'Racist' slurs mar gypsy consultation

Published Date: 27 March 2008
Location: Bedford

By Paul Fisher

Council says it can't publish more than 3,000 responses to a document seeking views on where to put new traveller caravan pitches in Mid Beds.

'Racist' comments from more than 3,000 residents have overshadowed a public consultation on plans to provide new pitches for travellers in Mid Bedfordshire.

Mid Beds District Council asked its taxpayers' for their views late last year – but of the 3,500 responses received, only 400 can be published.

The overwhelming majority refer to criminal activity or feature other racist remarks, the authority has said.

The council, which needs to find 25 more caravan pitches for travellers under the Government's Local Development Framework, has now been forced to extend the consultation period until May, to allow residents to submit revised opinions.

Cliff Codona, chairman of the National Travellers Action Group, said the consultation just proved the type of racism the gypsy community regularly faces.

He said: "There is racism against travellers and I think you could not have picked a better area of the country to prove that fact. It is nothing to do with gypsies or travellers, it is just everyone jumping on the bandwagon. However it should not stop the council following through Government legislation that says traveller sites should be provided. They should get on with it and provide sites that are desperately needed. Every time plans are put on hold it gives people time to put the boot in."

Mid Beds District Council is now writing to the 3,100 people who submitted unacceptable comments to ask whether they would like to resubmit their views, but based on planning issues and not stereotypes.
Mark Hustwitt, spokesman for the council, said: "It would not be responsible for us to publish any racist responses.

"If someone objects because of a planning reason, like being against a development because it is on a greenfield site, then we will publish it, but we cannot discriminate against any group because of stereotypes.

"No-one would now say someone should not get planning permission because they are black or gay; this applies equally to gypsies and travellers.

"I must say we were very surprised at the response. I think it is one of those areas where people find it acceptable to be racist and they are wrong."

The 400 comments that are acceptable will be published on the council's website this week.

The council will look at the preferred sites for development in May.

Mr Hustwitt added: "There are already many gypsy families living quietly in Mid Beds who are part of their communities. We are obliged to find 25 sites in Mid Beds to help control unauthorised encampments."

Bedford Borough Council is is under the same Government obligation to provide between ten and 15 new pitches for travellers across the borough. It expects to announce a consultation period soon.

The full article contains 479 words and appears in n/a newspaper.

Last Updated: 27 March 2008 3:01 PM

Travellers' tales

We need to know who our Gypsy pupils are...

Janette Owen
Tuesday March 11, 2008
The Guardian


In June, schools across the country will have the opportunity to take part in the first Gypsy, Roma and Traveller History Month, aimed at raising awareness and exploring the history, culture and languages of these communities. But the Department for Children, Schools and Families (DCSF) hopes that the themed lessons will have an additional impact.
According to the schools minister Lord Adonis, many Gypsy, Roma and Traveller pupils are among the lowest-achieving in our schools and the situation is not improving. Fear of prejudice and bullying has meant that many children and families are too scared to identify themselves, and without that knowledge schools are unable to apply for the extra support and funding that is available to help them.

The DCSF has produced a document, called The Inclusion of Gypsy, Roma and Traveller Children and Young People, which aims to persuade schools and local authorities to stamp out prejudice and ensure that the children get the extra support they deserve.

What can governors do to boost this initiative? They need to support the head in identifying which families need help. The guide says: "Schools and local authorities cannot comply with their duties under the Race Relations (Amendment) Act 2000 unless they are aware of the ethnicity and cultural diversity of their school population."

It suggests schools try to recruit governors from Gypsy, Roma and Traveller backgrounds. Governors should devise strategies to encourage parents to volunteer, and not feel they lack the skills required.

The vulnerability of these pupils must be recognised in the school's behaviour and anti-bullying policies. According to the guide: "It is equally important for schools to have, within their anti-bullying policy, examples of racist terminology pertinent to Gypsy, Roma and Traveller communities."

Heads should provide governors with information on racist incidents at least annually and ideally once a term. Governing bodies are required to inform their local education authority annually of incidents.

Adonis says: "Children from Gypsy, Roma and Traveller communities should feel safe and cherished in school, and therefore parents and pupils will be proud to identify themselves. Schools now have a duty to promote community cohesion, and this is a real issue for their attention."

The Inclusion of Gypsy, Roma and Traveller Children and Young People can be downloaded from the online publications section of teachernet.gov.uk.
Education.governor@guardian.co.uk

How a malicious press and ailing welfare system make new demons

By Torcuil Crichton

SLOUGH IS famous for two things - a damning piece of poetry, "Come, friendly bombs, and fall on Slough, it isn't fit for humans now", and as the dystopian location for The Office.

