The Decade of Roma Inclusion

One of my tasks here at OPES is to keep watch on the Decade of Inclusion. I have written in the past that I have not been impressed with the countries that signed on and their lack of progress. The twelve countries currently taking part in the Decade are Albania, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Bulgaria, Croatia, the Czech Republic, Hungary, Macedonia, Montenegro, Romania, Serbia, Slovakia and Spain. Slovenia has observer status. Each developed a national Decade Action Plan that specifies the goals and indicators in the priority areas.

As we approach January 27, Holocaust Remembrance Day, I will be reviewing the participating countries and you can decide for yourself if real progress, if any, has been achieved.

The following article is from Romedia Foundation and I found it to be very interesting. Please check out their site at http://romediafoundation.wordpress.com/. They are an excellent source for information.

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Under Surveillance: The Roma in Hungary 2012

Posted on January 12, 2012

 

Police in Hungary have now been formally instructed by the Chief of National Police to pay specific attention to minorities in their work, referring to what some have called ‘ethnic criminality’. The National Police were issued the instructions on December 30.

The special rules for “working in a multicultural environment” refer to officers handling immigration issues with the advice being issued by National Police Chief, Joseph Hatala.
The developments have received a mixed response from police officers and criminologists. Some believe that the new law will actually help the police to identify criminals while others have criticized the measure, claiming that it will only deepen the already existing prejudice within the force.

The main role of the police’s minority liaison division in dealing with minorities is to forge relationships with different cultural communities, youth organizations, refugee organizations as well as realigning minority leaders of social organizations.

Ultimately, the information gathered in the process is shared with the National Bureau of Investigation, the Alert Police Department, the Airport Police Directorate and regular police officers.
Furthermore, the instructions allow the chief of police to use the minority liaison to investigate any crime in which he thinks a minority group may have been involved. The assumption of innocence is put to one side.

Prejudiced police

Law enforcement and investigative bodies have been under pressure to reduce feelings of prejudice within the National Police. A decade ago, there was great controversy at the national Police Academy where an investigation found that its students were widely anti-Roma.
Research carried out by the Hungarian Helsinki Committee in 2007-2008 found that “Roma people are three times more likely to be stopped by police than non-Roma persons”.

Police activity against Roma communities in Hungary has come under international scrutiny

The police and Hungarian state in general, were under serious pressure when in April 2010 Amnesty International issued a report “highlighting the shortcomings of the Hungarian criminal justice system in identifying and addressing hate crimes, in particular racist violence that mostly affects Roma people in Hungary.”

In October 2011, the Council of Europe’s Commissioner for Human Rights Thomas Hammarberg expressed concern about police behavior against Roma communities.
The Commissioner stated: “Patterns of discrimination and ill-treatment by police towards Roma are widely reported. Roma have been subjected to police violence in detention facilities and public spaces, such as Roma settlements during police raids. When investigations have been carried out, they frequently appear to have been biased or discriminatory.”
Suspicions of racism among the police intensified further when an internal police internet forum was found to contain officers exchanging derogatory opinions on the Roma. However, similar discoveries have been made across Hungarian society, not only within the police, leading to a growing sense of unease and alienation among Hungarian Roma.

Police protecting a Roma community in Hejoszalonta, Hungary 2010

The head of the police had aimed to address these issues and tried several ways to tackle this widespread prejudice. He announced a record number of Romani officers, and encouraged police officer candidates among Roma children entering secondary schools. In addition to this, cooperation agreements with Roma minority self-governments, and a special rapporteur on the Roma were ready to be launched.

However, such measures were not warmly welcomed within the police force as leaders continually stressed that social issues could not be solved by police alone.

One police officer, wishing to remain anonymous, claimed that as a district agent with a good relationship with local residents, he could not understand the purpose minorities being given special attention and found the new regulations to be vaguely worded.

Results will take time

The new instructions were paved with good intentions according to National Institute of Criminology Fellow, Finszter Geza. The scholar insisted that it was a necessary means to encourage cooperation from minorities and bring them closer to the police.

“This type of instruction in Hungary has not yet been undertaken, even though in almost all European countries with multi-cultural societies, there are such solutions” – said Finszter.

He cited Holland as an example where, he explained, there are lots of immigrants from a variety of cultures, so each police officer is obliged to partake in an educational program in which the officer becomes acquainted with an ethnic group’s traditions and habits.

Finszter continued, and outlined that the solution to the problem was clearly handed down to every police service by the Declaration of Human Rights.

“Every police organization will answer to a centralized bureaucratic element, so the problem is more complicated. A professional attitude and cultural change is required, these things do not happen immediately, but over many years.” stressed Finszter, who hopes that the chief provision will have a positive impact on the police.

