Europe is united - in repressing the gypsies

The beautiful restored Irish College at Leuven, just outside Brussels, is humming with conferences and seminars these days. My last visit only weeks ago was to recall to Estonian and Finnish civil servants the pitfalls of the Irish presidency.

Last weekend I went back to hear gypsy/traveller groups from all over Europe who had come together at the invitation of Irish organisations to co-ordinate joint responses to their problems.

The successful meeting was hosted by the Irish National Platform Against Racism and Xenophobia as its contribution to the European Year Against Racism and funded jointly by the European Commission's Social Affairs directorate and Department of Justice, Equality and Law Reform.

The Irish groups present included the Irish Travellers Movement, Pavee Point, and the National Travellers Women's Forum.

In Portugal the dictionary defines "gypsy" as synonymous with "liar and thief".

In Bosnia the gypsies or Roma, as they call themselves, were among the first victims of ethnic cleansing.

In Sweden and Norway as late as the 1950s and 1960s children were taken from their parents and placed in institutions by the state because of the "unacceptability" of their nomadic lifestyle.

New revelations about forced sterilisation of the mentally handicapped in the 1950s have also shown evidence of young traveller women being pressurised into the operation by the threat of permanent institutionalisation.

The pattern of repression across Europe is different, but the result much the same. Gypsy/Roma communities are marginalised and stigmatised and everywhere under pressure.

The brutal ethnic cleansing of some eastern communities may be muted and concealed in the garb of paternalism and assimilationism in the more "caring" social democracies of the West.

But there is no country in Europe in which prejudice and discrimination have been eliminated. The culture is being lost, the people impoverished, and communities disappear. Increasingly, forms of economic activity which have sustained the nomadic lifestyle fall victim to the throwaway culture of modern consumerism.

Health problems associated with poverty are reflected in 10to 20-year differences in life expectation compared with the non-gypsy population right across the Union.

There are about eight million ethnic Roma/gypsies in Europe, three-quarters of them in the former communist countries of central and eastern Europe. The vast majority of these have been forcibly settled under the Stalinist regimes since the war, most often in poverty-ridden ghettos. The nomadic life was stigmatised as a form of social deviance and "parasitism".

The fall of communism has seen the lid lifted off simmering racial prejudice with attacks and persecution now common.

In western Europe a distinct sub-group predominates, known as Sinti in Germany or Manouches in France, their languages heavily Germanicised. In Spain 2 per cent of the population is gypsies.

Irish travellers, although they do not share the gypsies' ethnic roots, have made common cause with those who have the same nomadic traditions and the same experience of social exclusion.

An Irish traveller from London, Alice Doran, reflecting experience right across the EU, spoke of local authorities responding to their obligations to build halting sites by establishing them beside rubbish tips, in industrial estates or on the edges of railway lines. "The children are always ill," she said.

New British legislation now also made moving almost impossible with fines of £1,000 for illegal parking.

Tom Machiels spoke of the growth of racism in Flanders associated with support for the far-right Vlaams Blok.

Paul Jongbloed, of the Dutch group, warned of the dangers of Roma being trapped by a cycle of despair. Parents found themselves believing that education was pointless because their children are discriminated against in the workforce.

And Dr Rajko Djuric, president of the International Romany Union, spoke of three genocides against gypsies this century - first Hitler's, then Stalin's and that of the former communist leaders of Eastern Europe, then Bosnia. There a community of 300,000 has been reduced to 8,000 through forced migration and killings. Whole districts, he says, have been flattened, whole families wiped out.

The return of over 60,000 Bosnian Roma and Sinti in Germany is being held up because many of them are from the area now controlled by ultra-nationalist Serbs of the Republic of Srpska.

Where then now for the gypsy movement?

The groups take heart from the Amsterdam Treaty's strengthening of the Union's commitment to the fight against racism and the opening this week of the EU's centre in Vienna for monitoring racist incidents. Tom McCann from the Irish Travellers Movement insists on the need for international networking and solidarity.

They stress the need for funding of gypsy organisations and programmes aimed at supporting multiculturalism and safeguarding their language, Romany, in its different forms.

That can be done by mainstreaming equality issues in EU structural funding with specific targeting at minorities, the conference report argues. Work also needs to be done in raising public awareness and combating media stereotyping, the report, written by Pavee Point's John O'Connell, says.

And an emphasis must be placed, the groups say, in the union's enlargement talks, on the rights of the gypsy communities in eastern Europe.

Above all, the report stresses the need for dialogue based on mutual respect and equality to overcome perceived conflicts between communal and individual rights.