I fight because I love my people.

Source: Prospect

Date: 16.05.2020

On International Roma Day this year, Amnesty International calls on the government of Slovakia to ensure that human rights are at the centre of any COVID-19 response measures. Amnesty International is seriously concerned that conducting targeted testing in Roma settlements without providing Roma the necessary means to protect themselves will only add to stigmatisation and prejudice they already face.

View report in English

The European Environmental Bureau (EEB), a pan-European network of green NGOs, found Roma communities were often excluded from basic services, such as piped drinking water, sanitation and rubbish collection, while frequently living at or near some of the dirtiest sites in Europe, such as landfills or contaminated industrial land.

As many as 10 million Roma people live in Europe, including 6 million in EU member states. While their social exclusion has been long documented, EEB researchers say denial of basic services and exposure to pollution has been overlooked.

The EEB, in collaboration with researchers in central and eastern Europe, found 32 cases of “environmental racism” in five European countries: Hungary, Bulgaria, Romania, Slovakia and North Macedonia. The researchers also drew on existing work on living conditions of Roma people in Bosnia and Herzegovina, Serbia, Montenegro and Kosovo.

Absence of water, sanitation and rubbish collection were problems in more than half the case studies, such as Stolipinovo in Bulgaria, Europe’s largest Roma settlement and part of the city of Plovdiv. About 60,000 people are estimated to live in the district, but many are cut off from piped water and sanitation services from the rest of Plovdiv, a European capital of culture in 2019.

In Hungary, access to the public water supply for some Roma communities was shut down during summer heatwaves – decisions affecting 800 people in Gulács in August 2017 and 1,500 inhabitants of Huszártelep in 2013. The northern Hungarian city of Ózd received nearly €5.5m (£4.8m) from Switzerland to improve provision of running water to Roma communities, but researchers said many had not benefited from the scheme. Authorities claimed Roma households did not pay their bills.

Previous research concluded that only about 12% of Roma communities had functioning flush toilets and drainage systems.

One vivid example of the desperate conditions Roma people can find themselves living in is Pata-Rât, on the outskirts of Cluj-Napoca in Romania’s north-west, known for its gothic architecture and baroque palaces.

At Pata-Rât about 2,000 Roma people live next to or on a landfill site. “It’s horrifying,” said the Roma rights activist Ciprian Nodis, who has visited several times. “It’s similar to what you can see in the favelas of Rio de Janeiro. People are living in extreme poverty with no access to utilities, no access to electricity, water. They live in improvised shelters made from recyclable materials that they find on the landfill – cardboard, or rotten wood, or things like that. Most of them work in the landfill.”

He identified four separate Roma communities living at Pata-Rât: the first group came in the 1960s, and the most recent arrivals in 2013 when Roma residents of Cluj-Napoca were evicted from the city centre. The least fortunate of the four communities live on the landfill itself, where the air, water and soil is deeply polluted. “It’s a living hell, especially for the children who are born there. It’s bad luck to be born in Pata-Rât,” Nodis said.

But Pata-Rât is not even exceptional. Researchers identified more Roma communities living on or next to landfill sites at Fakulteta, near Sofia. On the outskirts of the Transylvanian city of Turda, Roma families live on a former industrial site contaminated with mercury. Unsurprisingly Roma people in the 32 case studies were vulnerable to respiratory and infectious diseases, accidents and depression.

Meanwhile Roma communities not living on degraded land risk eviction, without legal recourse. About 100 Roma people living in Constanƫa in Romania were forced to move to allow for the creation of a holiday resort.

Patrizia Heidegger, one of the report’s authors and the director of global policies and sustainability at the EEB, said the 32 cases were only the tip of the iceberg.

Denial of basic services persisted, despite Roma communities having being settled in the same villages and cities for many years. Absence of water or sanitation was “not due to not having lived in the place for a long time. It’s really total neglect of neighbourhoods with Roma populations.”

