World Ark Magazine - November/December 2008 - (Page 43)

GOvERNMENTS OR RULERS: THIS IS AT THE HEART OF WHAT MUNICIPALITIES ACROSS EUROPE CALL THE “ROMA PRObLEM.” Stagnant water pools in a hand-dug ditch, bits of cloth have been ground into the mud until only their texture is discernible. The palette is limited: muddy browns, weatherworn grays, rusty reds. The families who live here in the settlement pack themselves tightly into their makeshift hovels, sharing the common spaces with goats, pigs, dogs and one spindly fruit tree struggling to push forth new leaves for another season. Toward the back of the settlement is the small, clean, mud-masonry shed where Bodor keeps the goats he received as part of a Heifer International project, which works with this community to build sustainable livelihoods. The barn is clean, with a faint odor of ammonia and animal body heat. It sits adjacent to Bodor’s old house, a woodand-mud shell enclosing not more than 400 square feet of space where the family of eight lived until last year. Bodor turns back to the goat shed and opens the gate. The goats spill out, leaving the squalor behind, and head into the grassy field that spreads like an overgrown football pitch behind the settlement. His dreadlocked black dog at his heels, Bodor follows the goats and takes his post as solitary goatherd. Erika Estokova, in a purple suit and thin-rimmed glasses, looks thoroughly out of place standing with the goats in the field behind the settlement. Though she is not Roma, Estokova is the leader for the Heifer International’s goat breeding project in the Drahnov Region project. She is also the coordinator for the village’s Roma education project, a municipal position appointed by the mayor. A History of Assimilation After visiting with Bodor, Estokova invites us back to her home, a pristine white house on Drahnov’s main road. Marta Kulikova, Heifer Slovakia’s country director and our translator, joins us, and together they explain the history of the struggle for Roma inclusion in this region. Groups who do not respect borders or stay put can be threatening to governments or rulers: this is at the heart of what municipalities across Europe call the “Roma problem.” For centuries, one government after another attempted to control and confine, to split up and segregate the Roma. Their method of choice was assimilation— government-enforced conformity of a minority group to the majority. Kulikova explains assimilation this way: “This other group”—in this case, the Roma—“must take on your habits, behave like you.” In the mid-18th century, the Queen of Hungary (and mother of Marie Antoinette) Maria Theresa enacted a policy of Roma assimilation, which included sending Roma children to far-flung villages around the Hapsburg Empire to be absorbed into the local culture. Maria Theresa was known as a social reformer, and her treatment of the Roma was seen at the time as a more humane solution than the extreme discrimination the Roma faced—slavery, branding, even legalized murder. But the intent was still to squelch a foreign and suspect culture. These displaced Roma were called “New Magyar,” or new Hungarians, in a further attempt to destroy their cultural and ethnic identity. Attempts at corralling and controlling the Roma continued in the 20th century when Nazis exterminated as many as 500,000 Roma in what in Romany is called porajmos, or “devouring.” After World War II, Slovakia, as part of Czechoslovakia, fell under communist control. The RO M A IN T HE N E WS Discrimination against the Roma is making headlines across Europe these days, as anti-immigration sentiment grows and attacks against the Roma escalate. Earlier this year, The New York Times ran several stories when Italian police stepped up raids of Roma settlements in search of illegal immigrants, while government officials proposed fingerprinting all Roma living in camps. Last year, the Decade of Roma Inclusion website reported that a Serbian mayor suggested building a fence around his town’s Roma settlement so the Roma could not enter the town center. In 2007, Romanian President Traian Basescu made the news when, according to the BBC, he referred to a journalist as a “dirty Gypsy.” www.heifer.org November/December 2008 | WORLD ARK 43 http://www.heifer.org

Table of Contents Feed for the Digital Edition of World Ark Magazine - November/December 2008

World Ark Magazine - November/December 2008 Contents Letters For the Record The Good Life Asked and Answered Finding Peace in Africa Sierra Leone on the Mend The Roma: A People Apart Mixed Media Heifer Bulletin Heifer Spirit Calendar First Person

World Ark Magazine - November/December 2008

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