Grappling with a Roma identity

By Steve Bradshaw
Executive Producer, Life on the Edge

It was just a passing remark, the first time I heard Arpad Bogdan talk about the Roma father who had left him in an orphanage, and wonder if he should try to find him.

We were drinking late at night in a semi-derelict house in a Budapest side street. We had skipped over bicycles and rubbish to make our way inside. I should say this was not a doss house but a trendy Urban Minimalism club.

"He doesn't have to tell you this you know," whispered our mutual friend, director Antonia Meszaros. And it was then that I realised how conflicted Arpad is - how much of a dilemma his Roma inheritance has created.

Arpad is a much-garlanded young film director, whose feature film Happy New Life has won many awards. It is about a young Roma man's unbearable childhood in an orphanage. In the end, he can't hack it - unlike Arpad who emerged from his own orphanage into the University of Pecs and a promising film career.

"My film," Arpad says, "is about the dilemmas of someone who realises that in order to face the future, he must come to terms with his past - and that's something that I still have to do in my own life."

Arpad was one of thousands of Roma - or gypsy - children who were taken into orphanages during Hungary's Communist years. The truth is cloudy here, but it seems that in some cases their parents wanted this, in many they didn't.

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Roma protest loaded survey question on "gypsy crime"

By MTI

The head of the National Roma Council has protested against a survey published on Wednesday which had juxtaposed the words "gypsy" and "crime" in a question.

Orban Kolompar slammed Nezopont Institute's survey, which found that 91 percent of those asked said they thought "gypsy crime" was a real issue. Kolompar said that the term was unacceptable and that the question was an incitement of hatred against the Roma minority.

Agoston Samuel Mraz, who directed Nezopont's survey in question, told MTI that his institute had applied the phrase because it was used both in public discourse and in sociology.

He noted that 77 percent of respondents in the survey thought Roma people were more inclined to commit crimes than others. "Nezopont thinks that reducing such a high level of prejudice is an urgent public responsibility," he said.

The slogan "gypsy crime" was used with increased frequency by far-right groups after a driver, whose car hit a Roma girl but did not hurt her, was lynched by the girl's family members in October 2006.

Following the incident, public dignitaries, politicians, criminal experts and Roma officials joined in protest against using the derogatory term and against efforts to stigmatise the Roma community.

Roma MEP on her people’s plight in EU

Written by Robert Hodgson

Wednesday, 16 April 2008

The right fight

International Roma Day last Tuesday saw celebrations of Roma culture around the world. At the same time, many NGOs, politicians and representatives of Roma communities across Europe discussed what is being done to address the seemingly intractable problems of social exclusion and racism. The Budapest Times spoke to Lívia Járóka, who in 2004 became only the second Roma to be elected to the European Parliament.


The situation

The plight of the Roma people in Central Europe deteriorated rapidly after the change of system in 1989-90, when 50% of Hungarian Roma lost their jobs. Estimates of the number of Roma in the European Union vary from nine to fifteen million, but it is generally accepted that there are at least ten million. It is difficult to get a precise figure as people often do not declare their ethnicity. In Hungary the 2001 census suggested 190,000; the real figure is believed to be over half a million, or at least 5% of the population.

Many of Hungary’s Roma live in ghettos on the edge of towns and villages, and the level of segregation has – in some places – reached that of a sort of apartheid. Many communities lack even basic utilities such as sewerage and electricity. Unemployment among the Roma is estimated to be around 80%. Life expectancy for Roma is ten years lower than the Hungarian average.

Fight from within

Lívia Járóka, 33, grew up in Sopron near the Austrian border. After studying sociology on a Soros Foundation scholarship, she turned to politics and has made it her mission to push for reintegration of Roma into mainstream society. She became Hungary’s first Roma MEP in 2004 on a centre-right Fidesz party ticket.

Járóka said she found most European politicians to be ignorant of the issues affecting the EU’s Roma citizens when she arrived Brussels. Since the accession of 12 new member states in 2004 and 2007, the minority has increased such that it is now larger than the population of each of the EU’s 14 smallest countries – too large to be ignored.

“I knew I had to bring the Roma issue to the European agenda. I wanted to demystify what it means to be Roma,” said Járóka. She was aware of a paternalistic attitude to Roma during the pre-2004 accession talks. “Many people had a very prejudiced idea about how they live and what they want,” she said, adding that there had been very little real research into the situation. “Politicians were not ready to see this issue as a complex question. They try to change living conditions, or education, or healthcare, but they never see that it is a complex combination of all these, especially in totally segregated areas.”

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Extremist group holds anti-crime rally in Hugnary, critics call it an attack on Gypsies

2008-01-18 21:22:05 -

BUDAPEST, Hungary (AP) - A small extremist group rallied Friday in the Hungarian capital to protest what it said was a rising crime rate, but which critics said was a veiled attack on the country's Gypsies.

Some 50 members of the Hungarian Guard and around 200 supporters attended the short, torch-lit march to a high school near where an 18-year-old student was attacked last week by a 17-year-old classmate described in Hungarian media as a Gypsy. The victim reportedly suffered a skull fracture and died shortly after returning home.

The Guard was formed last year and has about 700 members. Its uniform has elements which resemble those used by the Arrow Cross, a pro-Nazi, World War II militia.
Budapest prosecutors have asked a local court to disband the Guard because of legal irregularities.

President Laszlo Solyom last month refused to meet with the group, describing an earlier rally as «immensely damaging,» saying they created an atmosphere which made it more difficult for Gypsies _ or Roma _ to integrate into Hungarian society.

On Friday, a Guard's official said the anti-crime rally wanted to call attention to «real problems in society ... for which the current political elite is responsible.

«We don't aim to solve these problems by violent means and we don't want to be police, that is a duty of the state,» Istvan Dosa said. «But there is an ethnic bomb ticking in the country which can explode at any time.

After Dosa's speech, a woman read out a list of crimes committed in Hungary in the past months _ at least some of which are known to have involved Roma. Some Guard supporters shouted «Gypsy criminals» and «Gypsy crimes» after every description _ even though the reader never used those words herself.

There are an estimated 600,000-800,000 Roma among Hungary's population of 10 million. They are among the poorest and least educated citizens. While there are no official statistics, U.N. Habitat, a humanitarian agency, estimated that up to 60 percent of male inmates in Hungarian prisons are Roma.

Budapest Mayor Gabor Demszky said the Guard's protest was actually aimed at «intimidating the Roma living in Budapest «(Friday's) act is aimed against democratic values, human rights, tolerance and the religious and ethnic minorities until now living peacefully in Budapest,» Demszky said in a statement ahead of the march.

Gypsy museum to open in Budapest in September

By: All Hungary News
2007-08-09 11:13:00

The Budapest Gypsy Museum about the history of the Roma (Gypsy) people in Hungary will open in the middle of September, writes fn.h.u, based on a report in daily Népszava.

Education and Culture Minister István Hiller, who helped develop the Budapest Gypsy Museum (Budapesti Cigánymúzeum), said that similar institutions are needed in other Hungarian cities as well, including Pécs and Szolnok.

Hiller also said that the Hungarian Socialist Party would like to be a partner in collecting data about the number of Hungarian Gypsy people deported during World War II.