[News] Social Distancing With Tear Gas and Walls: the “Racist, Hateful, And Life-Threatening Campaign” Unleashed Against The Romani With Covid-19

[Anti-Imperialist News]

https://www.counterpunch.org/2020/05/05/social-distancing-with-tear-gas-and-walls-the-racist-hateful-and-life-threatening-campaign-unleashed-against-the-romani-with-covid-19/
Social
Distancing With Tear Gas and Walls: the “Racist, Hateful, And
Life-Threatening Campaign” Unleashed Against The Romani With Covid-19
by Rain - May 5, 2020
------------------------------

Pata-Râta is a small community of 200people squatting illegally in
makeshiftshacks adjoining a garbage dump onthe fringe of the Transylvanian
city of Cluj-Napoca. August 1996. Photo: David Dare Parker.

She was 37 years old. Her name was not reported. We will never know the
name of her baby. For three days after her waters broke, she appealed
multiple times for attention at Ohrid General Hospital in North Macedonia.
Every visit ended the same way, with her being denied treatment. Her
friend, who drove her there, said she was bleeding, in obvious pain, and
had signs of an infection. The pregnant woman was from a nearby Romani
settlement where she survived in suffocating poverty. According to her
friend, she had no means to pay for check-ups during her pregnancy, and
that all she was offered at the hospital was racial invectives when what
she’d pleaded for was a caesarean. Eventually, one doctor intervened when
he realized her condition had deteriorated beyond what the hospital would
be able to treat, and he arranged for her to be transported to the
University Clinic of Gynecology and Obstetrics (UCGO) in Skopje.

Upon arrival at UCGO, the ambulance driver did not take her to the
emergency room, but instead left her curbside. She was Romani. A gypsy.
Should she have expected anything else? The hospital would not admit her
until she’d been tested for COVID-19. She waited outside for over six
hours. By the time she was admitted her baby was dead. She spent the last
two hours of her life in surgery. By 10 pm on March 31 she’d left a widower
and two young children. The cause of death should have been recorded as
systemic and institutionalized racism, but instead was entered as sepsis.
The Ministry of Health later confirmed that her COVID-19 test had returned
negative. This Romani woman and her baby are symbolic of what is being
inflicted upon Romani tribespeople in Europe during the coronavirus
pandemic, where the ideological twins of toxicity – populists and
nationalists – are trooping down the age old path of fomenting xenophobia
against a persecuted ethnic minority by fabricating their culpability in
the crisis.

“There is evidence of discrimination against Romani women in maternity care
in Europe. Interventions to address discrimination against childbearing
Romani women and underlying health provider prejudice are urgently needed,”
concluded a revealing study in *Reproductive Health*
<https://reproductive-health-journal.biomedcentral.com/track/pdf/10.1186/s12978-016-0263-4>
when most people didn’t know if Wuhan was a place in Asia or a bad ’80s
band.

Voice of America recently reported, “As the COVID-19 pandemic rages across
Europe, Roma, traditionally crammed in decrepit homes and settlements with
poor sewage, are largely being viewed as ticking time bombs.” Ticking time
bombs. We went from the multi-century tropes of beggars, thieves, baby
snatchers, dirty gyppos and pikies to “ticking time bombs” in less time
than it might take Doc Trump to stick a UV light in a limited choice of
orifices or mainline some Lysol, you know, “by injection inside or almost a
cleaning?” In the midst of a global pandemic, “ticking time bombs” is high
on the dehumanization scale. Instead of victim-shaming the 37-year-old Roma
woman who endured days of agony, the Macedonian press can now use a
variation on the theme of ticking time bombs and shift from spurious
reports of her being “unable to walk” due to “morbid obesity,” to her and
her baby being, say, some racist analogy for “a bomb so made as to explode
at a predetermined time.” Thank you, Webster’s. Now what kind of bomb might
that be?

“Local and national newspapers have waged a racist, hateful, and
life-threatening campaign of anti-Roma propaganda,” warned the *Health and
Human Rights Journal*
<https://www.hhrjournal.org/2020/04/anti-roma-racism-is-spiraling-during-covid-19-pandemic/>
in April, after reviewing COVID-19 related media coverage across Europe.
The pandemic, it summarized, has become “a license to unleash racism
against stigmatized groups” with “the discriminatory treatment of Europe’s
Roma minority a brutal case in point.”

