Roma People in Europe

By Burkhard Paetzold

Roma people constitute a large minority in Europe. Without having a country of their own their number is larger than the population of quite a few other European nations.

Members of a Roma family. Photo by Burkhard Paetzold.

The Roma have had to fight for survival in all of their history and half a million Roma lost their lives during the Nazi regime. After that many of the survivors lost their culture during the communist system. And finally many of these uprooted Roma lost their economic basis and became desperate when transition economies ran towards global markets.

To tell just a small example:

The rules in the European road system outlawed horse carts in Romania from one day to another. Horse trade and horse cart transportation was significant in the Roma economy over centuries so large groups in a whole nation lost their source of income.

After all, many Roma communities are segregated and tens of thousands live in generational poverty at the outskirts of towns and villages. Even though this is a typical human rights issue, for some reason it’s quite invisible. The media are in the hands of the dominant ethnic groups.

If support coming through the general schema is: “we” are helping “them” or “we” are teaching “them” and so forth. This way of funding can be trapped in dependency or greediness among neighbors if it’s not connected to community building and if it doesn’t address root causes of poverty. Sometimes it helps the rich getting richer. There are many examples how it even builds up self-fulfilling prophecies. One of the typical vicious cycles looks like this: funds from the European Union (EU) or infrastructure have to go through a bidding process with default standards. It’s almost clear that Roma will never have a chance in that. When, for instance, an EU funded sewage program is done, like I saw in eastern Slovakia some time ago, a specialized company might win the bidding, not all Roma in the community will understand the new system, since they never had one and they were not involved in building it. Like in other socially deprived regions you will find examples for destruction and vandalism. And everyone in the dominant ethnic group will say: “see what they did to our costly gift — it’s in their genes …”

Members of a Roma community. Photo by Burkhard Paetzold.

So funding needs to be connected to capacity building to strengthen the Roma community. In this regard the Self-Development of People (SDOP) funding really makes a difference. It started after a time of human relationship building. Presbyterian Church (U.S.A.)'s young adult volunteers, among others, have worked in Roma communities in Carpath-Ukraine some years as pre-school teachers and community workers. Mission workers of PC(USA) and the Reformed Church of America (RCA) as well as mission groups came to visit.

SDOP funding took into account that the PC(USA) has been supporting indigenous leadership training among Roma. And finally SDOP has supported a Roma housing project in Debrecen, Hungary, and a self help farming project in Komoroz, Carpath-Ukraine. Even though it didn’t change the material situation immediately, what happened was people got together to talk about their own concerns and began to prioritize and to advocate for themselves. Families in the communities found more reasons to collaborate.

More of this kind of sustainable funding is needed for farming, crafts and housing. A big concern is training. And marketing is difficult in isolated places like Carpath-Ukraine. As far as training is concerned in a recent encounter of Christian Roma from Carpath-Ukraine with Roma in Russia (supported by PC(USA) and RCA) we found out that it is culturally much more appropriate to find Roma trainers instead of bringing trainers from western countries.

One of the key elements that seem to be missing in the development effort of this community is the involvement of the Roma themselves. Self-Development of People has established an ECO to assist Roma communities to identify their own needs and to find their own starting point for a change. Learn how you can support Roma Communities.