Bury Me Standing

by Isabel Fonseca

  The coronation of Janusz Kwiek, Warsaw, 1937 (photo credits 8.5)

  The years 1984 to 1989 were the worst of Nicolae’s life. Like many other Romanians, by the time the revolution came he was ready. That very night—Christmas, 1989, when the Ceausescus were executed—Nicolae was trapped inside the state television station, where he and others seized the chance to announce the formation of the Ethnic Federation of Roma (this was to be the umbrella group for disparate Romany groups). As I met these nascent organizations, constantly changing and recombining in the next few years, I kept thinking of a phrase of the Romanian writer Emil Cioran, “the temptation to exist”: here again was hope for an identity beyond “etc.” But Nicolae, unlike many of the hundreds of new organizers, had been taught by experience to reject a nationalist approach. He left the country.

  Individual governments had ignored, belittled, or denied the violences committed against their own citizens; the project of capturing the attention, and then the imagination, of the larger world and its august international bodies was therefore that much more difficult. And yet only six months after the revolution, Nicolae Gheorghe brought the plight of Europe’s largest and most despised minority to the negotiating table—and even walked away with some commitments.

  At Copenhagen (and, later, in more and more clauses and articles, at Moscow, Oslo, Geneva, and Helsinki), the fifty-two nation members of the Conference on Security and Cooperation in Europe (CSCE—now Organization on Security and Cooperation in Europe) “recognized the particular problems of Roma” in Europe, in the context of intolerance, anti-Semitism, and xenophobia in general. The UN Commission on Human Rights followed with a controversial recognition of the Roma minority—controversial because not all its members recognized Gypsies as a people. In the form of the International Romani Union, the Gypsies had already (in 1979) been recognized by the Economic and Social Council of the United Nations, but it was only in 1993, following strenuous lobbying by Gheorghe and Ian Hancock, that this recognition was raised from symbolic “consultative” status to a vote.

  Gypsies in the UN! The very presentation of their case in the international gadjo arena was going against a millennium of Roma invisibility, ignorance, and indifference. Just as rare, particularly from an Eastern European, was Gheorghe’s emphasis on personal responsibility: “I know these are only paper commitments and not legal obligations,” he was quick to say, “but they are our texts, which we ourselves must realize.”

  One way the emerging elite was trying to do this “realizing” was in a different kind of international arena: the gathering of representatives from their diaspora. At Stupava, in Slovakia in 1992, a large group of Roma from many countries gathered for the first time since the demise of communism to discuss their future in the new Europe.

  The choice of meeting place itself lent powerful resonance to those exploratory meetings. The many Gypsy slums of Slovakia are home to some of the very worst-off. One settlement, at Rudnany, sprawled over an abandoned arsenic mine, and Gypsy children could be seen playing among the corroded containers and the little piles of white powder that leaked from them. They lived in long-abandoned, sagging, and often roofless mining offices, surrounded by heavy metals: arsenic, antimony, bismuth, mercury, and iron. It was something worse than “medieval” squalor: it was post-industrial squalor. These dangers were well known and ignored. Instead, there in Slovakia the popular Premier Vladimír Meciar was able, a year later, to make a speech in which he claimed it was “necessary to curtail the extended reproduction of the socially unadaptable and mentally backward population” (the Gypsies), adding, “If we don’t deal with them now, they will deal with us later.” In Prague, Václav Havel countered with a challenging truth—that the Gypsies are “a litmus test of a civil society”—but his view was not shared. The squalor of Gypsy life had deepened, and the death toll had risen. Since the Velvet Revolution, twenty-eight Gypsies have been murdered in Czechoslovakia. The level of hatred all around could not be overstated.

  In flew the long-serving Gypsy soldiers: Nicolae Gheorghe, Ian Hancock from Texas, Rajko Djuric from Berlin, Manush Romanov from Bulgaria. There were also the younger players, newer at least to the public struggle: Rudko Kawczynski from Hamburg, Klara Orgovanova from here in Slovakia, Emil Scuka, a Rom lawyer from Prague, and Aladar Horváth, a Hungarian Rom still in his twenties who had made a name for himself as a singer and was now a member of the Hungarian Parliament. And there were the converts from academia: Andrzej Mirga, and Hristo Kjuchukov, a Bulgarian Rom who had written his country’s first Romani ABC. Many academics came too, from France and the United States; there was Milena Hübschmannová, the linguist from Prague and my guide on an earlier trip in eastern Slovakia, and there was Marcel Courtiade, my guardian in Albania.

