Gypsy artists are coming to town

Published Date: 29 May 2009

TOP gypsy artists are coming to Doncaster to mark the second national Gypsy Roma Traveller History month.

The Baro Ziro Big Time Festival will be running for a week in June as part of the Hothouse arts programme, and will taken place at three venues across the borough - including a traditional circus tent in Chequer Road's Arts Park.

The main marquee line-up will feature entertainment from world music chart-toppers, KAL, Czech Eurovision entry Gypsy CZ and the rarely seen traveller music legend Ambrose Coop and Family.

There will be tales of life on the road with the UK's leading traveller storyteller, Richard O'Neill, an evening of performance, tunes and stories directed by the internationally acclaimed theatre director Alan Lyddiard, and a special screening of Shane Meadows' iconic film King of the Gypsies.
The gallery at The Point, on South Parade, will play host to the creation of an installation by renowned British traveller artists Delaine and Damian Le Bas, and British Traveller photographer Patricia Knight will bring her exhibition to Cusworth Hall.

Baro Ziro runs from Saturday June 13 to Saturday June 20. Tickets are available from the Doncaster Civic Theatre box office on 01302 342349

Gypsies, citizens without rights

Friday 22 May 2009

FRANCE 24’s reporter went to meet gypsies in Russia. Considered second class citizens, they are victims of numerous discriminations. This report was filmed in Chudovo, south of Saint-Petersburg.

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Anger at travellers' camp

Travellers set up camp in a field near Newent despite a last-minute council attempt to stop them.

A dozen families arrived at the field on Friday and worked around the clock to make the site their home.

They laid a hard surface, put up portable toilets, dug a cesspit and 12 separate plots were fenced off.

It is understood the site is privately owned by one or more of the travelling community but no planning permission for residential use has been made.

The travellers insist they are using the land at Southend Lane after failing to find an adequate home elsewhere in the county.

A spokesman for the group, called Sam, said they wanted to be good neighbours.

"We are honest, law abiding citizens who just want a place to live," he said.

"We have applied to the council to give us a home on a number of occasions, but with no joy.

"We don't want to cause our new neighbours any harm and want to get on with them as anyone else would."

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Human Rights for Gypsies

25. 5. 2009

Gypsies, the long-lost children of northwest India, number about 12 million worldwide. The Gypsies first arrived in Europe in the thirteenth century as asylum seekers, fleeing forcible conversion to Islam by the invading Turks. Their descendants today number 8 million, constituting Europe's largest ethnic minority­, a marginalized and much maligned minority, whose contributions to Western culture are often ignored.

Three examples of luminaries they produced: Sonya Kavalesky, who, in 1884, became the first woman university professor in the world ­ in Sweden, teaching mathematics; Charles Chaplin, the legendary filmmaker; and Bill Clinton, the former president of the United States. Both Chaplin and Clinton are descendants of British Gypsies. Ian Hancock, himself a British Gypsy, in his book We Are the Romani People (University of Hertfordshire Press, 2002) includes brief biographies of more than one hundred major Gypsy contributors to Western culture. Hancock is professor of English at the University of Texas, Austin. His book describes Patricio Lafcadio Hearn, who in the late nineteenth century pioneered the journalistic style of writing; Antonio Cansino, the creator of the Bolero dance, and his granddaughter, Margarita Carmen Cansino, widely known under her Hollywood name, Rita Hayworth.

Hancock's book attempts to correct European disdain of Gypsy history. Two other recent books with the same objective are W. R. Rishi's Roma: The Punjabi Emigrants in Europe (Punjabi University Press, 1996) and Isabel Fonseca's Bury Me Standing: The Gypsies and their Journey (Random House, 1996). Also remarkable are the films of Tony Gatlif, of French Gypsy descent, especially his documentary Latcho Drom: A Musical History of the Gypsies from India to Spain, which won the Cannes award in 1994.

When Isabel Fonseca, an American journalist, set out to write her book in 1991, she "had in mind that the Gypsies were 'the New Jews of Eastern Europe.'" She lived with Gypsy families for four years while researching in the libraries of many European countries. Her conclusion: "Gypsies alongside with the Jews are ancient scapegoats."

Traditionally, Gypsies did not keep written records and not all groups sustained an oral history. The research on their origin began in the late 1700s with a systematic philological analysis of their language, Romani, which was then firmly established as a Sanskritic language. Words like dand, (tooth), mun, (mouth), akha (eyes) are identical with those in Punjabi spoken in northwest India. If confirmation were needed, it is readily provided by the Gypsy music's use of the Indian ragas such as Bhairavi, Mulkausa, and Kalyani as well as the bol (the rhythmic syllables -- tak, dhin, dha -- imitating drum beats).

