Mob violence and collective punishment against Roma in countries such as Bulgaria, Italy, France and Ukraine do not occur in a vacuum – such intimidation is politically orchestrated. Seventy-five years after the liberation of Auschwitz, antigypsyism is an obscenity, a stain on the European Union and democratic values. It’s time to call it out and combat it more forcefully. The message to mainstream political parties for 2020 is simple: eyes wide shut is no longer an option; failure to act against far-right nativism, and the racism that comes with it, amounts to complicity.
Last March, the European Roma Rights Centre (ERRC) published a fact sheet on mob violence and collective punishment and warned of the threats facing Roma communities in countries where antigypsyism has been mainstreamed as an ‘acceptable form of racism’. Unfortunately, this warning proved to be all too prescient. The 2019 EU election campaigns coincided with a spike in mob attacks against Roma in Bulgaria, France and Italy.
April 2019 witnessed violent attacks on Roma homes and property in the Bulgarian town of Gabrovo by gangs of young men, following ‘spontaneous’ protests. Together with the vicious assaults on vulnerable Roma in Paris and Rome, these outrages served as a grim reminder that antigypsyism won’t be wished away. Growing far-right mobilization against ‘ethnic replacement’, multiculturalism and minorities, means that Roma will continue to be singled out for collective blame and collective punishment by cynical nativist politicians and neo-fascist mobsters.