Between John Betjeman and David Brent the place doesn't impinge much on the national consciousness but in the past week it has became the setting for a parable about modern Britain. There are only seven basic plot lines, so it's inevitable that this fable relied on an earlier work of fiction.

First the facts - at early dawn on Thursday, January 24, 400 police officers shoulder-charged their way into 17 addresses in Slough and discovered 68 Roma children sleeping within, 10 of whom they took into care.

The media were invited along (well, I wasn't) to record the officers as they carried the poor, pixillated children to apparent safety. The headlines had been written before the first door was smashed down. This was a raid, the police briefed, to rescue gypsy children, who were of Romanian nationality, who had been trafficked into the UK by unscrupulous adults for a life of juvenile crime.

These were, we were told on the front page of the London newspapers, the modern-day Artful Dodgers, trained to deprive you of your mobile phone and wallet quicker than it would take to ask for more gruel.

The story, from then on, was a rewrite of Charles Dickens's Oliver Twist with which, in its musical and televisual style, if not its original literary form, we are all familiar.

We have, incidentally, in these last three sentences slipped into fiction because it emerged later in the week that all but one of the nine children taken into custody has been returned to the Roma community in Slough and none of the 24 adults arrested at the scene has been charged with child-trafficking offences. Some were charged with minor immigration offences and three were charged with handling stolen mobile phones. One, 25-year-old Gheorge Mazarxhes, was jailed for eight weeks after he admitted handling a stolen phone. It looks, at the very least, that there might have been a misunderstanding.

The furious Roma adults in Slough, where there is a long-established Romanian community, insist that in extended gypsy families it is common for children not to live with their parents. It's bad enough, they say, to be stigmatised across Europe as thieves without being tarred as child traffickers too.

The Romanians are puzzled as to why they cannot get proper access to those arrested - 15 Britons detained in a suburb of Bucharest would have a UK counsel within 24 hours - and also why the police made such a hoo-ha about the operation. They suspect that the raid was not so much about disrupting a child trafficking ring in Britain and more about the irresistible lure of the newspaper headline.

It was a story that was deemed simply too good to miss, maybe because someone in the police too readily believed the negative propaganda these same newspapers spout each day about immigrants to the UK. It looks as if the police were caught in a self-fuelling circle of deceit, but what was initially paraded as a triumph in the newspapers has been a revealed as a farce.

The police carry on defending themselves by saying it would be wrong to conclude that no child trafficking was involved just because no-one was charged with the offence. That's not the kind of argument that would stand up in court, although you do have to have some sympathy with the police because there is no single law against child trafficking, which makes it difficult to prosecute without relying on a whole series of immigration and sex abuse laws being invoked.

Meanwhile, Slough is left to pick up the pieces. The Roma have been a very visible presence in the town for years and the place has a reputation for a more liberal attitude towards immigrants than the Daily Hate would find acceptable. But overcrowding and lack of legal income means the Roma are not great neighbours.

Around the established Roma community house prices are said to have tumbled. But then how do you fit 15 people into a three-bedroom house and not cause a nuisance? And aren't there laws on multiple occupancy that ought to be enforced before police start looking for child traffickers?

The local shopkeepers complain about Roma children shoplifting all the time and of women begging in the streets with their children in tow. People walking down Oxford Street complain of that too and it has to be said that training your children to beg in the street is almost as reprehensible as training them to thieve.

But thanks to our dysfunctional relationship with the European Union the Roma, like all Romanians, are only half welcome here anyway. As members of an ascension state the Romanians are free to enter Britain but they cannot take up any unskilled work, as most other eastern Europeans can.

Fearing another "Polish invasion" when Bulgaria and Romania joined the EU, Britain limited the rights of these citizens in this country.

There are worries in parts of England about overstretched public services being further strained by immigration but allowing Romanians to work legally in the UK would turn them into service-supporting taxpayers and make a latter-day Dickensian existence less likely.

EU Parliament: Anti-Gypsy prejudice, discrimination widespread in EU

© AP
2008-01-31 16:15:52 -

BRUSSELS, Belgium (AP) - Anti-Roma sentiments are widespread in the European Union, often leading to racist attacks, abuse and police harassment, the European Parliament warned Thursday.EU member states must increase their efforts to integrate Roma and prevent «ghettoization» in estates, slums and camps, where there are no hygiene and safety standards and a large number of children die in accidents, EU lawmakers said in a resolution.

They called on the European Commission to give one of its members the responsibility for coordinating an EU-wide policy on Roma and urged it to promote Roma staff within its routinely called on the countries to do more to end the marginalization of the Roma population, setting aside millions in EU aid programs the member states can use to bolster education, housing and job programs _ to little effect in many places.

