Who are the Romani?

For centuries, “gypsies” have dominated the Western world’s place of “someone to persecute
or blame.” From the black plague to thousands of socio-cultural problems throughout Europe and
North Africa from the 12th century to the present… arguably no group has had to contend with more
vicious stereotyping and ethnic persecution than the ethnic group known as Rom or Romani.

Why? How is it that they have occupied among the lowest and most unenviable positions in Western
culture for centuries? The following are just a few perspectives from Rom scholars – that will be
used as a lead-in to the film “Chocolat” and a discussion on roles we play or chose not to play in
societies where inequity is prevalent. These are extracted from http://www.rromaniconnect.org/

ROMANI (Rom/Roma/Rroma) Perspectives:

A new theory on Romani history based on ongoing research into recorded and factual evidence
is being prepared by Ronald Lee and other scholars, including Ian Hancock, Marcel Cortiade
and Adrian Marsh. Using language studies, blood groupings, DNA tests and the factual
evidence in the writings of the period by Firdausi and other scholars at the Ghaznavid court of
Mahmud and later, the Persians, Armenians, Turks and Greeks, the theory suggests that a group
of Indians numbering in the thousands were taken out of India by Mahmud Ghazni in the early
11th century and incorporated as ethnic units, along with their camp followers, wives and
families, to form contingents of Indian troops to serve in the Ghaznavid Emirate in Khurasan as
ghazis and in the bodyguard of Mahmud and his successors.
The existence of such troops is well documented in contemporary histories of the
Ghaznavids, as is their participation in the battles in Khurasan. The theory goes on to explain
that in 1040, the Ghaznavid empire was overthrown by the Seljuks and that the Indian
contingency, numbering around some 60,000, were either forced to fight for the Seljuks and
spearhead their advance in their raids into Armenia, or fled to Armenia to escape them. In any
event, the Indians ended up in Armenia and later, in the Seljuk Sultanate of Rûm. These
proto-Romanies remained in Anatolia for two to three hundred years and during that time they
abandoned their military way of life and took up a nomadic lifestyle based on artisan work,
trading, animal dealing and entertainment.
Gradually, small groups wandered westwards across the Bosporus to Constantinople
and from there up into the Balkans to reach Central Europe by 1400, leaving local groups in all
the regions they had passed through. Roma made their home in almost all countries of Europe
where it has been, and still is, the failure of all of the governments of those countries to provide
protection for Roma against persecution and massive discrimination by the police, local
authorities and the local population that are the causes of the present conditions. Under the
Geneva Convention on Refugees, this is tantamount to official persecution and allows Roma to
seek refugee status in signatory countries. Little action is taken to prevent massive job
discrimination in the workplace, housing and public sectors. In Romania and elsewhere,
employment ads in the local papers are allowed to state: No Roma wanted or words to this
effect. Roma are in effect living in a state of Apartheid in the New Democracies. In the Czech
Republic signs appear in windows of discotheques, cinemas and restaurants stating: No dogs or
Gypsies allowed!
 Now that Hungary, the Czech Republic, Slovakia and Poland are EU members and the
other new democracies that have large Romani populations are in line for EU membership in
the near future, it remains to be seen whether conditions will improve for the Roma, or will
proposed improvements be endlessly delayed or even abandoned. If the evidence of the
treatment of Roma in some of the long-established EU countries is any example, such as the
deplorable refugee camps in Italy, the campsite problems in Britain, prejudice and actual
persecution in Germany, Austria, France, Britain, Italy and elsewhere, the future of Sinti and
Roma in Europe is not all that promising. The problem is not so much one of ethnic or national
rights of Roma as minorities, where the present focus now lies, but of fundamental human
rights as guaranteed under the United Nations Charter of Human Rights.

Yvonne Slee

On Romani origins and Identity

Anecdote on Roma history and the army!

When Arp Arslan won at Manzikert battle (1071), the Byzantine emperor Roman IV Diogenes
was found injured and muddy on the battle field. Nobody could recognise him among other
soldiers but one Seljuk finally identified him. So Arp Arslan asked him: "If you were in my
place and me in yours, what would you have done?" Roman: "I would probably have killed
you" Arp Arslan (Arslan means "Lion"): "I will do worse, I will let you go". Arslan told Roman
to bend down to the ground, then he put his foot on Roman's neck. After a moment Arslan told
him to get up and sit at the table. He respected him for one week and let him go.

