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Grant Lovellette - Page 1 |
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My year of service to the Roma in 2003-04 took
place in Transcarpathia, the westernmost province of Ukraine. Although
there have been Roma in Ukraine for centuries, the ancestors of
today’s Roma originally came from northern India, arriving
in the area in which I worked toward the end of the Middle Ages.
They were originally welcomed and treated with respect because they
were believed to be religious exiles from Egypt, and because of
their skills as musicians and metalworkers. After the Turks began
to invade Europe, the Roma, being darker-skinned outsiders, were
no longer viewed as beneficial members of society but as incendiaries,
soldiers, or spies. |
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The village in which I worked, Szürte, is
on the western edge of Transcarpathia, just a few kilometers from
Hungary and Slovakia. Transcarpathia today is a rural region of
the Ukraine, a 12,617 km² historic borderland (bordering the
Ukrainian regions of Frankivska and Lvivska and sharing national
borders with Poland, Slovakia, Hungary, and Romania) whose infrastructure
and economy are intimately intertwined with borders, cross-border
cultures, and other countries' cities. |
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The poverty that accompanies unemployment and
marginalization was immediately apparent in my Roma community. The
majority of Roma in Transcarpathia today are not nomadic in the
traditional sense, having been forcefully settled by Soviet authorities.
A 1956 decree criminalized what was termed vagrancy and the parasitic
way-of-life of the Roma and ordered local authorities to settle
and give jobs to all Roma within three months under the threat of
forced corrective labor in a prison camp. |
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This forced settlement did little to improve the
situation of the Roma. Nowadays, they live in mud brick huts because
they can build these homes without the necessity of purchasing any
commercial building materials, but the walls crumble readily in
bad weather, and Ukraine’s weather is at times brutal. The
Soviets certainly were not the first authority who attempted to
integrate the Roma forcefully. The Roma entered Europe with a distinct
language and a distinct cultural identity. Some Roma still speak
the Roma language, Romani, but many have had their cultural and
linguistic identity destroyed from above. |
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For example, the Roma I worked
with in Transcarpathia do not speak Romani - they speak Hungarian.
The loss of their cultural and linguistic identity lies squarely
on the shoulders of one woman: Empress Maria Theresa, empress
of Hungary from 1740-1780. In 1774 she forbade marriage between
Roma; they were only allowed to marry Hungarians, who were always
in the position of power in the relationship. In addition, Roma
children over the age of five were to be taken away from their
families and brought up in non-Roma families to insure a proper
Roman Catholic upbringing. While destroying the Roma’s cultural
identity, Maria Theresa’s policies of interbreeding, assimilation,
and state kidnapping of Roma children did little to improve the
material situation of the Roma. Nomadic Roma lived in tents and
wintered in hillside caves, and sedentary Roma had only the barest
of necessities and were not much better off.
The next big milestone in Roma persecution was the Holocaust.
Everyone knows that six million Jews were murdered during World
War II, but fewer people know that the Roma race was also singled
out for elimination. Between half a million and one million Roma
were exterminated by the Nazis; the number is so inexact because
the Nazis did not bother to keep lists of the Roma they had slaughtered. |
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