It’s been more difficult to keep track of Roma stories recently. I blogged a while back about cyber attacks on the ROMEA association’s website, and now the Roma Buzz Aggregator blog also seems to have been targeted – when I try to visit their site I get a warning coming up informing me that it is a ‘Reported Attack Page’, presumably because it has been sabotaged by hostile hackers. Lolo Diklo has had serious problems too, although these seem to have been resolved.
But I have just read an interesting report on the Roma Daily News site, which is about EU strategies for dealing with ‘itinerant crime’. This extract, from a Belgian police report on the problem, stood out for me.
“Sedentary criminals are understood to be nomads, originally from the former Yugoslavian Republic, Romania, France or Belgium. These nomads are actually people without a real homeland. In historic terms this population group came to Western Europe in large migration waves. They now have Belgian nationality, are seeking asylum or are illegal. Despite the fact that a large part is settling down, the break between being sedentary and being mobile is not radical and never final.”
You might think, from reading this, that the Roma came to Europe in the 1970s or something, not back in the fourteenth century. Also striking is the phrase ‘never final’, which essentialises the Roma, and helps explain why so many Roma do not want to identify their ethnicity.