Old Europe, new Europe
This is a shocking story from today’s (Tuesday’s) Guardian about a new wave of persecution of central Europe’s Roma (Gypsy) minority, which has started to take the form of destruction of Roma neighbourhoods and the driving-out of their populations:
Miha Strojan was tending to his sick mother when the mob arrived. Wielding clubs, guns and chainsaws, several hundred villagers converged on the cottage in a clearing in the beech forest with a simple demand. “Zig raus [Gyppos out],” they called in German, deliberately echoing Nazi racist chants. “Bomb the Gypsies.”
It was the last Saturday of last month, when the mob terrorised the extended family of more than 30 Roma, half of them children, into fleeing their clearing a mile over the hill from the farming village of Ambrus in eastern Slovenia.
When I first read this, I misread Slovenia for Slovakia – a common confusion, even though I know where both countries are, because Slovakia, like the Czech Republic and Hungary, is notorious for anti-Roma politics and sentiment. Slovenia is supposedly one of the more civilised parts of old eastern Europe (despite the well-known scandal of its denial of citizenship to Croats and Bosnians who had been living there when it was a Yugoslav republic). Other scandals include the dumping of Roma children in “remedial” classes and an incident last week in the Czech republic where the police invaded a block of flats, trucked its residents away and dumped them in portacabins up to 50 miles away, and then levelled it.
I don’t pretend that Roma sometimes are not their own worst enemies, but the persecution is systematic and out of proportion to the trouble some Roma present. As far as I can tell, this is just how Europe is. It has had three major minority groups – Jews, Roma and Muslims – and if you want to know why Muslims get a poor deal in much of mainland Europe, they should look at what happened to the Jews and what continues to happen to the Roma. Europe simply can’t tolerate large numbers of people with a lifestyle at variance with the majority.