The problem was compounded as Roma communities were often blamed for the pollution and land degradation, she said. “They are perceived as the environmental problem and not as communities that are disproportionately affected by exposure to pollution or the non-provision of environmental services, which then leads to the degradation of their environment.

Roma communities faced huge prejudices, she said, citing attitudes such as “‘they don’t care about a clean environment, they don’t care where they live, they work in waste dumps anyhow so they live there.’ These are racist prejudices.”

The EEB is now calling on EU authorities and member states to increase efforts to protect health, while urging them to recognise the scale of the problem. “We need to acknowledge that environmental racism exists in Europe. That is the first step,” Heidegger said.

Source: The Guardian

Date: 15.04.2020

Many of the 10-12 million Roma in Europe still suffer from poverty and exclusion. The existence of widespread anti-Gypsyism reinforces and aggravates their economic and social deprivation. These inequalities persist despite ongoing efforts at national, European, and international level to tackle anti-Roma and anti-Traveller prejudice, discrimination and crimes.

This year’s International Roma Day is celebrated at a time when the world mobilises to combat the spread of the COVID-19 virus and European countries have adopted exceptional measures.As a consequence, everyday life is being transformed for many people in ways we had never believed possible.

Governments need to be supported by all in the management of this crisis, and they must be free to decide on the necessary measures. However, all measures must respect the existing European human rights framework, including the principles of equality and non-discrimination.

“I am concerned”, says Marija Pejčinović Burić,“by reports that some European countries have adopted measures that could result in further compromising the human rights of Roma and hampering their equitable access to the provision of basic public services, most importantly health care, sanitation and even fresh water. We are worried to learn that the provision of food aid and the disbursement of welfare benefits are endangered, and that some politicians blame Roma for the spread of the virus.”

Helena Dalli, European Commissioner for Equality, says: “Online hate speech and fake stories against Roma people are again on the rise. Many Roma in Europe continue to face anti-Gypsyism, discrimination and socio-economic exclusion in their daily lives – despite EU and national rules against discrimination. Negative stereotypes and prejudices are still very much present in our society. This is why the Commission will present a reinforced strategy for Roma equality and inclusion in European society.

Greater efforts must be put in place now to ensure that Roma people are included in society and that they have equal access to the basic needs, thus ensuring their protection against infection. We need to stand united. The only way to overcome the crisis is by working together. If there can be anything more contagious than a virus, it is our solidarity. Europeans need to stand up for each other now.”

In these challenging times, we call for particular efforts by member states to ensure that marginalised groups and ethnic minorities, in particular Roma, do not face additional disadvantage, discrimination, hate speech or hate crime.

We call on all European countries to comply with the standards of the European Convention on Human Rights and the European Social Charter by stepping up their support for marginalised groups, and to do their utmost to prevent national or ethnic minorities, in particular Roma, from becoming scapegoats in the current crisis.

We urge governments to ensure equal access to the provision of public services, which in times of a pandemic also includes the provision of food, clean water, as well as basic means of hygiene and health protection.

The new Council of Europe Strategic Action Plan for Roma and Traveller Inclusion (2020-2025) and the EU’s forthcoming post-2020 Roma Strategy aim to promote and protect the human rights of Roma and Travellers in Europe, to combat anti-Gypsyism and discrimination, and to foster their social inclusion. They provide a conceptual framework for safeguarding democracy through equality and social cohesion in diverse European societies.

Source: Council of Europe

Date: 09.04.2020

Source: Georg Eckert Institute

Date: 06.04.2020

More than 70,000 people have been killed and hundreds of thousands left homeless by the civil war in Syria, spreading misery among all of the nation’s ethnic and religious groups. But one ethnic minority has undergone more than its share of suffering — both during the current fighting and for centuries preceding it — and few outside of Syria know much about it. The group is known as the Dom and it has been a presence in Syria since before the Ottoman Empire. Often mislabeled by the pejorative “gypsies,” the Dom get their name from their language, Domari, means “man.” They have joined the exodus of Christian, Muslim and other Syrians refugees into Jordan, Lebanon, Turkey and beyond. But wherever they go, they generally face a less than warm welcome. As one source told VOA, „They are the most despised people in the Middle East.“

Who are the Dom?

