Romania

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.

Source: Times

At the end of a potholed road lies the village to which a hundred Romanians are returning after fleeing racist attacks in Belfast and where their fear will soon turn to despair.

Twenty hours of journey time separate Belfast, via Dublin and Budapest, from Batar but, surveying the medieval conditions in which the Roma live here, one might do better to take as a measure of distance not years, nor even decades, but centuries.

On the farthermost margins of the European Union a man’s legs and arms were smeared with dirt as he toiled to make bricks from straw and mud to build another room on his home. It was, he said, to provide somewhere to sleep for the dozens of naked children — some of them malnourished, all of them filthy — who were running and swooping gleefully through the scattered rubbish.

Elderly couples sat on upturned buckets and tired old horses pulled carts while older children rode scrap-salvaged bicycles. No sanitation, a rudimentary electricity supply and the background hum of hunger and hopelessness completed the picture.

The community of Pata Rat

The inhabitants of the small community of Pata Rat are mostly unemployed and make a living by doing small jobs and recycling waste. The only source of water is a single pump in the street, AFP reports.

Face blackened by 35 years spent on a rubbish dump on the outskirts of Cluj, Marin Varga waits for a local recycling company to peruse the few valuable objects he found that morning in the trash. "Things couldn't be worse," says this 47-year-old man, who looks at least 10 years older, with a sigh.

In his cart, attached to an emaciated horse, are his day's finds: a few broken computers, springs from an old couch and tangled cables, all thrown into a pile.

"We live one day at a time," says Varga, who shares a rundown shack with three generations of his family -- 13 people in total -- in the middle of the Pata-Rat dump in this northwestern Romanian town.

His children do not go to school. "They have to help us dig in the rubbish," he says.

Roma still discriminated

The Roma situation in EU countries is a problem that is still waiting to be solved. European institutions are moving slowly, despite the fact that at all levels clear positions were expressed. Meanwhile, according to an European poll recently published, half of the Roma declare themselves discrimination victims regarding the employment, housing and education, and a quarter of them says that they were victims of aggression, threats or harassment during the last 12 months.

According to the Eu-Midis poll of the EU, Romania discriminates Roma least from all European countries. The highest Roma discrimination is in the Czech Republic, Hungary, Poland, Greece, Slovakia, Bulgaria and Romania. These are the countries where the poll was made, but they are representative countries because here live most of the Roma. One from two interviewed Roma, felt discriminated in the past 12 months.

Romanians discriminate: in the private services sector, when employing or even at work, in the social assistance services and in schools.

[In September 1993], the resentment of ethnic Romanians and Hungarians against the Gypsies who live [in the community] exploded into a racial battle and lynching. It was one of many eruptions in Romania [that took place] since the overthrow of the Communist Government nearly four years [earlier and] allowed some long-repressed feelings to come to light.

Interviews with officials and Gypsy leaders in Bucharest as well as with local officials, Gypsy families and the investigating prosecutor in Tirgu Mures, the county seat, produced agreement on these basic facts:

Location

The Tragedy of HadareniHadareni

Romania

46° 42' 7.9272" N, 24° 43' 9.2568" E