  Among the Roma every style of politics was represented at Stupava—from black-power militancy and Bible-thumping to quiet accommodation within the gadjo political framework. Outside the conference building still other styles were on display. In the drive you’d see conferees lighting up, the blue queries of cigarette smoke floating skywards from each discrete cluster. They didn’t mingle, out of shyness (to judge from the awkward glancing and posing); in the case of the Hungarians, though, who moved always in a group of more than a dozen, apparent aloofness could be put down to language. They spoke only Magyar, and so they couldn’t talk to anyone who hadn’t arrived on their bus. Everyone was turned out in a boxy new suit bought, one sensed, especially for the occasion. These garments also demarcated delegates along national lines, as if they were cut from flags or fashioned from the plumage of national birds: the three Poles appeared in shades of mustard and malt; the Hungarian team wore purple—ranging from mauve to puce. The Bulgarians came in black.

  Cigarettes and smoker’s coughs, mustaches, hats, and overburdened small frames—these united most of the Roma, but their color-coded allegiances (no doubt merely a reflection of what was available in their countries’ sparse shops) could suggest the lack of unity that ignited such meetings and which has thwarted the whole Romany movement.

  No self-proclaimed monarch was invited—or dared—to venture into this convention, but there were even more unlikely participants, such as Frank Johnson, a Rom from Los Angeles who had nothing whatever to do with politics or academic life. Like many from within the Eastern bloc, he had never met his brethren from other countries. What would they make of each other? Apart from his dark complexion, Frank was not like an East European Rom. He was big and tall and open and American; he “could not believe” the beige meat and jellied potatoes we were being offered. They were all Gypsies, but would they have anything else in common?

  The Roma took the opportunity to hold their own private meetings after the scheduled sessions were through. I caught Frank Johnson as he was walking out of one these: from the corridor it sounded like a cockfight. “Gypsies around the world are alike. They can’t prioritize,” he said. “It’s the same back home. They’re brain-dead 362 days a year, and then they come to a meeting like this and strut around showing off.” Earlier that day Frank had visited a nearby slum and had been consternated by the desperation there. During the sessions Gypsies and their expert friends railed against gadjo stereotypes; but at the Gypsy settlement Frank had felt obliged to warn a professor from Duke University to “watch his pockets.” Frank was impatient with politicking.

  With his square hair-do and black suit, Frank looked like a salesman, and so he was: he sold hope, to women only. “They come and see me, they come in crying and I help them sort out their men troubles. It’s always men troubles, you know, and they all want a quick solution. I explain as how men leave them because they’ve gone and lost their bloom.” The next morning, Frank looked a bit wilted himself. The psychic (as he called himself) was staring at his salami-and-gherkin breakfast. I wondered what had brought him from L.A. to a political meeting in Slovakia. “I’ve had two wives, thirty-six years gone between the two of them, one Gypsy, one American. I thought I’d come to Europe and
try to find a woman with traditional values, one who’ll appreciate what I can give her, which ain’t much what with mortgage payments and whatnot, not that I pay mortgage when I’m renting. When I was growing up we owned our house. I hate renting.”

  Marriage and politics were of course linked in traditional Gypsy life, and Frank could be forgiven for thinking that a political meeting such as this might turn up another kind of candidate. But it wasn’t wives or rent or even the Slovakian slum that had really got Frank down. It was what he had seen of the new Gypsy leadership. Scattered, vain, egomaniacal, ignorant, power-mad, back-stabbing. (“Though they don’t even stab each other in the back,” an American woman observed, half impressed, “they stab each other in the front.”) The florid infighting was depressingly familiar even to an American Rom, but to new non-Gypsy observers it was frankly alarming. I too had been shocked the first time I saw a Gypsy leader get down on his knees and cry to make a point. Far from being embarrassed or worried by his behavior, both he and his audience duly returned to the business at hand. These were conventions—like the ritual wailing at a funeral—and they were understood by everyone in the group. It made sense to keep non-Gypsies out of their “real” meetings because things could be so easily misunderstood (and ridiculed). If Gypsy lamentation was mainly a matter of style, something like a living counterpart to the bold colors they liked, the keynote here was unembellished despair.

