Illustration: Peter C. Espina/GT

 

Greece has been gripped by a new bout of hatemongering, following a case in which a blonde child was found to be living with a dark-haired Roma family, and proved to be biologically unrelated to them. This sparked a wave of accusations of child abduction, little dampened by the revelation that the child had been given to the family as a baby by her mother, also Roma, in an entirely voluntary, though unapproved by the state, adoption.

Europe's roughly 11 million Romani, or "gypsies," of whom the Roma are a major subgroup, along with the Sinti and others, have long been the subject of prejudice. This latest round of bigotry is not limited to Greece.

In Ireland, two blonde children were seized from separate Roma families based on nothing more than racial paranoia and the fear-mongering of bigoted journalists. After DNA testing conclusively proved their relationship with their parents, the children have been returned, and the police left facing serious inquiries.

In reality, although traditionally dark-haired, plenty of Romani are blonde. But European police seem willing to swoop in to accuse families based on little more than racial stereotypes and the old slander of "gypsies" as child-thieves. This is only the iceberg of a continent-wide prejudice against the Romani that continues to be winked at by many European governments. 

One can only imagine the scandal that would result if police seized children from Jewish families for having small noses, or from African families for having paler skin than their parents.

Between a third and a half of Europeans, most of whom would find other forms of racism shameful, admit to anti-Romani prejudices.

Far-right parties from Hungary's neo-fascist Jobbik to the French Front National single out Romani for slanderous attacks. Local governments frequently discriminate against Romani communities, cutting off water supplies and evicting families. The UN has found that Romani are the victims of everyday racist violence.

Romani have been the target of increased violence and prejudice across the continent following the economic crisis and growing bigotry against migrants of all stripes.

Italy, under Silvio Berlusconi, legitimized anti-Romani discrimination, attempted the fingerprinting of the entire population, and saw courts ruling "it is legitimate to discriminate against Roma because they are thieves." In the UK, the popular Daily Express regularly runs headlines accusing "gypsies" - a term now widely accepted as a racial slur - of any number of crimes. This disgusted even some of its own staff, who reported the newspaper to the Press Complaints Commission, to little effect.

This history of discrimination stretches back centuries to the 14th century arrival in Eastern Europe of the Romani, originally from North India. It peaked with the mass murder of Romani by the Nazis.

Around 1 million Romani were killed in the Holocaust, while many survivors had been sterilized as part of the Nazi regime of "racial fitness." But the "anti-Gypsy" laws that the Nazis built upon had been established under the liberal Weimar Republic, and many of them continued to be enforced in the early days of West Germany. And while other Holocaust victims received compensation from the German state, it wasn't until the 1980s that Romani suffering began to be recognized by the courts.

Much of this prejudice comes from the Romani's traditionally nomadic ways. States are uncomfortable with, in anthropologist James C. Scott's phrase, "people who move around." Migrants are troublesome, hard to manage, and easy scapegoats among the population for any crime. Although the majority of Romani in Europe today are sedentary, racism and exclusion has left them undereducated and underemployed. This empowers bigots who then blame the Romani for being backwards or lazy. 

Wiping out prejudice against Romani, at least at the state level, should be a human rights priority for the EU. Yet while the EU's human rights agency has called for an end to discrimination, few legal cases have been brought, and the EU's "Program For Roma Inclusion" is an under-funded and largely powerless commission that has produced more talk than action.

If European governments want the moral standing to criticize others for ethnic discrimination, they should look to the mote in their own eye.

The author is an editor with the Global Times. Jamespalmer@globaltimes.com.cn