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Czech neo-Nazis air anti-Gypsy TV ad

Published: May 21, 2009 at 10:42 AM

PRAGUE, Czech Republic, May 21 (UPI) -- The Czech public television network said Thursday it will sue a far-right party for submitting an anti-Gypsy racist ad so it will not have to air it again.

Czech television received the National Party video clip, which promises a "final solution" of the Gypsy problem, and broadcast it Wednesday, the first day of a publicity campaign for the European Parliament elections in June, Prague Radio said.

Czech Prime Minister Jan Fischer condemned the anti-Romany video as illegal, the radio said.

A Czech television spokesperson said the station complied with a law that orders it to air all ads received from political parties in the pre-election period.

The spokesperson said the ad will not air again and the network will file a lawsuit against the National Party, accusing it of racism.

Michael Kocab, Czech minister for minorities and human rights said the station should have obeyed the criminal code, which bans distributing racial hate messages, instead of observing the election law.

Interior Minister Jan Pecina said he plans to try to ban the far-right National party.

Italy: Mayor 'pays' Roma-Gypsies to leave the city

Pisa, 21 May (AKI) - The mayor of the central Italian city of Pisa, Marco Filippeschi said the city was paying Roma-Gypsies who lived on the outskirts of the city to leave. "We send them back to their home in Romania," said Filippeschi, quoted by Italian daily 'Il Giornale'.

Filippeschi, from the centre-left Democratic Party, said he decided to demolish the shanty towns along the Aurelia and behind the hospital of Cisanello.

"The initiative has been coming for a long time. It involves 42 Roma-Gypsies from Romania, European Union citizens, who have voluntarily chosen to take part," said Filippeschi.

"As a grant to the families, the initiative cost 21,500 euros (or 511,90 per person), or a total of 30,000 including the bus trip escorted by the Red Cross. We cannot say that this is an exhorbitant price."

The group of Roma-Gypsies were taken to the Romanian city of Craiova, located in southwest Romania.

Filippeschi, when asked whether he was a member of the Northern League party known for its anti-immigrant and anti-Gypsy stance, insisted he was a member of the Democratic Party and this was not a deportation.

"By no means. I am a member of the PD. This was not a deportation, you know?. Everything was done respecting the law, informing the prefecture, police headquarters and the relevant foreign ministries. It is called 'voluntary repatriation' anyway."

The mayor said that the area of Pisa hosts around 1,000 Roma-Gypsies, half of whom live in villages where they pay rent or expenses, and the other half who live as squatters in makeshift huts.

"This winter there was a major flood in one of the camps and now the fire season is about to begin. Many of the illegal immigrants are targeted by the police for crimes such as thefts and receiving stolen goods," said Filippeschi.

Funds for the repatriation were taken from a European fund for immigration set aside for the region of Tuscany.

Under the agreement with the Roma-Gypsies the administration pays for a 'soft' return home, and in return, they commit not to come back to Italy for at least a year.

According to Filippeschi, it would be more costly for the Roma-Gypsies to return because their shacks have already been demolished and the areas already reclaimed.

There are 70,000 Roma-Gypsies in the country who are Italian citizens. Many others come from European Union countries such as Romania and Slovakia while others came from the Balkans.

Romanians are currently the largest immigrant group, and many Roma Gypsies have Romanian nationality.

Hungarian Blues

posted by Eyal Press on 05/18/2009 @ 3:03pm

I spent much of last year in Hungary, leaving just before the IMF cobbled together a rescue package to prevent the nation's economy from imploding. A full-scale implosion has been averted, at least for now, but Hungary is still in dire shape. Its economy is projected to shrink by 6 percent this year, unemployment is rising, and the country's disgraced socialist leader, Ferenc Gyrunscany, recently had to step down after several years of feckless rule that boosted the popularity of the Hungarian right.

This is bad news for all Hungarians, but especially for the country's Roma gypsies, a favorite scapegoat of the Hungarian Guard, a fascist group that has also seen its popularity grow in recent years. A number of gypsies have been killed recently in unsolved murders presumed to be the work of right-wing vigilantes, and the level of anti-Roma sentiment in Hungarian society has apparently increased dramatically. "You now hear anti-gypsy sentiment at every level of society," a prominent politician recently told the Financial Times.

I found this statement alarming in part because, frankly, I heard anti-gypsy sentiment at every level of society a year ago, including from young people in Budapest who thought of themselves as open-minded. In fairness, I also met Hungarians who marched in demonstrations against racism and intolerance. The current economic upheaval has not yet brought the far-right, much less the fascists, to power in Hungary. But it has made expressions of hatred more frequent and more casually permissible, an ominous development in a place where insecurity is rising.