  Ian Hancock was one of the few leaders with a keen sense of the honorable and much-thwarted evolution of Romany nationalism, which began in the 1930s, in Romania. And he was proudly aware of the astonishing proliferation of new groups formed in the Eastern bloc since 1989: in Hungary alone, there were already 140 registered Rom organizations. Nevertheless, here Hancock spoke most evocatively of Rom fatalism (and, like Frank Johnson, he used the third person). “They are so skeptical. Some don’t even believe they have a language. They deny their identity.” Dispersal and the imposition of varieties of white culture, Hancock believed, had caused the Gypsies to lose their language, their sense of belonging, and their ability even to recognize each other.

  Writing for a Gypsy readership in a 1988 issue of the magazine Roma (published in India and one of the enduring Gypsy publications), Hancock pointed to a different cause:

  It has been said more than once that our main problem is lack of enough educated people among us to organize things. This is not true; there are certainly enough educated and concerned Roma to do the job. The problem is, instead, an old one: our national disease, hamishagos [to meddle or to disturb]. This for some reason, makes us want to hinder, instead of help, our own who are getting ahead. Sar laci and’ekh vadra (“like crabs in a bucket”), when one tries to climb out, the others hang on to him and pull him back down.

  He offered the example of the first appointment of a Gypsy by a president (the president was Ronald Reagan, as it happened) to a federal position—the direct result of Hancock’s years of pushing and pestering. When Bill Duna, a Gypsy of Hungarian origin living in Minneapolis, was appointed as the single Rom member of the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Council, “the very next day,” Hancock told the readers of Roma, “other Gypsies sought to wreck things. They sent cables and telegrams to the Council saying that they were more qualified than he. The Holocaust Memorial Council’s response was to make fun of the situation. Individuals unable to read or write, knowing nothing of the history of the Holocaust …”

  At Stupava, though, Hancock did not want to discuss these internal problems. Among his publications is a book called The Pariah Syndrome, and the title is an indication of what he believes to be the cause of Gypsy fatalism. “For example, the newspapers. Whenever there is a story about Gypsies it’s always about crime. And only when Gypsies are implicated is ethnicity mentioned: ‘the Gypsy mother,’ ‘the Gypsy home.’ Imagine substituting the word ‘Jew.’ ” He was talking about the Western press, about The New York Times. Some of his most useful work has been in his role as a one-man watchdog, patiently correcting the stereotypes that crop up everywhere, from editorials and police reports to greeting cards, which in the U.S.A. in the 1990s could still feature thieving hook-nosed Gypsy crones. Hancock is offended, and he has a point. “But we are never identified when there are serious rights issues involved. For example, no one mentions the fact that most children in Romanian orphanages are Roma, like most refugees in Germany.”

  One of those refugees was Rajko Djuric, the poet and president of the International Romani Union, who had been threatened with death and forced to flee his native Yugoslavia after enraging authorities with his call to the disintegrating country’s eight hundred thousand Gypsies to refuse to fight. Gypsies lived in every part of the country, he’d pointed out; their name was a term of insult; what interest or duty could they find in a nationalist scramble for land? A year before Stupava (when a full-blown Balkan war still seemed unimaginable to most observers) I went to meet Rajko Djuric in Belgrade, and I found him in the middle of the Serbian capital’s first mass protest. That day in March 1991, over the din of the crowd, Rajko reminded me that few Gypsies had survived the terror once the Ustasha (the Croatian fascists in the Second World War) came to power in the north. And in occupied Serbia, he continued (in the relative calm of the packed bus we had boarded), Gypsies fell to firing squads at a rate of one hundred for each German killed by partisans, and fifty for each German wounded. Rajko correctly predicted that in the coming years of war the Gypsies would again be used as cannon fodder. A year later, at Stupava, he again rightly promised that the Gypsies of the former Yugoslavia, with no patch of ground to bargain with, would also be excluded from all the negotiations which would dramatically affect their lives. Every discussion at Stupava pointed to an emerging theme: that Gypsies must redefine themselves as an ethnic problem—rather than a social one, with the deathless implications of parasitism and criminality (and, perhaps worse, of invisibility).

