Ignorance of the cultural and historic backgrounds is too widespread, and the experiences that many have had with the Roma – also in Germany – are too contradictory….
No doubt the mentality of the Roma has been formed to a large extent by the humiliation they have suffered since the Middle Ages, which is transmitted from generation to generation as a post-traumatic stress disorder….
Certainly, however, as elsewhere Roma crime is not conditioned by their ethnic make-up but by their social circumstances. We mustn’t forget that many of the ten to twelve million Roma in the EU don’t live in ghettos, but unobtrusively in normal housing in villages and cities, and that many work at normal jobs.
Moreover, not just the non-Roma but also many Roma fall victim to Roma criminals.
Süddeutsche Zeitung, October 22
All over Europe, poisonous little boils of anti-Roma feeling are erupting, powered by economic dislocation and the fear of mass migration from Bulgaria and Romania…. Anti-Roma feeling is as deep and persistent as anti-Semitism, but largely unacknowledged and, in parts of Eastern Europe, actively tolerated…. We are a long way from another holocaust, but Europe is again in danger of failing that test. Child-abduction is an appalling crime; immigration a vitally important issue. But when we talk of “blonde angels”, antisocial lifestyles, “us” and “them”, we are reviving the ancient language of prejudice.
London Times, October 25
In about 1992 I was in Romania for talks with their military legal officers. We Canadians were there to bring enlightenment regarding the rule of law and the legal mechanisms of the free market and respect for human rights. (As it turned out, we often had as much to learn as to teach, but that’s another story…)
I very well remember a discussion based upon our Charter of Rights and Freedoms. I was assured by a senior Romanian legal officer that they too had a constitutional document which fulsomely stated and protected an admirable set of rights and freedoms for all Romanians “…except for the Roma, of course.”