However the criminologist also found it important to note that the instructions had an introductory section, attempting to explain the need for the new measures. “Thus the statement is a bit of a self-criticism as well. For example, the prejudice reported among the police must exist for this to be made clear. “

Nothing new

Further anonymous officers claimed that the instructions do not say anything new. ”It would be nice to know why the command was issued. Last spring we were already provided instructions on how to be a police officer and to keep in touch with the minorities’ – he said. They said the objective is not new, because the police’s role was still to prevent crime above anything else.

The impact of the latest police guidelines will be seen in the coming months. However, from the outset, in a country which is no stranger to ethnic or racial tension, paying specific attention to minorities may be sending the wrong message to the Hungarian people.

Many will take this as an assumption of criminality within Roma communities, and particularly volatile sections of society may take this as justification for persecution. It certainly won’t discourage the extremist right wing groups and their paramilitary wings in their anti-Roma activities.
Having said that, in an article of January 10, the extreme right media portal kuruc.info has actually criticized the instructions for which the title read “Pintér (Minister of Interior) protects Gypsy criminals again: “special attention” has to be paid to them from now on”.

Breakfast on the Bus

This article comes to us from The Open Society via The Roma Virtual Network. I've had the opportunity to hear the authors of this article, Gwendolyn Albert and Jack Greenberg, speak at the Inaugural Romani Studies Conference at Berkeley in November. Please follow this link for more articles and information from The Open Society. http://blog.soros.org/2011/12/breakfast-on-the-bus/

Breakfast on the Bus

December 5, 2011 | by Jack Greenberg and Gwendolyn Albert

Not more than a two-hour drive from Budapest’s elegant pedestrian downtown, you wouldn’t really notice that something is out of kilter. The provincial towns have new, bright renovated centers, neat cobbled public areas and are imbued with a cozy neighborliness. Apparently, the post-communist transition is complete and everyone has prosperity and freedom of choice.

Not so.

Travel a little further to the periphery, scratch a little deeper into the social fabric of Hungary, and stop for a moment, and you will soon find the peripheral neighborhoods that would evoke comparisons with the most heartbreaking locations of the Civil Rights era: improvised housing totally inappropriate for a harsh temperate climate, far too many dirty, underfed, and illiterate children, nearly total unemployment for anyone of working age and a deep reliance on what few social benefits suffice to keep a family at or below the poverty line, muddy streets that better resemble a bayou than a public road, and perhaps the best building in the neighborhood, a windswept school, what could be a beacon of stability, progress, and a real future or another marker of segregation and utter despair. But who are these people, hardly any different in appearance from anyone else and avoided like lepers, pushed to the margins, denied services, and treated as subhuman?

Ring any bells?

They are Roma, one of Europe’s most diverse and largest ethnic group estimated to be nearly twelve million strong, people without a state, a parliament, or a clear voice—and a convenient political threat by populist hatemongers in Europe in need of easy political points to hide their own incompetence and mismanagement. Long ignored, far too frequently blamed for every social trauma imaginable, they have been doomed to the margins with no remedy in sight despite a huge philanthropic mobilization and the decisions of Europe’s most authoritative courts.
But take a breath, peep inside the local Roma school and see what you find.

Will it be a heartwarming exception or a broad policy of integration? Mixed rows of Roma and Hungarian children working diligently and attentive, an array of school supplies for each, a teacher and a Roma teaching assistant carefully attending to each child’s needs, helping them surmount the daily obstacles to their education and implant in them the beginnings of the knowledge, perspectives and skills that will allow them to advance equally towards the educational milestones ahead?
Or will it be the chilling status quo, what the Roma have come to expect as typical? A hostile, uncommunicative teacher insisting that her hungry, cold, 100-percent Roma class only fill in the color between the lines, hardly bothering to assign in-class tasks that would require any mental agility from the pupils, much less daring to suggest any homework, the teacher capable of little more than another groan at the thought of another hopeless day diluting the curriculum to make her job simpler?

Naturally, with Hungarian public opinion hardened by a hostile, homogenous domestic media and politics held hostage by revisionist public attitudes towards diversity and modernity, it’s a stalemate between the status quo and the exception: while the state gives lip service to the directives and decisions coming down from the European Union, very little is done, and what’s done is done cautiously with the expected methods of a resistant bureaucracy: decision-making delays, new rounds of studies, more conferences, and ill-willed vacillation on commitments until a new election cycle, when any progress is flushed down the toilet to cater to misconceived majority interests.
Meanwhile, in Hungary’s nearly 1,600 impoverished or marginal Roma settlements scattered around its glorious towns and villages, many local schools doggedly hang on to the old segregation model buttressed by the hollowed out reform vocabulary of decentralization and choice, municipalities repeatedly separating students and classes for fear of earning the electoral ire of the majority—unless forced by the expense of an impending court case or the rare charismatic mayor to change their curriculum and enrollment procedures.