Misunderstood and complicated, Dom have been present in the Middle East for at least a thousand years. Most information about them is gleaned from their language, Domari, an Indic variation. It is similar to Romani, the language of the European Roma, suggesting their common roots in India. Both Roma and Domari are peppered with words borrowed from other languages, reflecting their history of migration through Iran and elsewhere. Beyond that, little of their origin is known—or agreed upon by scholars. During the Ottoman period, Dom migrated freely throughout the Middle East as “commercial” nomads, providing services to communities wherever they settled. The fall of the Ottoman Empire following World War I led to the formation of nation states with proper borders, which greatly curtailed Dom movements. Locals in Syria, as elsewhere in the region, call the Dom Nawar — a word likely derived from “fire,” referring to their traditional work as blacksmiths. But over the years, the word “Nawar” has evolved into a pejorative, connoting someone who is uneducated and uncivilized. They also differentiate Dom by the region in which they live and the work they perform. In Aleppo and Idlib, the Dom are called Qurbat and work as blacksmiths or untrained dentists. The so-called Riyass live in Homs and Hama, where they sell handicrafts or entertain at parties. Dom women, dubbed Hajiyat, might dance in Damascus nightclubs, beg or tell fortunes.

The numbers

It is almost impossible to estimate Syria’s Dom population, as they often conceal their identity out of fear of being stigmatized. SIL International’s Ethnologue estimates 37,000 Syrian Dom speak Domari, alongside Arabic.But the Syrian newspaper, Kassioun, reported twice that number in 2010. Kemal Vural Tarlan is a photographer, documentarian, writer and activist who focuses, he says, on those who live on the sidelines of society, chiefly Dom and Roma. He also authors the Middle East Gypsies website. He says Dom are viewed as outsiders and intruders, therefore they are almost universally discriminated against. So they often hide their ethnic backgrounds through what they call the skill of “invisibility,” which helps them move into and out of communities. “The official Dom population could be much higher than estimated, because so many Dom describe themselves as Kurdish, Arab or Turkmen,” Tarlan said. Whatever the number, he says more Dom live in Syria than anywhere else in the Middle East.

Dom refugees in Turkey

Turkey has been home to “gypsies” since Byzantine times, and in 2005 the UNHCR estimated a Roma/Dom population of 500,000. Kemal Tarlan has spent much time in recent weeks near the border documenting the influx of Dom from Syria. He believes as many as 10,000 to 20,000 Dom have settled in southern Turkish towns such as Kilis, Gazientep and Şanlıurfa. “İnitially, some were able to register in proper refugee camps,” Tarlan said, “but now they cannot get into camps, because they are full.” Some Dom have gone to live with families in the cities. Those with no place to go live as nomads in tents. Tarlan says they receive little assistance from the government, so in order to survive, they beg or work in the fields. “But the majority are unemployed,” he said, and this has given rise to local tensions. Recently, after citizens of Şanlıurfa started to complain about a rise in petty theft, Turkish authorites dismantled and burned a makeshift tent city. The media referred to the campers as “Syrians.” But Tarlan says most were Dom.

Into Lebanon

With Beirut only about 65 miles away, many Dom from Damascus have fled into Lebanon. Catherine Mourtada is co-founder of Tahaddi (“Challenge”), a non-governmental assistance group that serves Beirut’s underprivileged, many of whom are Dom. “They are excluded from the normal school systems, either because they don’t meet admission requirements or because public schools are full. „So they come to our place,” Mourtada said. Mourtada has seen increasing numbers of Dom from Syria, looking to stay with their Lebanese relatives. “Already, they are very poor, and now they must welcome other very poor members of their family coming from Syria, so it is very hard for them.They are all living in dire conditions,” she said. “They can’t find any work except for recycling things from the garbage dump, like aluminum or iron or cardboard, just to be able to survive.” In some cases, Beirut Dom are forced turn their Syrian relatives away. “So they have to find a room somewhere to rent. They are lucky if they can get a bathroom or running water,” Mourtada said. Because there are no official refugee camps in Lebanon like those built in Jordan and Turkey, Mourtada says Dom have begun to settled in tent cities in the Bekaa Valley.