Roma are now one of the largest, poorest, and fastest growing minorities in Europe, with a total population on the continent estimated at between 7 and 9 million.

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 wins a day in Greek court

The European Union's top court has condemned Greece for violating the European Convention on Human Rights in a case filed by a woman who suffered a miscarriage after abuse by Greek police in 2001.

By Kathy Tzilivakis, Thursday, January 10, 2008

The European Court of Human Rights has dealt a severe blow to Greek law enforcement and the country's justice system, ordering Greece to pay 21,000 euros to a Roma (Gypsy) woman who said she was kicked in the back and stomach while pregnant by a police officer during a raid on a makeshift settlement in the western Athens industrial suburb of Aspropyrgos six years ago.

Human rights campaigners have hailed the ruling as a landmark victory in the fight against police brutality against Gypsies and other visible minorities in Greece. The police tactics in the raid in Aspropyrgos in 2002 sparked heated criticism from local and international human rights organisations. But it was not an isolated incident. It was one of many reported cases of police targeting Gypsies in Greece.

"This is the fourth conviction in 2007 related to police violence [against Gypsies]," said Panayotis Dimitras of the Greek Helsinki Monitor, a local rights watchdog. "This indicates that there is a serious problem of police violence and impunity. It also shows there is institutional racism in the Greek police. The Greek Helsinki Monitor has repeatedly called on the state to deal with such cases before they reach the European court."

In the case reviewed by the Strasbourg-based human rights court, Fani-Yannula Petropoulou-Tsakiri, 28, testified that police ignored her pleas for urgent medical assistance and allegedly herded her onto a police van with other Gypsies who had been arbitrarily arrested. Tsakiri, who was 10 weeks pregnant, suffered a miscarriage. Today she lives in Amfissa with her four children.

According to a report published by the Swiss-based World Organisation Against Torture (OMCT) about the 2002 raid, "Officers ordered Roma [Gypsy] individuals to lie face down on the ground while they aimed their guns at them. Other officers entered into almost every home - in some circumstances by force - in search of both drugs and hiding [Gypsy] persons. Once all the individuals were gathered outside their homes, officers began to threaten and harass the group while they waited for transport vehicles. During this time, reports indicate that bullets were fired in the air, while several incidents of police brutality were also registered."

The ruling

The court held unanimously that there had been a violation of article 3 (prohibition of inhuman or degrading treatment) of the 1950 European Convention on Human Rights concerning the lack of an effective investigation into Tsakiri's allegation and that there had been a violation of article 14 (prohibition of discrimination) taken in conjunction with article 3.

"The court finds that the failure of the authorities to investigate possible racial motives for the applicant's ill-treatment, combined with their [discriminatory] attitude during the investigation, constitutes discrimination with regard to the applicant's rights which is contrary to article 14 taken in conjunction with article 3 in its procedural limb," said the ruling.

However, the court ruled, by six votes to one, that there had been no violation of article 3 concerning her allegation that she had been the victim of police brutality.

As explained in the ruling, the decision of the six judges (including one from Greece, Christos Rozakis) was based on the fact that the circumstances in which Tsakiri's bleeding had occurred on 28 January 2002 "were not entirely clear". The medical report only stated that she had bled and suffered a miscarriage. No reference was made to bruises, injuries or any other cause of the bleeding.

The one dissenting opinion was voiced by Loukis Loucaides (Cypriot), the president of the court. Loucaides says he does not share the opinion that there was no violation of article 3 as regards the alleged ill-treatment inflicted by police.

"The applicant stated her complaint in a coherent and convincing manner," said Loucaides in his dissenting opinion. "She explained that she had been kicked on her back and, as a result, had felt an intense pain in the abdominal area and started bleeding. There followed a miscarriage... What I cannot understand is why the majority did not believe her story, without even finding a concrete, well-founded reason why she must have lied. In fact, the evidence does not disclose any such reason. The fact that the medical report produced by the applicant made no reference to bruises and to any possible causes of the bleeding does not detract from the truthfulness of the applicant's complaint."

Loucaides also stressed that the majority decision could be "very dangerous in the sense that it may cause injustice to individuals like the applicant, whose evidence may not by itself be taken seriously because of police prejudice as regards their status".

He also said it may "encourage the police to use unacceptable methods of investigation, amounting to ill-treatment in respect of persons like the applicant or other persons who do not have any eyewitnesses to corroborate their complaints of ill-treatment."

Kathy Tzilivakis writes for the Athens News and appears here with permission.