Working in step with a few NGOs to end the worst cases of segregation and inconceivable gaps in Roma children’s education, the Roma Education Fund provides educational programs, incentives, and scholarships to Roma children to attend school and achieve in the classroom. For the youngest and most at risk, these interventions may be morning and midday meals, regular doctor’s visits, basic literacy, and numeracy. For students further in their educational careers, the Roma Education Fund sponsors after-school centers and tutoring tied to academic achievement, and in the most intransigent cases the Fund may even resort to what was the most radical action of the American Civil Rights era with mostly positive implications for generations to come, the decision that catapulted the race and education issue from the TV in the living room to the neat suburban districts nearest you: busing.
But set aside the scenes of hysterical white parents in America in 1971 chaining themselves to school buses ordered to transport their precious white children to black schools. This will never happen in Hungary, such is stigma associated with Roma, and any politician who openly accepts such an option will soon find himself/herself without a job before too long, penalized by an irrational majority explicitly/passively supporting Roma children’s segregation from white schools.

Bus some exceptions have been created by ambitious young mayors, like in the unpronounceable named Hodmezovasarhely or Szeged, where desegregation started right after local elections, Roma-only schools were closed down, school busing is paid by the city, and the Roma Education Fund's mentors are working with the Roma pupils in the afternoons. These actions have been singled out in the best practice catalog of the European Union for a third time and visitors are coming yearly wondering if it is really possible.

Yet, just because you can’t integrate Roma all at once does not mean you should do nothing.
Within the northeastern town of Nyiregyhaza’s municipal limits, two locations host its poorest Roma residents, the Guszev and Keleti settlements, both dispersed far from the town center and isolated from any white neighborhoods or schools. Here, a number of attempts have been made to ensure that the children living in these poor areas are provided with quality education and opportunities for advancement. Over the last four years, a legal campaign by Chance for Children Foundation has forced the local government in Nyiregyhaza to shut down the segregated primary school in this neighborhood and open the doors of Nyiregyhaza’s supposedly off-limits majority schools to Roma pupils.

But how do young children living in a neighborhood untouched by Nyiregyhaza’s public transport services (unlike the majority of white students) get to downtown schools in which they are now suddenly enrolled? What hazards await them on their commute by foot during the few hours of light of eastern Hungary’s notoriously bitter winter? Will any of them show up?

Rather than waiting for a new set of indicators on attendance and achievement for these pupils, the Roma Education Fund, backed by the local Roma community, refused to accept that they were being given access to education (integration) but nothing else other than a mandatory, legislated discount for school-age children on public transport. A solution was negotiated in which the municipality agreed to pay for the driver, fuel, and maintenance, and a grant was cobbled together to purchase to two buses in order to collect pupils each day from Guszev and Keleti, deliver them to their new schools and bring them home each afternoon. Nearly everyone reported better results and seemed to relish the chance to mingle and integrate: Roma children acquired new perspectives and knowledge outside their isolated neighborhoods, Roma parents often accompanied their children on the bus and joined programs to boost their own and their children’s literacy and numeracy and Hungarian-language skills, teachers genuinely welcomed Roma pupils into their classes and schools, and a seemingly receptive majority was glad to see progress, even if the pupils might not have been as well groomed as their classmates and were entitled to breakfast and lunch.

But this cautious cooperation has ceased in the past year due to alleged financial pressures in the municipality and been conveniently matched by a new attempt to reopen Nyiregyhaza’s segregated Roma schools. The buses have been abandoned in a municipal garage and the students from Guszev and Keleti have been left to wind their way to school and back along Nyiregyhaza’s threatening winter roads.

For every bit of progress, two bits of revisionism.

That’s why we fight and that’s why we started.

Where are we in the Decade?

The Decade of Roma Inclusion was launched in 2005, founded by a plethora or organizations interested in improving the situation of the Romanies in a dozen countries in Europe. Co-sponsors of the Decade are the World Bank, the Open Society Institute, the United Nations Development Program, the Council of Europe, the Council of Europe Development Bank, the Contact Point for Roma and Sinti Issues of the Office for Democratic Institutions and Human Rights of the Organization for Security and Co-operation in Europe, the European Roma Information Office, the European Roma and Travellers Forum, the European Roma Rights Centre and the Roma Education Fund. In 2008, the United Nations Human Settlements Programme (UN–HABITAT), the Office of the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR), and the United Nations Children's Fund (UNICEF) also became partners in the Decade. The countries who pledged themelseves in the Decade are Albania, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Bulgaria, Croatia, Czech Republic, Hungary, Macedonia, Montenegro, Romania, Serbia, Slovakia, and Spain.