Into Jordan

In 1999, Amoun Sleem founded the Domari Society of Gypsies, a cultural and educational center in the East Jerusalem neighborhood of Shu’fat. Herself a Dom, she says she has first-hand experience with discrimination, cultural marginalization and poverty that most Dom face as a result of illiteracy. “Whenever disaster strikes in the Middle East, no one gives a thought to how it will impact the Dom,” she said. Sleem says she has received word that many Dom refugees are living at or near the Zaatari camp in Mafraq, Jordan. She has been trying to get a permit to visit the camp, but has run into a lot of red tape.In the meantime, she is trying to encourage Jordanian Dom families to host the refugees. “It’s not very easy,” she said, “but if it could happen, it would be a very good thing.”

Source: Voa News
Date: 03.12.2018

In Tarlabaşı, Istanbul’s oldest slum, a tiny community centre offers a crucial place of safety and support for the shunned Syrian Dom community. But as the city gentrifies, there are fears these refugees may become victims once again

On the north-western corner of Istanbul’s famous Taksim Square, a small gang of children dart through the traffic, tapping on car windows and trying to catch the attention of passers-by to sell bottles of water. These Syrian Gypsy children from a community known as the Dom are in many ways the forgotten faces of the Middle East crisis, which has left an estimated 26,000 refugee children homeless across Europe. The Dom speak a separate language which traces back to the Indian subcontinent; even in times of peace they have always existed on the fringes of society, and are used to facing almost universal discrimination.Before war broke out, there were up to 300,000 Dom living in Syria. Now many live on the streets of Istanbul’s ghettos, part of the approximately 366,000 Syrian refugees seeking a new life in the Turkish city. Many reside in Tarlabaşı, Istanbul’s oldest slum. It is just a few streets from the ornate splendour of İstiklal Caddesi, the nearby avenue of sultans that once saw Istanbul dubbed “the Paris of the East”. But life in Tarlabaşı is very different: it has become known as a haven for Istanbul’s minority communities of migrants, Gypsies, transsexuals, prostitutes, and the outcasts of society.

Even here, however, the Dom children are despised. Other Syrian refugees and local Turks refuse to associate with them. When asked why, Ilyas, a shopkeeper who asked for his full name to not be used when speaking about the Dom, simply comments: “It is a prejudice, yes. I can’t explain it though. I just don’t like their complexion.” But one organisation is trying to help. Based in a tiny flat of no more than 70 sq metres, Tarlabaşı Toplum Merkezi (TTM) is a non-profit community centre started a decade ago by Istanbul Bilgi University’s Centre for Migration Research, and initially funded by the European Union. Run by four full-time employees and a small army of volunteer teachers, lawyers and even musicians, it provides educational support, psychological and legal counselling for nearly 5,000 children and 3,000 adults in Tarlabaşı. It exists as a place of safety and comfort; a way out from the deprivation and crime which pervades this sector of Istanbul.

For hundreds of years, Tarlabaşı’s narrow, winding streets were a peaceful home to non-Muslim diplomats and later Greek merchants who served the business district around İstiklal Caddesi. But as religious tensions rose through the mid-20th century, the Turkish government launched organised pogroms targeting non-Muslims in the city – the most notorious of which was the Turkish Kristallnacht of September 1955. In the ensuing violence, homes and shops were looted and destroyed. Over the following decades, those abandoned buildings were gradually filled by Gypsies known locally as “Roman”, and by refugees fleeing the Turkish-Kurdish civil war in the late 1980s. The construction of a six-lane boulevard which segregated the neighbourhood from Istanbul’s wealthy tourist district sealed Tarlabaşı’s fate. “Violence, drug issues and prostitution is definitely more visible here than anywhere else in the city,” says Ebru Ergün, a psychologist who has worked at the centre for the past five years. “The boulevard is one of the causes of that. It intensified the stigma surrounding this area and made it into a slum.”