Voice of America stated that it was the Romani, the people themselves, who
were COVID-19 ticking time bombs, as opposed to the appalling conditions
the Romani have been condemned to live in that leaves them more vulnerable
to the pandemic, which is an important distinction. Voice of America didn’t
start this pejorative-for-any-occasion to vilify the Romani, it began
before the Spanish Inquisition, but for this latest incarnation, the
mechanistic approach to further stigmatize the Romani, look inside the
European “basket of deplorables” aligned with Trump where you’ll find
Orbán, Zemen, Kollár, Marinov, Salvini, Le Pen and Borissov. After recently
elected Slovakian prime minister, Igor Matovič, dispatched the army to
lockdown Romani settlements at the beginning of April, “ticking time bombs”
became synonymous with the Romani and the spread of COVID-19 in Europe, the
talking point beginning as an easy sell for Matovič’s cabinet, members of
the Slovak parliament, and doctors towing the government line. But not so
much for Amnesty International
<https://www.amnesty.org/download/Documents/EUR0121562020ENGLISH.PDF>,
which informed Matovič’s administration that, “without providing Roma with
the necessary means to protect themselves, including ensuring access to
water and sanitation” the militarized response would “only add to the
stigmatization and prejudice” the Romani face.

“It is by no means a demonstration of power,” claimed Matovič, in
contradiction to Amnesty’s findings after the Slovakian military forcibly
quarantined five Romani settlements in one day. “The presence of armed
military personnel around the perimeter of settlements appears intimidatory
and raises questions about adequacy for the purposes of law enforcement and
protection of public health. In particular, the fact that they carry
weapons.” Matovič’s “targeted testing” recorded 31 positive cases of
COVID-19 out of nearly 7,000 residents. According to Amnesty, “the Roma
were not informed about the duration and the conditions of their
confinement. The authorities reportedly did not separate those who had
positive tests for COVID-19 from the rest of the community. Moreover,
according to available evidence, the authorities did not put in place
adequate provisions of food and medical supplies.”

“We still have some 30,000 people with no access to water,” confirmed Peter
Pollák, Slovakia’s first Romani Member of the European Parliament (MEP), a
lonely voice in Matovič’s OLaNO (Ordinary People) Party. Community members
informed Amnesty’s researchers that under the “compulsory quarantine” it
wasn’t just water they were deprived of, but medication “for chronic
diseases such as diabetes, heart-diseases and asthma,” all of which elevate
the lethality of COVID-19. “They also reported instances when an ambulance
initially refused to come and assist residents who needed health care.”

Matovič ran as a populist, but the extent of his Trumpian tendencies are
yet to be determined within his recently formed governing conservative
coalition. The same cannot be said of Boris Kollár, leader of the We Are
Family Party, who in Matovič’s government is now Speaker of the National
Council of the Slovak Republic. Kollár claims his far-right party is rooted
in “traditional” conservative family values, the tenets of which were on
full display when he took the stage at a nationalist-fest in Milan last May
alongside Matteo Salvini, Marine LePen, Geert Wilders, Jorg Meuthen,
Heinz-Christian Strache and Bulgaria’s wannabe Donald Trump, Veselin
Mareshki. When asked how he would address the perpetual humanitarian crisis
of the Romani in Slovakia, Kollár suggested purchasing 700,000 plane
tickets to relocate them in the UK. He later claimed he was joking, as you
do, because ethnic cleansing always elicits a good laugh. Ironically, their
Romani-Traveler kinfolk in the UK are faring little better. Prime Minister
Boris Johnson, who in Obama-speak is deplorable enough politically, has
introduced the *Police Powers and Protections Bill* which, to all intents
and purposes, criminalizes the Romani traveling lifeway.

Kollár is simpatico with another who fits Trump’s categorization of “very
fine people,” the seventeen newly elected members of the National Council
of the Slovak Republic from the Kotlebovci-People’s Party Our Slovakia
(L’SNS). Party leader, Marian Kotleba, built his political career on hate
speech and inciting violence against the Romani, whom he decried as “Gypsy
parasites.” When Mayor of Banská Bystrica, Kotleba empowered his party
faithful to organize into regimented squads to intimidate and coerce the
Romani community. By statute, he used alleged “Gypsy criminality” to
justify instituting a manual labor program that compelled the Romani to
repair roads. In 2020, his campaign slogan for L’SNS was “Slovakia First.”
Sound familiar?

For his stint in parliament, Kotleba has switched to a suit from the
fascist Hlinka Guard inspired uniforms he and his followers used to don,
but the L’SNS emblem still features the double cross of the Slovak Republic
circa 1939 to 1945 when the state was allied with the Nazis. Kotleba uses
Facebook and YouTube to incite with conspiracy theories, a kind of Balkan
Alex Jones in jackboots, with one constant – that “Gypsies” and
“immigrants” are responsible for infecting Slovaks with coronavirus.

