Another Darkness, Another Dawn

by Becky Taylor

  A key moment came in 1979 when the Society, alongside Roma and Sinti activists, organized a public demonstration at Bergen-Belsen under the motto In Auschwitz vergast, bis heute verfolgt (‘Gassed in Auschwitz, persecuted to this day’). This was followed in 1980 by a high-profile hunger strike at Dachau memorial camp, where three of the twelve Roma participants were camp survivors. This protest sought to raise the ongoing marginalized position of Sinti and Roma in German society, but specifically aimed to force the Bavarian Interior Minister to disclose the location of the ‘disappeared’ vagrant police files. Although they were unsuccessful on this score, the protest created global media coverage, expressions of international solidarity and a raised awareness of the treatment of Sinti and Roma under the Nazis. The hosting of the International Romani Union’s third congress in Göttingen in the same year, although mainly organized from outside Germany, ‘played a significant role in boosting the self-awareness and public relations of the emerging civil rights movement’ in Germany itself. Following the congress a new representative organization was formed – the Zentralrat Deutscher Sinti und Roma (Central Council for German Sinti and Roma), taking as its model the national German Jewish Council – which received political recognition and financial support from the Federal government. Accompanying this was a long-awaited statement from the government acknowledging German responsibility for the Roma Holocaust.66 As in Yugoslavia then, and different from other countries where Roma and Gypsies struggled to find either funding or recognition, German activists were able to benefit from a measure of state support.

  In common with the concerns and campaigning of other minority ethnic groups across western Europe from the 1970s, the issue of education became one around which activists and, over time, more proactive academics and practitioners, coalesced. Long seen, and used, as an instrument of assimilation, formal schooling had failed to meet either the needs or aspirations of Roma and Gypsy communities, whether or not they were nomadic. In France, for example, in 1959 compulsory education was extended to sixteen, a measure that went hand in hand with threats to cut family social benefits in cases of poor school attendance. This was seen as highly intrusive by many Gypsy families, whose resentment increased with further regulations that specified that nomadic children had to be sent to school even if a family was only in a commune for half a day. Alongside its other measures of the period, the government introduced four important circulars on the education of Gypsies between 1966 and 1970, measures that culminated in the law of 11 July 1975. Together their strongly assimilationist terms envisaged ‘completing’ the instruction of the family through constructing an education system with extra ‘classes of adaptation’.67

  Paradoxically, assimilation depends in part on mainstream society accepting minorities in their midst, and evidence suggests that attitudes of schools, teachers and fellow students, their parents and the wider community continued to ensure Gypsy children felt unwanted and stigmatized within the state system. Those interviewed in the early 1980s repeated variations on the phrase ‘they put us down at the back of the class and make us do nothing’.68 It was the same story in Britain where, for most Gypsy Traveller children at the end of the 1960s, the experience of schooling was little different to that of their parents – short-lived, patchy and dominated by bullying from other pupils and disdain from teachers. Jimmy Stockins, left school after two years, aged seven, in the mid-1960s:

  What did I want to go to school for? School was for gorgers [non-Gypsy Travellers]. Why should I learn to read and write? No other person I mixed with could . . . Don’t ask me the name of the school . . . I hated it. Sit still. Sit up straight. Single file. Fold your arms. It was like being in a fucking cage. All silly rules and saying prayers . . . I couldn’t understand why them calling ‘Gypsy’ or ‘Gypo’ across the playground was meant to annoy me. After all, that’s what I was . . . Gorger kids seemed to think we didn’t like being Travellers for some reason.69

  In Hamburg, where there was a relatively high concentration of Sinti families, a survey conducted in the city in 1983–4 found that no Roma or Sinti children graduated from high school, with 70 per cent of them being educated in special needs schools. Further, it found that after leaving school one-fifth found waged employment, while the rest went largely into trading, mainly buying and selling carpets and textiles.70 And despite the pushes made across the Eastern Bloc from the 1960s, although there was a tiny emerging Roma elite, overall, levels of attainment and social integration remained low. An investigation in 1978 concluded that ‘only 30% of Gypsy children completed primary school, while the number who finished secondary school was negligible’, contributing to more than half of Roma aged over 30 being illiterate.71

  This led the state to re-emphasize segregation, so that by the 1980s around 80 per cent of Gypsy children in Bulgaria attended segregated schools where the curriculum emphasized ‘technical’ (vocational) education rather than academic subjects. These schools signed contracts with local firms to produce goods, a portion of the profits going to the students but the bulk to the teachers and the schools. They remained a controversial aspect of Bulgaria’s education system, with some arguing that students acquired useful skills while encouraging pupils to stay longer in school. Indeed this policy was seen as the main factor raising the proportion of Roma children going on to secondary schools to between 25 and 30 per cent. Roma rights activists in particular, however, argued how it discriminated against them:

  With this program, Gypsies are destined to be illiterate. They don’t learn what children in other schools learn. Even the small numbers who go on to secondary school fail in the first year because they aren’t competitive with other students. These special schools exist throughout the country, but only in Gypsy neighbourhoods. Not a single Bulgarian goes to these schools, even if they live in Gypsy neighbourhoods.72

  As with debates over separate versus integrated schools in other parts of Europe, integrated education also brought problems with it: Gypsy children were perceived as disruptive and lowering the standards of the school, and given the language difficulties experienced by most of them (speaking Turkish and or Romani as their first language rather than Bulgarian), their difficulties within mainstream classrooms were often very real.