Many of the children of Tarlabaşı fail to complete primary school before ending up as beggars or labourers, relying on state-run social services that provide little more than free lunches and sacks of coal. The Dom children, though, don’t even make it as far as school. “They live in awful conditions,” says Ceren Suntekin, a social worker at the centre. “They mostly beg or sell things near the tourist districts, and the police are quite violent towards them as they don’t suit the image that Istanbul is trying to create. The Roman mostly collect garbage on the street, sell flowers, or play music at clubs. They struggle to break out of this life because when they go to school, teachers discriminate against them and they don’t have the environment to study in when they come back home.” The TTM centre provides Turkish lessons to children and adults alike, so Tarlabaşı’s many Syrian and Kurdish residents can find jobs, earn a living, or even continue in education. Hasan Kizillar, 19, grew up in the local Roman community but learnt to play the violin, piano and other instruments in the centre’s orchestra. Now he works as a volunteer himself, teaching music to children, while preparing to study finance at Istanbul University. “He came from a very poor family,” Ergün says. “But like many Roman children, he was highly talented. We’re also slowly making progress with persuading families to allow girls to be educated, and running classes on literacy and gender equality.”

Most importantly of all, the centre is a place where those in trouble can seek help. Domestic abuse cases are commonplace in Tarlabaşı, and Ergün describes the centre’s recent attempts to aid a family of migrants where the mother and her two daughters had been beaten and sexually abused by the father for many years. “They were coming to us regularly,” she says. “We tried for a long time to persuade the mother to go to a shelter, and eventually she did. We found her a lawyer and now her husband is arrested and the children are safe. We’ve helped the woman find a job as her husband hadn’t allowed her to work; now she’s no longer dependent, we hope it will be a better life for them.” But this support network may not exist for much longer. Tarlabaşı is undergoing considerable change. Over the past few years, Turkish president Recep Tayyip Erdogan has outlined an infrastructure agenda worth in the region of $100bn, and Tarlabaşı has been earmarked for urban transformation. Billboards depicting future visions of the neighbourhood – chic young couples strolling past modern apartments, retail outlets and hotels – are strewn outside the many ongoing building projects. Many of the dilapidated 19th-century buildings that have served as homes for Istanbul’s poorest, meanwhile, are rapidly being demolished. When forced out, the inhabitants often receive a fraction of the market price.

Issam Saade, a 51-year-old Kurdish waiter who has lived in Tarlabaşı since the mid-90s, explains that after years of fighting to stay, he was evicted last autumn following a court order. “There is more money coming into Tarlabaşı but not for the people who live here now,” Saade says. Two years ago, Istanbul’s rapidly escalating rents almost saw the TTM centre close down, but with the help of donations from the US, UK, Sweden and Holland, its work has been able to continue – for the moment. “Because of the gentrification process taking place here to attract tourists, the state wants the refugees and migrants who live in Tarlabaşı to move away,” Ergün says. “Many of them have nowhere to go, but the state doesn’t care about that. “They will have to move to wherever they can afford, and when they go, we will have to go too. We hope we can follow them to a new location and continue to help. Our centre is one of the few places where it’s safe for children from these communities to play, and where women can discuss their problems. There’s nowhere else providing that.” And what about the very poorest of all, the Dom children who beg on the streets of Taksim Square, where will they go? “We don’t really know. And I don’t think they know either.”

Source: The Guardian
Date: 03.12.2018

Children from the ‚mysterious, tragic and despised‘ Dom Gypsy community fled the war in Syria only to find more danger begging on the streets of Istanbul.