*Baro Porrajmos*, the “great devouring,” is how the Romani term the
Holocaust. In Slovakia, the Hlinka Guard shock troops were enthusiastic
participants. The Nazi’s co-opted one of our ancient symbols of peace and
good fortune, bastardized it on angle, and murdered 500,000 of our
relatives beneath it. Some estimate that in excess of a million Romani-Sinti
were victims of the Holocaust
<https://www.dw.com/en/roma-holocaust-memorial-day-auschwitz-survivor-mano-h%C3%B6llenreiner-recalls-nazi-gypsy-camp/a-44926614>.
In one night alone, on August 2, 1944, over 4,000 Romani men, women and
children were gassed in Auschwitz-Birkenau when the “Gypsy camp” was
“closed.” If you can’t imagine the historical trauma of the Romani
currently being held in confinement by the Slovak military, you’ve been in
the MAGA-sphere too long.

Slovakia isn’t the exception, it’s closer to the rule. Romania and Bulgaria
have also employed paramilitary force to confine Romani populations in
circumstances Amnesty International has categorized as “arbitrary and
disproportionate” which “amount to a violation of human rights.” Bulgaria
hasn’t just followed “Build that wall,” it’s built several, all around
Romani settlements and citing COVID-19 as justification. “These ghettos,”
began Bulgarian MEP Angel Dzhambazki, “could turn out to be the real nests
of contagion.” Dzhambazki is second in command of the VMRO, a nationalist
party in Bulgaria’s governing coalition. Trumpophile, Veselin Mareshki, is
Vice Chair of the National Assembly of Bulgaria. What’s happening to the
50,000 people behind the walls who are among the 80% of Romani across
Europe who live below the poverty line, the 30% who have no running water,
and the 46% with no access to basic sanitation, may be difficult to gauge.
Under Prime Minister Borissov, who Trump feted at the White House in
November 2019, press freedoms are almost non-existent. Former US Ambassador
to Bulgaria, James Pardew, identified Borissov as one of the leaders Trump
models in his “rants” against the press “to stifle truth and government
accountability” which has been on full display during every episode of the
White House coronavirus reality show.

“Instead of seeking additional ways to protect these particularly
vulnerable members of our societies as coronavirus spreads, some
politicians have actively fueled anti-Gypsyism,” said Frantisek Kopriva,
MP, Rapporteur for the Parliamentary Assembly of the Council of Europe
<http://assembly.coe.int/nw/xml/News/News-View-en.asp?newsid=7832&lang=2>.

Kopriva has been largely ignored. In Hungary, Prime Minister Viktor Orbán,
who Trump whisperer Steve Bannon called “Trump before Trump” has continued
his anti-Romani discrimination by excluding the tribespeople from the
country’s COVID-19 mitigation plan, and blamed George Soros for inciting
discontent among the Romani. “Trump before Trump” is being as good as his
word. “We do not want our own color, traditions and national culture to be
mixed with those of others,” he said in 2018. In Erdogan’s Turkey, 48 NGO’s
<http://m.bianet.org/bianet/insan-haklari/222669-48-stk-dan-romanlar-icin-14-talep>
signed a statement denouncing policies that have omitted Romani communities
from hygiene services and that now “can’t access the most basic rights” due
to the pronouncement that “Roma carry the virus anyway.”

The dire reality for the Romani is that the shredding of their human rights
is not exclusively the domain of fascists, nationalists and authoritarians.
In Spain, the Civil Guard was first deployed to a Romani-Gitano community
at the beginning of March, a move supported in the national press, where
the Romani were described as “unstructured clans unused to public order and
discipline.” We gave you the essential elements for Flamenco, historically
you gave us slavery, and today the socio-economic deprivation that has
resulted in the lowest life-expectancy in Europe
<http://somatosphere.net/forumpost/covid-19-roma-community-spain/> and
rampant levels of COPD and diabetes. As COVID-19 hit Spain, the Fundación
Secretariado Gitano warned, “We are talking about 47,000 people who
currently lack the food and basic products for subsistence, with the
aggravating circumstance that there are many minors in poverty situations
(the child poverty rate in the gypsy community is 89%), and to which the
aid, neither food nor monetary, promised by the Government is reaching.”

