GYPSIES HAVE A DREAM: A NATION WITH NO STATE

International Herald Tribune (page 4), monday, July 31, 2000

By Peter S. Green

PRAGUE - Seeking to stem a rising tide of racial attacks, economic deprivation and official indifference to their fate, some Gypsy leaders are now saying that they want to be recognized as a ''nation without a state'' in order to protect their rights in Europe.

At a meeting in Prague last week of the International Romany Union, elders and leaders from over 40 countries sought to find a place for their people as the European Union planned to accept its first members from Central and Eastern Europe.

Europe's increasing prosperity seems to be passing most Gypsies by, they complain.

''We do have a dream, the same concrete political dream of Martin Luther King,'' said Emil Csuka, the Romany Union's president.

Some 15 million Roma, as Gypsies prefer to be known, live around the world, mostly in Eastern Europe.

Mr. Csuka wants the Gypsies to be recognized as a ''nation without a state'' by the European Union, the United Nations and other organizations.

What they are seeking is equality, but as a recent report by the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe warned, Europe's growing economy and spreading democracy is leaving the Gypsies behind.

''Ten years after the Iron Curtain fell, Europe is at risk of being divided by new walls,'' said the report. ''Front and center among those persons being left outside Europe's new security and prosperity are the Roma.''

''We're a hidden population,'' said Charlie Smith, a Romany and a local government councilor from Essex, in England. Britain counts about 200,000 Gypsies, about a fourth of whom are still nomadic. ''Politicians don't see us as someone they have to court to get the vote, so they ignore us.''

The Prague congress, the first in 10 years, elected a supreme court and a government for the movement, as well as a parliament, which Mr. Csuka says he hopes will increase the Gypsies' ability to negotiate for a better share of state aid to help the impoverished Gypsy communities find their footing.

The Gypsies' problems are most acute in Eastern Europe. Much like segregation in the old American South, Gypsies, who are generally darker-skinned than their neighbors, are often barred from public restaurants, swimming pools and shops. In many countries, Romany children are automatically shunted into special schools for the mentally retarded. If they find jobs, and few do, it is often as manual laborers or pieceworkers.

Growing xenophobia and nationalism in Eastern Europe have led to hundreds of attacks on Gypsies, including one earlier this month in the Czech Republic, where three young right-wing skinheads were charged with throwing firebombs into the home of a local Romany family.

The Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe report said Gypsies had been the victims of ''what must properly be called pogroms,'' at the hands of their non-Gypsy neighbors.

In the past several years, seeking to escape racial persecution at home, Gypsies have begun emigrating, mainly from the Czech Republic and Slovakia to Belgium and Great Britain, raising anti-Gypsy sentiment in Western Europe.

Many Gypsies said they did not just want handouts. Several speakers at the meeting called for more training and education for Gypsies, and for pressure on governments to make local banks, businesses and bureaucrats stop their widespread discrimination against Gypsies.

Mr. Csuka says that Gypsies are a nation ''since all of us share the same language, the same tradition, the same origins, even if we have been living and we live in so many different countries.'' But others fear declaring themselves a nation could raise more problems than it solves.

''What you call Roma is a collection of highly different groups with different social histories, different religions,'' said Sociologist Nicolae Gheorge, a Romanian-born Gypsy, who is now an official at the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe.

He said what they all had in common was the prejudice of others.

''Can you build an identity for yourself on the basis of prejudice?'' he asked.

Tom Acton, a professor of Romany Studies at the University of Greenwich in England, said the proposal smacked of the ethnic nationalism often blamed for Eastern Europe's brutal history.

Instead, say Mr. Gheorge, Mr. Acton and others, the emphasis should be on forcing Europe's existing states to respect human rights and on encouraging Gypsies themselves to actively lobby existing states and organizations, such as the European Union and the United Nations, to ensure that their basic human rights are respected in every country.