Towards sunset on the busy north-west corner of Taksim Square, Nisreem, 7, and her raggedy gang of Dom Gypsy street kids grow excited as they prepare to spend the next six hours tapping on car windows and begging passersby to appreciate that they are Syrian war refugees. Nisreem speaks, but has an impossible time staying still. She is filthy with glassy eyes and fluffy reddish hair, telltale signs of malnutrition, which makes children restless and fidgety. Darting through traffic in the heart of Turkey’s biggest city, the rest of the gang try to act a bit more together. Drug addicts, prostitutes and Turkish police lurk nearby so the gang members often huddle together for security. For fun they sometimes sing and dance.

More than three years into the Syrian war nearly half the country’s population has been displaced, according to the Office of the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR). More than six million Syrians are internally on the move and more than three million have fled. Nisreem and the other Dom street kids face a more complicated fate than other Syrians who are more organised in their search for a safe haven. Scholars from the Budapest, Hungary-based European Roma Rights Centre, say the Dom, who are known as the Middle East Gypsies and speak a language traced back to the Indian subcontinent, are seen as “mysterious, tragic and despised”. The gang feels this. On their corner of Taksim Square they have worn down the grass by hanging out there and worn out their welcome by begging. Many who pass see their grubby fingers and slap them away.

Tonight the gang includes Zayneb, 6, and Little Ali, 5, who is as dirty and wild as Nisreem. Dunya is 11 and Amel, who tries her best to keep everyone in line, is 15. “Not everybody is mean to us but most people are. Some people give us food, but it is always junky food,” said Nisreem. In July, they escaped Aleppo, in northern Syria, before sneaking into Turkey with no paperwork. All year Aleppo has been the target of barrel bombs dropped by the Assad regime in a war that has already killed almost 200,000 people. Turkey is home to an estimated 1.5 million Syrian refugees and officials are scrambling to address the crisis. To say resources are strained is an understatement. Turkey has spent US$2.5 billion (Dh9.2bn) housing 200,000 refugees in 22 camps. But it has received only $175 million (Dh643m) in international support.

During the first two years of the war, Turks were seen as generous and supportive of Syrians. But as the war has dragged on, Turks have become increasingly angered at their presence. The Dom have always lived on the edge of society, says Kemal Vural Tarlan, a researcher of Dom populations in Gaziantep, Turkey, about 50 kilometres from the Syrian border. “They face universal discrimination. Other Syrians refugees in the official camps have demanded the Dom actually stay in different camps.” According to the Dom Research Centre, before the Syrian conflict an estimated 30,000 lived in Turkey, and as many as 300,000 lived in Syria, the largest Dom population of any Middle Eastern country. Researchers admit these population estimates are sketchy. Fearing discrimination, many Dom describe themselves as Arab, Kurdish or Turkmen and also very often use fake names. They also keep on the move.

After sunset, the gang went on the move as Nisreem dragged Little Ali from their Taksim corner to check on friends selling cold water nearby. Everyone else tumbled along in a tight knot of children. None of the refugees attend school, so the best thing to talk about is money. On a good night of begging, they can earn a total of about 40 Turkish Lira (Dh65). Most nights they only make 20 lira. Divided among the five of them, they each get 4 lira. When Amel and Nisreen find their pal Hamza, who is 11, they learn he has done better selling bottled water than begging. At night they return to a decrepit squatters apartment overflowing with other refugees. “The situation is very tragic for all refugees but for Domari refugees it is alarming,” said Sinan Gokcen of the European Roma Rights Centre. “They live in miserable conditions in informal camps or in abandoned buildings without access to water and proper sewage. Collecting paper and scrap metal are the main sources of income.”

The UNHCR recently said women and children make up 75 per cent of all Syrian war refugees, with 50 per cent of those under 18. The gang is mostly orphaned girls and daughters of war widows. There are few male Dom relatives around to protect them. Life for the Dom gang on the Istanbul streets can also be dangerous. On September 22, a windstorm caused six storeys of scaffolding to collapse where they always beg. Ten people were seriously injured, including one street kid.

Source: The National
Date: 03.12.2018