The “segregated purpose-built ghettos” in Spain resemble some in the
Balkans. In France, they look the same. Existence on the outer regions of
human rights isn’t differentiated by borders. President Macron has been
criticized by the European Roma Rights Center
<http://www.errc.org/news/open-letter-to-president-macron-how-is-a-gypsy-supposed-to-speak>
for “callous indifference for the security” of the marginalized community.
To little or no avail, aid agencies have warned of “a potential health
disaster” in Romani “slums” like Saint-Denis and Perpignan when COVID-19
hits. “They live crammed into small shacks, so they can’t confine
themselves and isolate people who could infect them,” said Adeline Grippon,
an aid worker of Médecins du Monde. “They lack the basics like access to
water, to toilets, in many of the shanty towns,” she continued, in what is
a continent-wide refrain. Perpignan saw the first Romani coronavirus
fatalities in France. The Romain have been in that region since the 14th
century, and two-years ago mounted protests to halt the demolition of their
homes in the town’s Saint Jacques historic district, the poorest
neighborhood in the country. Others, drawn from the Balkans by the allure
of making up to $70 per week recycling scrap metal, have grown accustomed
to their homes being razed. Their search for a better life usually ends
with riot police destroying their camps.

A certain irony shadows the fact that France has one of the most intolerant
policies toward the Romani. Les Saintes Maries de la Mer in the Camargue is
arguably the most significant ceremonial pilgrimage site for not only
Europe’s 12-million or so Romani, but the clans worldwide. It was Romani
from the Camargue who made alliances with Lakota, Cheyenne and Pawnee
leaders in 1905 when Buffalo Bill’s Wild West and Congress of Rough Riders
of the World show toured France. Cody, not one to disappoint his host, the
Marquis de Baroncelli, who held the same opinion, “discovered striking
resemblances in color, type, customs and vocabulary” between the indigenous
peoples separated by an ocean. Iron Tail, whose face is known to most while
his name and identity remain adrift in mainstream American historical
oblivion, was among those who participated the cultural exchange.

For all the similarities in philosophy born of Earth and sun and star blown
sky in the duality of feminine and masculine articulated in ceremony, dance
and song, were Iron Tail present now in the grip of this global pandemic,
he would surely note other correlations between the peoples: how many
experience segregation, existing within government-designed ghettos in
overcrowded dwellings that bear no resemblance to their traditional homes.
That those within the walls struggle with higher rates of diabetes, TB,
hepatitis, obesity and chronic respiratory diseases than those beyond them.
And that multigenerational poverty can’t adequately be described if it has
never been lived. There’s a reason why COVID-19 infection rates in Native
and Romani communities could reach levels predicted to be seven times
higher than regional averages.

As for social distancing, Iron Tail would recognize that until now that
wasn’t a measure to control the spread of a virus, it was a day-to-day
consequence of structural inequality and discrimination that has consigned
Native Americans to society’s “other” and the Romani to be among the most
invisible of the “other.” If we weren’t invisible, these places wouldn’t be
buried in obscurity: Pata-Rât, Stolipinovo, Lunik IX, Ferentari, Fakuleta
and Shuto Orizari where the mother whose child died in her womb waiting on
a COVID-19 test, had relatives. These aren’t even squalid shantytowns, they
are hell holes most would concede were unfit for human habitation, but they
are hell holes tens of thousands of Romani are forced to call home.

Pata-Rât near Cluj Napoca
<https://eeb.org/library/pushed-to-the-wastelands-environmental-racism-against-roma-communities-in-central-and-eastern-europe/>,
a Romanian city known for its baroque architecture, is a 44-acre landfill.
In and around the unstable trash mountain approximately 2,000 Romani
shelter in meager huts made of refuse. There’s no water and no sanitation
in a dump. Many lived in viable communities in the city before they were
evicted and under police escort taken to this toxic wasteland. To sustain
themselves, families rummage through the trash heaps for anything that can
be recycled, choked by the stench of Sulphur and fumes from rotting and
burning garbage. Leachate is everywhere. Between packs of feral dogs and
swine, children are so caked in grime that the handful of visiting charity
workers can’t see the extent of their skin diseases. “You’re very talented,
you love the people,” Trump told Romanian President Klaus Iohannis at their
last meeting. Evidently, not all of the people. “The gendarmes scared the
children, even some adults as well. They sprayed tear gas and shouted at us
to stay in the house. We all felt like criminals,” wrote Maria Stoica from
Pata-Rât. That was April 26.

“They can’t eat because there’s no work due to the pandemic,” Ciprian
Valentin Nodis, a Romani academic, said of the Pata-Rât exiles. “Where is
this going to lead?” he asked.

Yes. Where is this going to lead?
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