Though a global pandemic poses a risk to everyone, the most marginalized among us are subjected to additional challenges. Members of Europe’s Roma population have long been identified as “outsiders” – labelled as inferior, criminals, threatening, and potentially contaminated carriers of disease. Countering the rising wave of anti-Roma hatred, hate speech, and violence associated with responses to the pandemic is an urgent European priority. Failure to attend to it will exacerbate the risk of atrocities and hate crimes against the Roma.
Few politicians have met the leadership challenge posed by the COVID-19 pandemic. Some, many of them women, have relied on scientific experts to guide early lockdown and aggressive testing policies, and to achieve impressively low morbidity rates; Germany, New Zealand, and the south Indian state of Kerala, are examples. Others, a majority, have been slow and hesitant in following expert advice, wasting precious time and thus contributing to dramatic surges in rates of infection and mortality among their populations. Yet others have politically exploited the widespread insecurity and fear generated by a novel and as yet incurable virus by turning on stigmatized “Others” to foment hatred. A particularly egregious example of the latter approach is the response of Ukranian mayor Marcínkív who ordered the forced transfer of the Roma from his city of Ivano Frannkvisk to the border with Zakarpattia and hurled racial slurs at the Romani people, who resisted coercive banishment.
Racist scapegoating of outsiders in times of epidemic is a strategy with an ancient pedigree. From the fourteenth century Black Death to the many subsequent outbreaks of plague around the world, including outbreaks of syphilis, leprosy, HIV/AIDs and subsequent viral epidemics, sudden outbreaks of deadly diseases have been associated with the search for a scapegoat. In pagan times, witches and evil spirits were blamed. In the medieval period, European Christians expanded the attribution of contamination and blame to heretics, Muslims and Jews. Large-scale killings of Jews were prevalent during the years of the Black Death and to a lesser extent in later outbreaks of plague in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. During the seventeenth to nineteenth centuries, with increasing population movement and the building of cities, many epidemics of cholera and typhus were attributed to the filth of new and suspect populations. As recently as the early 1900s, the Chinese were blamed for an outbreak of plague in San Francisco.