  To that end, the three American experts lectured the Gypsies on the management of ethnic crisis. They knew about Mexican Americans, about blacks and whites in America, and about ethnic conflict in general. Well-meaning though they were, none of them knew anything about Gypsies, and this was noticed. Still, their immediate credibility had already been more comically undermined by scratchy radio dispatches announcing the ethnic riots back home in L.A. The radio belonged to a Serbian political scientist sitting in the back row, who had been tuning in for news of his own ethnic crisis.

  It was my impression that most of the Roma were not listening to anything, though none was more theatrically indifferent than Rudko Kawczynski, the militant leader from Hamburg. In Germany he had organized sit-ins and hunger strikes—new directions in Gypsy protest; and he had established an international parliament called Eurorom, as well as a Roma National Congress. It was impossible to ignore him at Stupava. He arrived ostentatiously late at each session, preceded always by two leather-jacketed henchpersons who would lean cross-armed against the wall rather than sit at the school desks like everyone else. His manner of speaking—with elaborate pauses and the intentionally soft voice of a Mafia capo—was as pompous as his carefully tilted wide-brimmed hat. Kawczynski was the Eldridge Cleaver of the Romany emancipation movement; and he could barely contain himself.

  Donald Horowitz, the professor from Duke, stood at the podium describing how the negative image of Roma was shared by other “subordinate ethnic groups” formed through slavery and conquest. He cited American blacks, some low castes of India and Africa, and, perhaps unintriguingly and even insultingly to his present audience, the Burakamin of Japan. “The Burakamin had also been characterized as dirty, lazy, sexually promiscuous, and akin to four-legged animals.” But such images could be changed, he was going on to say, when Kawczynski cut him off.

  “Roma are sitting, gadje are speaking. They are telling us what to do, which language to speak. They want to teach us how to speak our own language. What are they doing here?… Ten miles from here Gypsies are starving. This is not a concern of the
gadje. It is our problem. They don’t want to help us. They want to quell us, or else expel us or maybe to kill us. Europeans try to make our life so difficult that we will leave voluntarily. They drive us to think that they are all alike. Brothers, don’t think that the gadjo is more clever than you are. You must help yourselves. We cannot expect any kind of help from anyone.”

  Manush Romanov, the diminutive leader from Bulgaria, was twenty years older than Kawczynski and, though a separatist himself, he was not convinced. “They are stronger than us!” he shouted out during Kawczynski’s tirade, to which the Polish-born panther replied: “No.” (Deep pause.) “Only in seminars, not in the street. We must take back the streets.” Manush Romanov was more poetic. “We have problems,” he replied, “like leaves in the forest.” Many, I supposed he meant, and here he had some authority.

  If among Gypsies the act of survival, even identity itself, is a kind of victory, in the case of Manush it was a three-part triumph. His name, which he took for himself in 1989, means “Gypsy Man” in Romani, or “Man Man.” He used to be Mustapha Alia, and then, after the first campaign of forced name-changing in Bulgaria, Lyubomir Aliev. In his former life, before Sofia’s once-thriving Gypsy Theater had been shut down, Manush had been a playwright and a puppeteer. He was one of three Gypsies to be elected to Bulgaria’s first free Parliament, and the only one to admit to being a Gypsy. Like many of the new figures (and despite such glamorous political credentials as a stint in prison), he seemed an unlikely leader. But there were very few “likely” leaders, mainly because, as Hancock had pointed out, there were very few likely followers among the Roma. Some sixty distinct tribal groups existed among Bulgaria’s population of eight hundred thousand Gypsies—and there was Manush’s lone cultural association (ethnically based political parties were illegal in Bulgaria). Some of the proudest groups, such as Bulgaria’s Grastari, or Lovara, an elegant population of horse-dealers—who had remained nomadic until it became a punishable offense in 1958, expressly forbade defiling involvement in gadjo politics, and they thought Manush should be lynched.