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Case Study: ROMA OF EUROPE
- High unemployment, reduced access to health care and poor housing
mean Roma suffer some of the worst living standards in Europe.
Analysis
Roma (also known as Gypsies) trace their origins back to India a
thousand years ago. They migrated westwards over successive centuries
and can now be found throughout Europe.
Those in Eastern Europe were the first to lose
their jobs when factories laid off staff in the new post-communist
economic climate of the nineties and over 80% of Roma are now unemployed
throughout the region. Unemployment pay stops after a few months
and alternative social security benefits are non-existent. In some
municipalities child benefit is restricted for large families.
Roma groups claim that medical care, although in
theory still free for all, is denied to them. Doctors, midwives
and ambulances, they say, will not come to 'Gypsy' quarters and
villages.
Finding a stable home from which the various services
can be accessed is hard too in western Europe. Some 2,500 nomadic
Roma families in Britain and a rather higher number in France suffer
from a lack of legalised caravan sites. Moving from one area to
another, children suffer from poor performance at school.
In Italy, shanty towns have been bulldozed to the
ground outside Florence and Rome with no alternative accommodation
offered to the majority of the people living there on the grounds
that they are asylum seekers or lack official papers.
In July 2000, the municipal authorities of Aspropyrgos
and Ano Liosia in the suburbs of Athens started what they called
"cleaning operations," in fact emptying the area of its
3,000 Roma inhabitants as part of the preparations for the Olympic
Games.
Despite centuries of persecution, Roma are one
group who seem to have been resolutely left behind in Europe's general
rising prosperity.
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