A girl with balloons in Roma flag colours, International Day of the Roma, Bucharest 2015. AP/V. Ghirda. All rights reserved.Terrorism. Sprawling camps for displaced people. Concrete walls and barbed-wire fences. Today, Europeans confront a range of humanitarian and security crises; Romani people have long experience facing these conditions.
In past decades, Europe’s 12 million Roma have been pursued by neo-Nazi mobs in the Czech Republic, murdered by right-wing terrorists in Hungary, and forcibly removed from homes in France, Bulgaria, and Italy by politicians who scapegoat them in pursuit of votes.
Last month, a Slovak neo-Nazi party that organized marches against the Roma minority won 14 seats in the 150-strong Parliament. Recently, large numbers of Syrian refugees have captivated the public’s attention; meanwhile, thousands of stateless Roma have been living in miserable camps in Italy for nearly four decades after fleeing post-Tito Yugoslavia in the 1980s and the Bosnian war in the 1990s.
