Filip Borev: Genocide by another name? Assimilation and the 'Roma Question'

Young British Romani blogger writes on growing antiziganism in the UK – Genocide by another name? Assimilation and the ‘Roma Question’.

Filip Borev is an 18-year-old British Romani writer whose voice is one of the
freshest and most interesting in the UK today. He has been blogging, mainly
about Romani issues, for two years and the extremely witty, mature and
forthright style of his writing has won him many fans and also helped to dispel
a lot of ignorance about the lives of Romani people and their history. In 2012,
he came to the attention of the mainstream media when he wrote an open letter to
one of the major UK TV channels, Channel 4, challenging the damaging racist
stereotypes in their popular programme My Big Fat Gypsy Wedding.

He recently wrote for The Guardian newspaper about the “Maria” affair I was a
pale Roma baby – it’s always been a family joke that I was stolen and is a co-author of a recent report on third sector/NGO services for Romani
and Traveller communities in the UK – Our Lives, Our Fight, Our Third Sector.

Filip is a regular Twitter user @pipogypopotamus and you can find his blog heer.

His most recent blog discusses the frightening way in which antiziganist
attitudes are not only prevalent in wide-circulation UK newspapers such as The
Daily Mail and The Express, but are now entering into mainstream politics, as
can be seen in the racist rhetoric, not only of Nigel Farage, leader of anti-immigration
party UKIP, but also of the former Home Secretary, David Blunkett MP and the
Deputy Prime Minister, Nick Clegg.

Bernie Higgins

Genocide by another name? Blunkett, assimilation and the ‘Roma question’.

"We have got to change the behaviour and the culture of…the Roma community,
because there’s going to be an explosion otherwise. We all know that." – David
Blunkett.

Change a culture – what does that mean? Assimilation, I expect. Indeed, in
recent months the ‘Roma question’ has been at the centre of political debates,
media campaigns and televised debates. Fuelled by the impending expiration of
the restrictions on Bulgarians and Romanians freedom to live and work in the EU,
attention has fallen on the Roma community. It was without surprise that the
likes of Nigel Farage, the Daily Mail and the Express have used this as
opportunity to foster an anti-immigrant and antiziganist sentiment, yet, when
these words come from the mouth of a supposedly ‘left wing’ Labour MP, it is,
perhaps, time to start worrying.

The Rom are by no means strangers to intolerance – it has defined our past,
our present and, without a doubt, our future. Our history is not one that we
look back on with nostalgia, indeed, we have long been maligned. From five
centuries of enslavement in Wallachia; to orders for our expulsion which date
back to the 15th century (and persist to this day); to being put to death for
the mere crime of being Romani; and to the ‘Porajmos’ – the Nazi genocide of
500,000 Romani people. What is clear is that antiziganism has come to define the
gadjo (non-Romani) population as much as it has the Rom.

Why? That is a question I have asked myself my entire life – why have we been
so severely loathed for so many centuries? For sure, we were a mysterious
stranger when we arrived in Europe in the 14th Century. Where we came from, no
one can really say for certain. Whether it’s India, Egypt, or even the moon,
what we do know is that we have remained in Europe ever since. We are no longer
strangers, we have been part of Europe for 700 years, yet, we are still as
mistrusted, as detested, and as enigmatic as the day we arrived. I suspect that
Blunkett and Farage would suggest that there is something inherently wrong with
our ethnicity that justifies the discrimination that we face, a view which was
shared by Hitler. What that is though remains a mystery – is it, like Blunkett
claims, our predisposition to congregate on the street and socialise or was
Hitler correct to suggest that we are racially impure?

It seems almost inherent in the human race to suspect the unknown. We fear
what we do not know and it is only with knowledge that our fears are eradicated.
Once upon a time we believed the world to be flat and we feared fallen from its
edges, yet, with knowledge we learnt it was round. We can, perhaps, then justify
why Europe feared the Rom when they arrived from an unknown territory, in the
14th Century. There have been attempts to map our origins – linguistic evidence
suggests we originated from Northern India – yet, our history is unwritten and,
thus, theories of our origin are simply educated guesswork. That said, there is
no concrete knowledge to lessen fears and suspicions and despite our 700 year
presence in Europe we remain the stranger from an unknown land.