  In the West, activists and parents, emboldened by the successes of new representational groups such as the Gypsy Council, and seeing the importance of literacy and numeracy in the modern world, began demanding their children’s right to education. Leeds, for example, saw a high-profile public campaign that embarrassed the council into finding school places for ten Traveller children within 24 hours.73 In other areas localized voluntary schemes aimed to bring education onto sites, such as the West Midlands Travellers School, which operated a bus that visited five unauthorized sites during evenings and weekends. By the 1980s, local education authorities, in line with the shift away from assimilation towards multiculturalism, had begun to develop specific Traveller education units, which while varying in quality and practice, provided some acknowledgement of the need to see Gypsy Travellers as a specific group with particular needs.

  France too saw similar developments, as it moved away from the traditional French equation of uniformity equalling equality, and towards giving ‘more to those who have less’. While not without its limitations, in practical terms this increased funding to schools welcoming students with social or educational difficulties.74 At the same time, in common with changes across western Europe, there emerged new schooling methods, including building schools on Gypsy sites, as well as introducing mobile ‘lorry-schools’, often through a mix of state and activist provision. This was not without its problems: some Gypsies did not value mobile or site schools, seeing them as providing lower-quality, piecemeal or paternalistic education, believing that they reinforced the lack of contact with other children.75 In places where Gypsy children from sites attended mainstream schools in significant numbers, their arrival often led to the removal of sedentary students, creating ghetto
-schools.76

  By the 1980s, then, states of very different political complexions had been making moves no longer simply to remove or assimilate their Gypsy populations, but tentatively to try to implement specialist measures aimed at narrowing the difference between them and wider society. As we have seen, this was not always, and in fact rarely, motivated by concern for the lives of Gypsies themselves, while across the political spectrum very similar measures were used. Often the difference between socialist and non-socialist states was the level of state intervention, rather than the intention behind the measures. And yet, despite the increasing power of states – particularly if we contrast it with that held by early modern, or even the emerging bureaucratic states of the nineteenth century – what is perhaps most significant is not that states increasingly intervened in the life of Gypsies, but how partial their power actually was. If we look at two very different nations – Britain and Bulgaria – we can see how both states failed either to fully implement their policies towards Gypsies, or to improve their life chances.

  In Britain the provision of local authority sites enacted in the legislation of 1968, lacking a timescale by which local authorities might be forced to act, only made slow headway: nearly a decade after its passing there was still over 6,000 caravans with no stopping place. While the next decade did see a slow increase in the number of official sites, it was accompanied by the increasing hardening of popular and official attitudes towards Gypsy Travellers, who were increasingly seen as to blame for their situation. Often offering the only chance of stability open to families, official sites were one place where they could sustain a distinctive culture while being able to access education, health and welfare facilities. And yet they were not unproblematic. Sites were generally designated for residential use only, so that work, such as car-breaking and scrap storage, had to be conducted elsewhere or jeopardize tenancy rights. Kinship networks were weakened as pitches were allocated by wardens on the basis of need or through being known as ‘good tenants’, so not only were extended families broken up, but families with a history of conflict might be tenanted together. There was no security of tenure as Gypsies and Travellers were exempted from legislation protecting other caravan-dwellers or council tenants from summary eviction, while the physically marginal location of sites reinforced separation from the settled population and promoted a ghetto-like atmosphere.77 Most crucially, the legislation was enacted at the local level where the weight of public opposition – ‘bordering on the frenetic’ – against new and existing sites, could erupt into violence and vandalism and was often rooted in stereotypical assumptions about Gypsies’ habits and beliefs. The absence of clear central government direction and the lack of political will at the local level – no councillor ever won a seat through supporting a new caravan site – meant that there was a shortfall of at least 3,500 pitches across the country by the mid-1980s.78

  For the thousands of Gypsy Travellers who did not want, or were unable, to live on council sites, unauthorized sites trapped families in a cycle of conflict and eviction:

  Things are getting worse. Even getting a bit of land is difficult. We go round in a convoy and sometimes we get ten to fifteen of us on the bit of land and the police come and stop the rest of us getting on . . . Sometimes they dig a trench all round with JCB diggers and say we can’t get off unless we take our caravans with us. Well we’re trapped then. Can’t take out cars to get food even and we can’t get out to get to work . . . there was one morning at six o’clock when they had warrants to search for firearms and we were all out of the trailers standing in a row while they searched . . . Sometimes people are ill: one time they hitched up a trailer and the midwife looked out and said that a baby was going to be born . . . The local people we don’t see directly but a few have waved sticks at us when we try to get onto a piece of land but . . . [the] worst is what the papers say about us. People panic automatically when we first arrive and too much is written in the papers to frighten people against us.79

  If one of the problems of the British legislation was that of reluctant implementation shaped by local prejudice and the absence of national direction, what of socialist Bulgaria, which in theory at least was backed by strong state action?

