The Gypsies in Europe

The Italian government of Berlusconi proposed recently the creation of some measures against the Gypsies living in Italy, particularly the fingerprinting of adults and children. Unlike conquering Tatars, Mongolians and Turks, the Roma (as the Gypsies are known) arrived on the European continent in smaller groups. In Europe they have never conquered a country, never fought a war and never founded a state or made claims for one. And yet, the century long and still growing problem of anti-Gypsy prejudice is well alive in the continent. There have been numerous reports and inquiries about them but nothing has been solved. To our days they have and are been persecuted and in the best of cases ignored.
There are still many people unaware that they too died in the Nazi concentration camps in great numbers. Nowadays, as the European Commission President Jose Manuel Barroso said: “”They still represent the largest ethnic group facing extreme poverty, social exclusion and discrimination in our territory.”
The problems facing the Gypsies has came finally to the attention of the European Commission -in part for the outcry against the Italian decision– the NGO’s and the billionaire and financier philanthropist George Soros, founder of the Open Society Institute. Last Tuesday the 16 of September, in a press conference at the first ‘European Roma Summit’ in Brussels he said, “Certainly, fingerprinting, racial profiling and so on is unacceptable and, I believe, illegal, and I hope that the European Court of Justice will take up the case and declare it illegal.”
The summit was brought together to draw attention to the problems that the up to 9 million Gypsies in the EU face. There have always been gypsies in most of Europe, from England and the Mediterranean countries to Russia. In some countries they have been more or less tolerated, though always with some distrust, in others they have live little better than animals. Some of them have become famous artists -singers, dancers, musicians, bullfighters, writers-, many of them have been unable to learn a living. But when this past summer we heard about the Roma young girls who drowned in an Italian beach among the indifference of the bathers, and now we heard about the Italian government trying to take away some of their rights, it was time to alert people to their plight. Specially when this year in a shocking declaration, Rudko Kawczynski, president of the Roma national congress, stated that over 3,000 Roma had been murdered between 1990 and 2002 in eastern Europe alone.