It is now 2011. We are beyond the halfway point on the calendar, but I am not so sure we have reached the half-way point to any sort of Roma inclusion. I've seen many committees, summits, conferences, and meetings, all closing with a statement of re-commitment or a list of new goals, or even a declaration against anti-Romani policies. I've seen an equal number of human rights violations by the very countries who dedicated themselves to oppose poverty and descrimination.

Albania requested admission into the European Union in April, 2009. According to the EU's own webpage,http://ec.europa.eu/enlargement/enlargement_process/accession_process/how_does_a_country_join_the_eu/negotiations_croatia_turkey/index_en.htm

"In order to ensure progress in the negotiations, the candidate countries will also need to make progress on the ground in meeting the requirements for membership, most importantly the Copenhagen criteria:

• the stability of institutions guaranteeing democracy, the rule of law, human rights and respect for and protection of minorities"

There are other criteria, but we are only concerned with point one. Has Albania guarenteed the human rights of the Romanies living within her borders? We've heard of forced evictions, homelessness, and poverty. The 2010 report from Human Rights Watch wasn't very encouraging. Can Albania get their act together by 2015?  Doubt it. Will they be voted in to the EU? We will have to wait and see.

Bosnia and Herzegovina have Romani populations that are in constant fear and many are homeless. Anti-Romani sentiment is still quite prevalent. Threats, beatings, and discrimination are constantly on the minds of Romanies.

Bulgaria.  Riots, descrimination, persecution, murder. Need I say more?

Croatia still has problems with violence against Romani, though improvements have been made in the educational system. Back in 2010, there were reports of segregation in the classrooms, but it appears the policy has been/is changing. Human Rights Watch did give Croatia a warning in 2010, so this is also a wait and see situation.

The Czech Republic and Hungary. See Bugaria and add neo-Nazis.

Macedonia and Montenegro still have many social and cultural issues with the Romani that must be dealt with and progress is slow. While Macedonia is currently experiencing national problems, the answer is not to ignore nor allow social groups to blame Romanies for conditions withing communities. When countries are having difficulties, it is more important than ever that they ensure the rights of everyone living within its borders, including minorities.

Romania is dealing with migration and expulsion issues with its Romani population. France began deporting Romanies back to Romania, then went so far as to threaten Romania with blocks in the EU if the Romanian government doesn't keep the Romanies in Romania. Also of interest is Romania's 'name bill' they attempted to pass in 2010 stating that the Romani would not be able to call themselves Romanies while in Romania. Shall we consider the history? Romania became Romania in 1862. We have been calling ourselves Romanies for centuries. Perhaps, in the true spirit of inclusion, we should be charging them royalties for the use of OUR name.

Serbia also has its extreme issues. Romanies there face poverty and discrimination. With tensions high, even Romani children have been targets of abuse and injury. The Romanies who left during the war and have been forced to return are having difficulties getting identity cards which in turn means they have little to no access to safe housing , health care, employment, and welfare services. Human Rights Watch is currently involved here, but progress promises to be very slow.

Slovakia and the Czech Republic tend to have similar policies when it comes to the Romani people. Racist attacks against the Romanies occur frequently yet the government, despite being a member state of the EU, does little to protect Romani citizens. The mandate of the EU, as stated above, dictates that its members have already shown their ability to protect minorities before their admittance to the EU and that minorities remain safe while living in the member state.

Spain needs to work on helping the Romanies with housing and education. Racism against Romanies in Spain is still quite prevalent, and therefore should be addressed as an issue as a long standing member state of the EU.

This list is critical and by no means exhaustive. It is not meant to be an in depth summary. The idea behind this is to simply take a quick glance over the issue of the Decade of Inclusion to see how counties who joined are handling their commitments.

This list is also not meant to be critical of The Decade of Roma Inclusion. The Decade is an important step towards achieving equality and education between the Romani community and the rest of the world.

Governments must deal severely with hate crimes. Violent crimes against minorities, not just Romanies, should be investigated quickly and addressed with all due justice. Racists often believe their actions promote their counties and prevent minorities and foreigners from getting jobs and supporting themselves, leaving jobs to true citizens.

The media must also be exhorted to run equal opportunities for positive Romani interest stories. If the media only covers the hate and violence, they will only promote hate and violence. We are not suggesting censorship, but a call to responsible journalism.

Governments must consider adding an educational program to the school systems, educating youth on the history and current issues of the Romani. When children see only hate in the media, hate at home, it is all they will learn. Educational programming will allow a new generation to advance towards equality.

Romanies must be included in decisions made for the Romani people. Nothing for us Without Us is a slogan used by Disabled Persons Organizations and should teach everyone something very important. No legislation about any group should be created without the input and support of the group it affects. Romanies must become more involved in the politics of the countries in which they live, as is their right stated in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. Without input, Romanies will continue to suffer under anti-Romani policies.

Education is the key.