Kosovo Refugees

Some 10 years after the Kosovo conflict, thousands of Kosovar refugees – most of them from the Roma community – are set to return home, daily Süddeutsche Zeitung reported this week.

According to a parliamentary inquiry by the Left party into the matter, Berlin and Pristina plan to sign an agreement this autumn to send back the refugees, the paper said.

There are reportedly 14,000 Kosovar refugees in Germany, 10,000 of whom are Roma.

The agreement states that Kosovo must take all refugees back that can give proof they once lived in the disputed former Serbian territory. The Interior Ministry has apparently promised Kosovo to process 2,500 applications each year and maintain an “appropriate relationship to different ethnicities,” which implies they will not send only the persecuted Roma refugees home, the paper said.

Last year 900 Kosovar refugees returned to their homes from Germany.

The music is mournful, a painfully slow lament that evokes longing and loss.

There are slides – glissandi – between chords that pluck at the heartstrings as well, as if all of a people's suffering can be encapsulated in the notes of a song.

In a smoky cabaret, the audience is appreciative, even if the lyrics aren't understood.

But it has always been thus: The gypsy-entertainer, bohemian and romanticized; minstrels for their supper, valued for talents with the violin, the guitar, the lute, pan-pipes and castanets.

Perhaps, as musicians of distinct skills, they might even gain easier work-visa access to Canada. Why not? It worked for strippers. And it's a tactic that could get Roma around entry restrictions recently imposed anew against Czechs, a spate of asylum-seeking gypsies the clear target.

"The Canadian environment is extremely correct," observes Prague sociologist and researcher Ivan Gabal, with wry emphasis.

It is the first day of school. The children are well-scrubbed and neatly dressed. Some, the littlest and most excited, have their mothers in tow as they wait at the bus stop.

The bus pulls in. The doors fold open. The driver glares.

And forbids them from boarding.

"I don't take gypsies."

Moms, incensed, start to yell. Kids, confused and frightened, begin to cry. The driver, unmoved, slams shut the door and the bus rumbles off, leaving youngsters stricken and adults seared with shame.

Many of these children have just had their introductory lesson in what it means to be Roma – reviled and excluded – in this so-civilized country.

Ask the question: Why did 2,869 Czech Roma [arrive] at Toronto's Pearson airport between Oct. 2007 and June 2009, seeking asylum as alleged political refugees?

Here is an answer: Rust-belt Kladno – birthplace of NHL star Jaromir Jagr – a mining eyesore 25 kilometres northwest of cosmopolitan Prague, where gypsy children are unwelcome in public schools and on buses, where families live upwards of 10 to a single room in a dilapidated tenement building on the hardscrabble edge of town.

The Roma festival in the Transylvanian town of Sibiu felt like a carefree affair – the cobbled square of the old quarter filled with music and talk and late summer sun.

Dozens of Gypsies had gathered to play and sing and to sell their pottery, jewellery and metalwork to locals and tourists in this town in central Romania, whose medieval heart was renovated for its stint as European Capital of Culture in 2007.

With only a few policemen keeping a relaxed eye on proceedings, this was about as good as relations get between Gypsies and their neighbours in Romania and across eastern Europe, where discrimination against the continent’s largest ethnic minority is the norm, and violence is on the rise.

Far-right parties from Romania, Hungary, Slovakia and Bulgaria won seats in the European Parliament in June, and extremist attacks on Roma have intensified, with one Hungarian gang suspected of killing six Gypsies and injuring several more in the last year alone.

Four men suspected of carrying out deadly attacks against Gypsies have been arrested in eastern Hungary.

Jozsef Bencze, chief of the National Police, said evidence seized during raids Friday links the suspects to a series of killings, Voice of America reported. Most of them occurred in small villages largely inhabited by Gypsies, or Roma, the name they prefer.

On Saturday, police prevented the ultra-nationalist Hungarian Guard organization from holding an induction ceremony, the BBC said. The group scheduled the event on private property north of Budapest after it was refused permission to use Heroes' Square in the city.

Police greeted buses carrying black-uniformed members and began asking for identification papers.

Jobbik, a party with ties to the Hungarian Guard, won 15 percent of the vote in Hungary in recent European parliamentary elections. The party has called for a crackdown on crime by Roma.

At least six killings have targeted Roma in recent months. Earlier this month, a woman was killed and her daughter wounded by men who broke into their house as they slept.

Madonna performs during her concert in Bucharest

At first, fans politely applauded the Roma performers sharing a stage with Madonna. Then the pop star condemned widespread discrimination against Roma, or Gypsies — and the cheers gave way to jeers.

The sharp mood change that swept the crowd of 60,000, who had packed a park for Wednesday night's concert, underscores how prejudice against Gypsies remains deeply entrenched across Eastern Europe.

Despite long-standing efforts to stamp out rampant bias, human rights advocates say Roma probably suffer more humiliation and endure more discrimination than any other people group on the continent.

Sometimes, it can be deadly: In neighboring Hungary, six Roma have been killed and several wounded in a recent series of apparently racially motivated attacks targeting small countryside villages predominantly settled by Gypsies.

"There is generally widespread resentment against Gypsies in Eastern Europe. They have historically been the underdog," Radu Motoc, an official with the Soros Foundation Romania, said Thursday.

In spite of the recommendations of the EU institutions, in spite of the directives and the resolutions protecting the rights of the Roma people in the Member States, camp clearances without the offer of alternative housing or assistance and integration programmes are still underway in Italy.

The reassurances and praiseworthy promises made to the representatives of EveryOne Group by Gianfranco Fini, the President of the Italian Chambers of Deputies, and Alfredo Mantovano, the Undersecretary of State to the Ministry of the Interior, have remained in the limbo of good intentions, because the inhumane policies - comparable in every way to the ethnic cleansing programme carried out by the Nazi-fascists in the years of the racial laws - have never ceased.

Source: Anthony Cronin

A racially motivated attack against a Roma mother and her baby in Ireland was caught on film by professional photographer, Anthony Cronin, he describes what took place:

A group of Roma Gypsy women some with children, bustling down the footpath in a hurried fashion passed me by. Then my ears caught the sound of Irish teenage girls behind me, four of them shouting the likes of “dirty bastards” “filthy fuckers” “fuck of back to where you came from” at the Gypsies and chasing them. I turned to observe the scene and seconds later over my head started to fly rotten fruit the Irish had picked off the ground. The Roma woman with the baby in the picture bravely stopped to challenge them after she was hit by some fruit. Shocked at this racism, but not expecting what was to happen, I reached for the camera that was hanging around my neck and focused on the brave Roma lady, thinking I might get an interesting shot of her emotion.