Roma, on Move, Test Europe’s ‘Open Borders’

Bucharest, Romania — This city is full of stark, Soviet-era housing blocks, and the grimmest among them — gray towers of one-room apartments with communal bathrooms and no hot water — are given over to the Roma population. Children reflected in a puddle of water in Ferentari, a suburb of Bucharest inhabited mostly by Roma. Roma like Maria Murariu, 62, who tends to her dying husband in a foul-smelling room no bigger than a jail cell. She has not found work in five years.“There is not much for us in Romania,” she said recently, watching her husband sleep. “And now that we are in the European Union, we have the right to go to other countries. It is better there.” Thousands of Romania’s Roma, also known as Gypsies, have come to a similar conclusion in recent years, heading for the relative wealth of Western Europe, and setting off a clash within the European Union over just how open its “open borders” are.

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Who Are Gypsies, and Why Is France Deporting Them?

The term Gypsy is short for Egyptian, although ethnically, Gypsies actually originally came from India. They left their homeland sometime during the 11th century, probably as a result of Muslim invasions, and have never returned. By the 14th century, they'd entered Eastern Europe, whose residents somehow got the impression that they came from Egypt (hence the nickname). Although they rarely show up on official censuses, today's Gypsy population is estimated to be between 2 million and 5 million. Most of them live in Slavic-speaking countries such as the Czech Republic, Bulgaria and Romania.

Yet despite centuries of Gypsy presence, Europe has never accepted this oft nomadic ethnic group and has enacted systematic purges of varying severity since they first arrived on the continent. Evidence of discrimination can be found just by looking at our language: when we cheat someone out of money, we "gyp" them. Gypsy moths are parasitic, and gypsy cabs operate illegally. And though many Roma still use the slang term — Britain's Gypsy Council is a self-organized association of so-called travelers — others regard gypsy as an insult despite its wide use and prefer Roma, or sometimes Romani.

• France Deports Gypsies: Courting the Xenophobes?, Time, 8/19/10.
• Romani.org website.
  

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