When Roman (escorted half the way) arrived in Constantinopolis, he found Andronikos on the
throne and told him: "Ok, I will leave you in power, just leave me alive, I want to finish my life
in a monastery." Adronikos accepted and swore he would not do him any harm, then told
Roman to sign his abdication. After doing so, Andronikos gauged Roman's eyes out of his
head, put meat-worms in the holes, bound him on a mule's back and sent him back through the
desert of Anatolia. A few days before Roman's death, he recieved a letter (probably from
Andronikos), telling him, "I didn't do any harm to you. On the contrary, I wanted to protect you
from the views of this world because you are processed to heavenly visions".

Romanies were the only other population besides the Jews who were targeted for
extermination on racial grounds in the Final Solution.

During the 1920s the legal oppression of Romanies in Germany intensified

considerably, despite the egalitarian statutes of the Weimar Republic. In 1920 they were
forbidden to enter parks and public baths; in 1925 a conference on "The Gypsy Question" was
held which resulted in laws requiring unemployed Romanies to be sent to work camps "for
reasons of public security", and for all Romanies to be registered with the police. After 1927,
all Romanies, even children, had to carry identification cards, bearing fingerprints and
photographs. In 1929, The Central Office for the Fight Against the Gypsies in Germany was
established in Munich, and in 1933, just ten days before the Nazis came to power, government
officials in Burgenland called for the withdrawal of all civil rights from the Romani people. In
September 1935 Romanies became subject to the restrictions of the Nuremberg Law for the
Protection of German Blood and Honor, which forbade intermarriage between Germans and
"non-Aryans," specifically Romanies, Jews and people of African descent. In 1937, the
National Citizenship Law relegated Romanies and Jews to the status of second-class citizens,
depriving them of their civil rights. Also in 1937, Heinrich Himmler issued a decree entitled
"The Struggle Against the Gypsy Plague", which reiterated that Romanies of mixed blood were
the most likely to engage in criminal activity, and which required that all information on
Romanies be sent from the regional police departments to the Reich Central Office.
The first document referring to "the introduction of the total solution to the Gypsy
problem on either a national or an international level" was issued under the direction of State
Secretary Hans Pfundtner of the Reichs Ministry of the Interior in March, 1936, while the
wording endgultige Losung der Zigeunerfrage, i.e. the "final (or `conclusive') solution of the
Gypsy question", appeared in print in a directive signed by Himmler in May, 1938. Between
June 12th and June 18th that same year, Gypsy Clean-Up Week took place throughout Germany
which, like Kristallnacht for the Jewish people in November that year, marked the beginning of
the end.
In January, 1940, the. first mass genocidal action of the Holocaust took place when 250
Romani children were murdered in Buchenwald, where they were used as guinea-pigs to test
the efficacy of the Zyklon-B crystals. later used in the gas chambers. In June the same year.
Hitler ordered the liquidation of "all Jews, Gypsies and communist political functionaries in the
entire Soviet Union."

On July, 31st 1941, Heydrich, chief architect of the details of the Final Solution, issued
his directive to theEinsatzkommandos to "kill all Jews, Gypsies and mental patients." A few
days later Himmler issued his criteria for biological and racial evaluation, which determined
that each Rom's family background was to be investigated going back three generations. On
December 16th that same year, Himmler issued the order to have all Romanies remaining in
Europe deported to Auschwitz-Birkenau for extermination. On December 24th, Lohse gave the
additional order that "The Gypsies should be given the same treatment as the Jews." At a party
meeting on September 14th, 1942, Justice Minister Otto Thierack announced that "Jews and
Gypsies must be unconditionally exterminated." On August 1st, 1944, four thousand Romanies
were gassed and cremated in a single action at Auschwitz-Birkenau, in what is remembered
as Zigeunernacht.

Extract from Ian Hancock's Afterword from the book, Settela.