Scandal of gypsies mistreated in eastern Europe
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Your support makes all the difference.Gypsies in former communist Europe are facing dire poverty and discrimination, and are systematically sidelined as their governments look forward to the benefits of joining the European Union, the United Nations said yesterday.
"Roma endure living conditions closer to those in Sub-Saharan Africa than to Europe," a Development Programme (UNDP) report said, based on studies of infant mortality, nutrition, literacy and income. Hungary, Slovakia and the Czech Republic are to join the EU in 2004, joined by Romania and Bulgaria in 2007, all with huge Roma populations.
In a damning study detailing the plight of the Roma gypsies, who it calls "the poorest of the poor" of the region, the UNDP called on Romania, Bulgaria, Hungary, Slovakia and the Czech Republic, to adopt policies that will end the "culture of dependency".
The report said statistics "systematically under-count" their numbers, often because the Roma themselves deny their roots, wanting to avoid the stigma attached to their group.
Romania's gypsy population, Europe's largest, could be as high as 2.5 million. The official figure in Hungary is 190,000 but could be 800,000, in a population of 10 million. In Slovakia the number ranges from 90,000 to 520,000, in a 5.4 million population, and in the Czech Republic from 12,000 to 300,000, among 10.2 million. The Roma gypsy population in Europe is estimated at roughly the number of people in Switzerland, Norway and Luxembourg combined, and 30 per cent of those households live on welfare.
Socialist-era polices of resettlement, ethnic intermingling and employment provision had left them over-reliant on state paternalism after the Iron Curtain fell. "Roma under communism were better off in virtually every aspect relevant to human development, although this progress came at the cost of lost traditional cultural and economic patterns," the report says.
Today, only 20 per cent of Roma gypsies have regular jobs, and a further 20 per cent work on the black market. One in six is "constantly starving", and one in two goes hungry for a few days each year. One in three Roma children fail to complete primary school, and two in three never complete secondary school. Roma children are routinely put in schools for the mentally disabled, "with no good health reasons in most cases", the report says.
Respect for Roma gypsy rights has been a central issue in the process of accession to the EU.
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