Tuesday, June 2, 2015
The Effects of Oppression: The Romani People
When it comes to the Romani people, it is difficult to study ethnographic issues because the Romani people have no one language or culture. This is because the Romani, or Roma, are not settled in any one area, but rather in small communities across Europe and the Americas. Their culture was dispersed as a result of their long history of being oppressed, exploited, and killed because of their heritage. Therefore, this post is intended to explore the way that this history of oppression has influenced the Roma people.
As Trevor discussed in his post, the Romani were victims of genocide under Adolf Hitler's Third Reich. However, the Holocaust was not the first or, unfortunately, the last occurrence of human rights violations committed against this particular indigenous group. The Romani have been rejected from European society from almost the moment they arrived in it 1000 years ago. The historical community more or less agrees that the Romani people began arriving in South and Central Europe between the ninth and fourteenth centuries after emigrating from northwestern India. However, what is not in contention is the reception they received upon arriving in Europe. For the rest of their history, the Romani were enslaved, murdered, exiled, and exploited by every society they attempted to settle into. They were simply expelled from Wester Europe, and Portugal actually shipped its Romani population off to Brazil, resulting in a community of modern day Romani in the country today. By necessity, the Romani settled in Central Europe, where they were less likely to be enslaved or banished. However, under the Hapsburgs, the Romani were forcibly assimilated into Austro-Hungarian society, which was no less damaging to their culture. Under these assimilation laws, the Romani were forbidden to speak their language or ply their traditional trades. They were also forced to settle, prohibited from roaming the countryside in caravans, as had been their way of life for centuries.
After World War II and Hitler's horrific treatment of the Romani, the Soviet Union also tried to assimilate this indigenous group into society, forcing them to abandon their nomadic lifestyle and outlawing most of their traditional livelihoods, things like music performance in taverns and fortune-telling. The Kremlin also enacted an effort to relocate Romani populations from their homes in the backwaters of Central Europe to major cities. This practice led to increased literacy rates among Romani, but it also degraded their culture and caused a lot of tension between the Roma and the people of the Soviet Union, who felt that the Romani were getting special treatment from the government. As a result, when Communism broke down in the late 1980s, newly created Central European governments went right back to ostracizing and abusing the Romani, a practice which has unfortunately continued into today.
After the collapse of the Soviet Union, Romani have faced an incredible amount of discrimination in Central Europe. In places like Kosovo, where civil war broke out in the 1990s, Romani were the first group to be driven from their homes and the last group to be resettled into society. In cities, job discrimination is rampant, leading to the Romani being the poorest ethnic demographic in Central Europe. In some countries, this discrimination has led to instances of ethnic cleansing, with the most notable example being Romania, where the Romani population was targeted after a breakdown in the country's criminal justice system. In recent years, as globalization knits Europe closer together, the European Union has been fighting discrimination against Romanis by requiring anti-discrimination laws to be in place before a country can join the organization. This has helped the Romani plight, but there is still violence between Romanis and Central European populations, and discrimination against this minority group is far from ended.
Reference:
Joseph Russell Rudolph.
2008. Central Europe. In Hot Spot: North America and Europe. No Editors Listed. Pp. 131 133. Westport, CT. Greenwood Press.
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
Reflexive comment
ReplyDeleteAs a student of International Relations, I found this book chapter to be a horrifying example of how far anti-discrimination initiatives still have to go in order to create a global society that provides even basic human rights to all of its minority groups. I had no idea, before doing this research, that the Roma people still faced such blatant discrimination in countries they've lived in for 1000 years. I knew that they were targeted during the Holocaust, but I found it very upsetting, as a person with Eastern European heritage, that the Roma still face violence and racism in the post-World War Two world. Hopefully, the European Union effort to end this discrimination succeeds in the near future.
As far as the Romani's history goes, I find it very encouraging that their culture and, to some extent, their language has survived two concentrated efforts to wipe them out. Because of the Romani's dispersal around the globe, their culture has had to adapt and change in order to survive, which I think is a fascinating process. It was very interesting to read about how their history affects their modern day issues, particularly in Central Europe, where they face the most serious problems, and where the majority of Romani live.
This comment has been removed by a blog administrator.
ReplyDelete