Dare to Ask: Gypsies are victims of stereotype

By PHILLIP MILANO, The Times-Union

Question

I'm a real gypsy (Roma). People label us as petty thieves and criminals and claim we are filthy and dumb. Why?
cOnFuSed-ChiK, 20, Florida

Replies

I'm an English Romany gypsy. I studied business at college. Good gypsies are not shown for being the clean, decent people we are. The scummy gypsies get seen for thieving, etc. The media picks up on the bad stuff.
Shirley, 24, England

In Spain, gypsies are treated badly, but in a way, I can see why. We lived on the U.S. Air Force base. Things would always get stolen by the gypsies who lived on the vacant lot down the road - even our BBQ.
Jade, 16, Sydney, Australia

Where I live, "gypsies" are usually engaged in scams and thieving, frequently against vulnerable elderly people. Not all people who identify as gypsies or Roma engage in this kind of conduct, but those are not the ones you hear about.
Sue, Chicago

When I traveled to Romania several years ago, I was amazed at the horrific way the Roma people were treated. For the Romas' part, I witnessed many involved in harassment of foreigners and stealing. I also met several college-educated, wealthy Roma. The "true Romanians" (forgive the term) summarily dismissed the Roma as awful, terrible beasts beneath consideration or hope.
Tinuviel, 37, female, Albuquerque, N.M.

Expert says

And you should've seen the comments we didn't print.

Gypsies - a preferred term is Roma - have traveled a tough road these past thousand years.

Fast-forward through lots of history to the 14th century. By then they'd migrated to the Balkans and were wrongly thought to be from Egypt (hence the name "Gypsy"), when in fact their origins were India, said Zoltan Barany, a University of Texas professor who specializes in ethnopolitics.

They were darker-skinned, fiercely protected their cultural identity . . . and were quickly persecuted. Meanwhile, all the land was already spoken for, so they developed skills they could practice on the go, such as mending, entertaining or working at fairs, said Barany, author of The East European Gypsies: Regime Change, Marginality, and Ethnopolitics.

"No one wanted them, and they chased them away. . . . With no means of survival, of course they were going to steal, but it's not that it's in their genes."

Unfortunately, they're still shunned across the globe.

"They've gone through incredible amounts of discrimination and marginalization for centuries, partially because of hostility of the host country and partly because of their own inability or unwillingness to integrate."

It doesn't help that too many gypsy families don't value education, with many Roma youth telling Barany and other researchers they don't see college as their most viable option.

"If you look at the socioeconomic conditions of Roma, you see every major cause [for their plight]: poverty, overpopulation and lack of education."

Continue cross-cultural dialogue at www.yforum.com, or mail questions and replies to Phillip Milano, The Times-Union, P.O. Box 1949, Jacksonville, FL 32231.

Spanish gypsy widow takes her case to the European Court of Human Rights

Oct 17, 2007 - 6:59 PM

El Mundo newspaper reports on Wednesday of the case of a gypsy woman who has been refused a widow’s pension by the state because she and her husband married gypsy style. María Luisa Muñoz is now taking her claim to the European Court of Human Rights in Strasbourg after seven years of fighting in the courts in Spain have proved unsuccessful.

She married Mariano Jiménez in 1971, and had six children with him before his death in December 2000. The INSS National Social Security Institute refused her application for a widow’s pension, on the grounds that she was not his spouse, despite his many years of paying into the system.

María Luisa’s first claim to a social court in Madrid was upheld, but was later overturned by a higher court on an appeal placed by the INSS. Her last resort was the Constitutional Court, where all but one of the magistrates voted in the court’s ruling earlier this year that she had not suffered discrimination because of her race.

The Fundación Secretariado Gitano, a non-profit organisation which works for the promotion of the Roma community and who are giving their legal support to María Luisa in her claim, says her situation is a clear example of discrimination and a ‘violation of human rights.’

The FSG also points out that the couple’s marriage took place some years before the 1978 Constitution, at a time when laws which expressly discriminated against the gypsy people were still in force.

Ongoing struggle for equality

Racist discrimination - ugly reality in the EU. Two generations of gypsy representatives take part in the fourth of five 'Crossed Portraits', a series marking 50 years of the EU

2007 is the European Year of Equal Opportunities for All. A European Fundamental Rights Agency (FRA) was created in Vienna at the beginning of the month, complementing the work of the European Union Monitoring Centre on Racism and Xenophobia founded in 1998. The gypsy community is the EU’s most important minority and they are struggling hard to put an end to prejudice.

January’s Eurobarometer, dedicated especially to the issue of discrimination in honour of the European Year of Equal Opportunities for All, says that two-thirds of Europeans see discrimination based on ethnic origin as the most wide-spread form in the Union. Also, although 65% of Europeans believe that the presence of different ethnic origins can enrich national culture, 64% believe that ethnic discrimination has increased in the last 5 years. The study also shows that most Europeans believe that gypsies are at a social disadvantage, although the percentages vary from country to country.

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