People power can move Roma onwards

By Robert Cottrell

Date: 10/02/05

When Britain stationed immigration officers at Prague airport in 2001 to keep poor Roma away from Britain, I urged the Czechs to station immigration officers at Heathrow to stop drunken British stag parties getting on planes to Prague. The British louts were a far bigger danger to innocent bystanders.

Sadly, the Czechs did nothing and Wenceslas Square by night has come to resemble a Basildon lap-dancing club crossed with an outdoor public lavatory. As for Britain's Roma-exclusion scheme, the House of Lords finally ruled before Christmas that it had been "systematically discriminatory and unlawful". I see here a fine British compromise. We agree that we were wrong, but only when it is too late to do anything about it.

Which is not to say that the British fears were absurd, merely that the response was ill-judged.

I had no idea how badly some Roma lived until I visited Velka Ida, a village near Kosice in eastern Slovakia, in December 2003. Western European governments were worrying then that EU enlargement might bring in thousands of Roma seeking social-security benefits. Like many of my colleagues, I went to see whether this looked likely. To my untutored eye, it certainly did.

Even to call Velka Ida a "village" gave the wrong impression. It was a huddle of huts lashed together from planks and mud and polythene, on a patch of land so filthy that it might as well have been a garbage dump. I looked into one hovel where the only furniture was a plastic tub, a broken sofa and a gas ring. Here a couple lived with their ten children, sleeping on rugs and banked earth.

It seemed to me that if a family from Velka Ida could find its way into Britain or France, then no matter how harsh or grudging the treatment they received there, they would be better off in material terms than if they stayed in their hut. So why not go?

To the relief of western governments and to my own surprise, there has been no mass migration. But it can only be a matter of time before more scare stories appear in the British newspapers looking ahead to the probable widening of the Schengen area in 2007 and to the EU's planned admission that same year of Romania and Bulgaria. These two countries have about 3 million Roma between them, or roughly as many Roma as currently live within the EU.

Racism obviously plays a large part in fears of Roma migration, as it does in Roma poverty and this shames us all. But some good may yet come out of these fears, if they stir Europe's governments into doing more to help the Roma within their existing communities, hoping to deter migration that way.

The question is where to begin. Perhaps by creating jobs, since nine out of ten Roma in Slovakia are unemployed. But employment requires education. Employment and education both tend to assume some minimal standard of housing. Housing requires income. And income, sooner or later, requires employment.

The 'Decade of Roma Inclusion' announced last week by eight central European and Balkan countries, plus the European Commission and other international institutions, aims to tackle all of these problems at once, which may be the only way.

But the Roma could also do more to help themselves. Romania and Slovakia both have Roma minorities roughly equal in size to their ethnic-Hungarian minorities. In both countries, Hungarian parties sit in governments and lobby for their interests, while the Roma are politically invisible. Change that, by mobilising and channelling the Roma vote, and you gain real power to change other things too.

• Robert Cottrell is central Europe correspondent for The Economist.

Article reports on the situation of the Roma minorities in Central and Eastern Europe.