Still considered as the ‘unknown’, we are yet to be deemed ‘European’. We are
not Bulgarians, Romanians or Brits, nor are we deemed to have any other national
identity. We are simply the Romani – the strangers who wandered here from
somewhere outside of Europe, and who have continued to wander through the
borders of Europe’s territory. We have, thus, never been deemed as full
citizens. This excuses Europe from providing us with the equal rights bestowed
to its ‘real’ citizens – the citizens with a history and a homeland. We have,
therefore, faced centuries of persecution for not being European enough. It is
this persecution, however, that has led us to become so isolated from mainstream
culture.

Romani cultures have remained strong and almost unchanged for centuries. They
have adapted only to the oppressive policies which police our lives. How does
one integrate into a society that has rejected them from the start? Indeed,
policy has coerced us to part with many of our cultural traditions. Nomadism,
for example, has essentially been outlawed which prompted our move into ‘bricks
and mortar’ accommodation. This is arguably the process of ‘assimilation’ but
certainly, within my own experience, this did not ease the discrimination that
we face. The strangers in the caravans become the strangers in the gadjo
neighbourhood – adhering to mainstream culture, yet, still visible as a target.
Nomadism is unwelcomed; however, we are also unwelcomed as the neighbour next
door.

If we look across Europe we will find neighbourhoods in nearly every big city
that are inhabited entirely by the Rom. Politicians tell us that we have
segregated ourselves, but we were unwanted elsewhere. For centuries, therefore,
we have built networks of dependence amongst the Romani communities in which we
live. Our ethnicity, our cultures, and our shared experience of oppression have
been the links that have bonded us together. The longer our persecution
prevails, the stronger our cultural identities have become. In a society that
denies us our basic rights, our cultures are our only weapon. We have been
denied equality and our rights have been taken, but the one thing they can’t
take from us is our identity.

My grandmother is a Bulgarian Roma migrant. She arrived in the UK in the
1980s looking for a better life. Communist Bulgaria had a policy of forced
assimilation for all ethnic minorities – the Romani way of life, the Romani
language, and even Romani surnames were outlawed. Sedentarist policy forced the
Romani away from nomadism, and the freedom to practice traditional occupations
was restricted. “They hoped to eradicate us” she told me. “I left all my family
behind to come to England. Back then we thought England was the land of the
free, the land of opportunity. Now it’s like being back in the dark days –
first, they take our homes, with the scrap license they have taken our jobs, and
now we are banned from the streets. Banning us from congregating – did they not
ban the Jewish people from the parks?” After the fall of communism in Bulgaria,
conditions did not improve for the Rom. “Communism took our skills, our
traditional crafts. There were no more jobs when communism fell and the Rom were
left with no means to make a living. No one wanted to help the Rom, we were left
in ghettos, no jobs, no money for water or electricity, not even a toilet.”

This is how conditions remain for most of Europe’s 12 million Romani people.
Like my grandmother, they come to the UK looking for a better life. Instead,
they are met with intolerance. These people have come to the UK from
neighbourhoods where they have never had a refuse collection, yet, we assume
they will understand our colour coded bins and waste disposal systems. They come
from poverty that is unfathomable in this country, then criticise them for
‘stealing our jobs and our benefits’. Overcrowding has characterised their lives,
both here and at home, yet, we chastise them for exercising their freedom to
gather outside. The Rom do not congregate outdoors to ‘intimidate’ their
neighbours, yet, this entirely harmless act is observed as menacing by a society
who condemns them for simply being Romani.

Whilst writing this article, the Deputy PM, Nick Clegg, endorsed David
Blunkett’s attack on the Rom. “We have every right to say if you are in Britain
and are coming to live here…you have got to be sensitive to the way life is
lived in this country. If you do things that people find intimidating, such as
large groups hanging around on street corners, you have got to listen to what
other people in the community say." Coming from the ‘far right’ I’d perhaps not
be shocked, but I find it increasingly distressing that antiziganist attitudes
and scaremongering are creeping into mainstream politics. There is something
quite eerie about David Blunkett’s words. The notion that we must ‘change’ a
culture for the greater good of our society is heavily draped with Nazi
connotations. To change our cultures, to assimilate, to lose the one thing that
has bound us together through centuries of oppression, is genocide by another
name.

The Nazis sought to eradicate Romani cultures by taking our lives, in Britain,
seventy years on, they wish to take our souls instead. When they take away our
culture there is no longer a need to kill us, for they have taken all that we
have left. The Romani have a saying – Na bister 500,000 (never forget the
500,000) – but how could we forget when the genocide lives on.