  As ever we need to set policy developments in the wider social and political climate, particularly the regime’s increasingly sustained attack on Turkish culture and identity culminating in ‘the Revival Process’ of 1984–9. Bulgaria’s long-term move towards ethnic homogeneity was summed up by the then premier, Todor Zhivkov, who in 1979 stated that he wished to make Bulgaria the ‘Japan of the Balkans’.80 As in Northern Ireland where Irish Travellers were doubly suspect – firstly on the grounds of their Traveller identity, and secondly for being Catholic – the majority of Bulgarian Gypsies suffered from being both Roma and Muslim. This period saw the forcible renaming of citizens; Turkish cultural organizations and newspapers banned; Turkish mahali (quarters) broken up and families rehoused; and deliberate ethnic mixing of military and labour brigades. While we can read this as a specific attack on minorities, it also operated within the broader political context of Zhivkov’s leadership and what has been called his ‘slavish obedience to the Moscow line’. It was most obviously reflected in the new constitution of 1971 and party programme which stressed how there would be no ‘privileges . . . based on ethnic belonging, origin [or] creed’ within Bulgaria, but instead a ‘unified socialist society’ based on ‘the amalgamation of urban and rural life, and of physical and mental labour’.81

  Remarkably, given the resources devoted to these efforts and the regime’s near monopoly over civil society, assimilation was commonly both partial and patchy. While by 1974 about 220,000 Bulgarian Muslims had been renamed, Gypsies found ways around the new restrictions through, for example, adopting Bulgarian names for official purposes whilst continuing to use Roma names at home.82 Ethnographic research, although tightly controlled by the state and usually directed towards demonstrating socialism’s successes, in fact revealed how Gypsies sought to maintain their sense of identity in the face of policy.83 So, by the 1980s the Ljuljin apartment complex in Sofia, for example, which housed a number of dispersed Gypsy families

  amidst concrete terraces, playgrounds, and the hostile stares of Bulgarian neighbours, they still celebrate open-air weddings and baptisms. One weekend they may congregate at one relative’s apartment, the next weekend at another’s. Although the entire extended family rarely lives together in an apartment, they still gather frequently.84

  Research also revealed the extent to which travel continued to be a central part of many Gypsies’ livelihoods despite holding a fixed address: ‘bear and monkey acts, music, ironworking, woodworking, and selling old clothes, trinkets, and black market items’ all involved servicing a dispersed customer base, and led to absences of up to a month.85 This demonstrates that although many Gypsies may have moved more towards a reliance on waged labour, there was space within socialism for private enterprise and trading, particularly on the edges of the economy. The process of ‘organizing’ goods via a complex network of vruzki (connections) had in fact become a key feature of socialist regimes by the 1970s, and was by no means exclusive to Roma. Yet, with a long tradition of self-employment and economic flexibility, they were perhaps better placed than many to exploit the gaps in the socialist system.86 So, in the mid-1980s:

  Blue jeans from Italy, lingerie from Greece, scarves from Turkey or Japan, tee shirts from the United States, and electronics from Japan are in great demand. Gypsies with relatives in Yugoslavia or Turkey can sometimes establish illegal trade routes. If caught they end up in jail, but may try to bribe their way out with connections . . . Vruzki also help obtain scarce Bulgarian goods such as building materials and help wade through the bureaucracy.87

  In engaging in black- or grey-market activities Roma were no different from the wider population, in that all were attempting to construct what was often described as a ‘normal’ life within an economy of scarcity. And ye
t, it also supported a distinct cultural identity in the face of state regulation and the pressures of assimilation under socialism.

  Very quickly, however, things changed. Not simply for Roma, but right across Europe. The dismantling of the Berlin Wall and the unexpectedly swift collapse of socialist regimes after 1989 rewrote the political, social and economic map of Europe. Although broadly welcomed for bringing new political freedoms and increased personal autonomy, including rights to travel abroad, the precipitous collapse of ex-socialist economies and national boundaries heralded a new and difficult era for the populations of the ex-Soviet bloc countries. While it would be overstating the case to say that the changes were calamitous for Roma populations across the region, events over the subsequent decades suggest that overall they were among the losers in the new societies. In this period of often frighteningly rapid change, not only did Gypsies need to negotiate the new realities facing everyone in the region, but to live with a right-wing backlash and the rising tide of nationalism which soon became a feature of daily life.