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THE GYPSIES IN HUNGARY
Author: Thomas Land
Issue: April, 2001 Contemporary Review Company Ltd.
ZSOLT Janos, a tall, olive skinned lad with intelligent, widely set dreamy
eyes, wants to qualify as a NATO pilot to prevent the recurrence of ethnic
cleansing anywhere in Europe. He is a member of the first graduating class
of Hungary's Gandhi Secondary School, the only such institution in Europe...
Thomas Orszag-Land is a Hungarian-born author and foreign correspondent
who writes on global affairs.
THE GYPSIES IN HUNGARY
Author: Thomas Land
Issue: April, 2001 Contemporary Review Company Ltd.
ZSOLT Janos, a tall, olive skinned lad with intelligent, widely set dreamy
eyes, wants to qualify as a NATO pilot to prevent the recurrence of ethnic
cleansing anywhere in Europe. He is a member of the first graduating class
of Hungary's Gandhi Secondary School, the only such institution in Europe
devoted exclusively to producing a Gypsy educational elite as an agent of
social change. The headmistress of the school has just received an important
human rights prize from the American government.
The graduates are facing a desperate struggle. But similar schools serving
at various levels of education are springing up elsewhere to confront the
widespread discrimination facing Gypsies throughout East-Central Europe and
beyond. The school is in Pecs in the South of Hungary near the Croatian
border, an ancient and beautiful city with liberal traditions and balmy
Mediterranean weather. The city has accepted many refugees from the recent
Yugoslav wars. It has also won a prize for racial tolerance from the United
Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization.
Zsolt (not his real name) is very unusual in that he thinks he has never
really been touched by racial discrimination. He has been chosen for the
Ghandi educational experiment because both his parents belong to the one per
cent of their people who have completed secondary schooling. He is also
lucky because he has somehow escaped the segregation of Gypsy children -- a
practice widespread throughout Eastern Europe -- who are often dumped in
infant schools for the mentally retarded.
He is unlikely to succeed in his military ambitions. That is because of the
intense competition for top jobs in the armed services, which are just being
integrated with Nato, rather than because of institutional racism. But in
the rural and industrial slums beyond Zsolt's world where most of his people
live, conditions are very different.
The Gypsies are Europe's most deprived and fastest growing ethnic minority.
They comprise several distinct tribes originating from Central and
North-Western India between the 5th and 12th centuries. Today they number up
to 30 million, perhaps a third of them living in Europe. They have retained
strong tribal and family loyalties and preserved systems of collective
security which conflict with common European traditions. They are known as
Roma in Eastern and Central Europe, Manush and Sinti in Western Europe and
Gitanos in Spain and Portugal.
In Hungary, 'only 0.3 per cent of Roma hold post-secondary school diplomas
and only one in four complete primary school', says Professor Miklos
Haraszti of the University of California's Study Centre in Budapest. They
comprise an estimated 5-7 per cent of the loin national population but make
up two-thirds of the prison population. Their jobless rate is over 60 per
cent, more than six times the Hungarian average. And their life
expectancy -- a vital measure describing health, economic and social
conditions -- trails the national average by as much as ten years.
The gates of secondary schooling are at last wide open to Gypsy students,
observes educational sociologist Istvan Kemeny, the author of pioneering
fieldwork, in the January issue of the authoritative journal Hungarian
Quarterly. But the educational gap between the Gypsies and the Hungarian
ethnic majority 'has not narrowed over the past 40 years... And even today,
only one in five Gypsy families could afford to send their children to
secondary schools'.
The European Commission -- the administrative headquarters of the European
Union (EU) in Brussels -- has urged Hungary as well as the Czech Republic,
Slovakia and Bulgaria to take urgent practical steps to end discrimination.
However, Michael Lake, the Commission's permanent representative in Budapest
(and a former journalist on the staff of the London Sun newspaper), has also
declared that the Gypsy issue will not hinder Hungary's EU membership
application. The Council of Europe has also called on East Europeans to end
discrimination. And a Geneva-based UN Commission on Racial Discrimination
has called for a legal review in all of Europe to ensure equal treatment for
Gypsies. The Commission's latest report does not name offending countries.
But it refers to the mass murder and expulsion of Gypsies committed by
Albanians in Kosovo in revenge for their alleged collaboration with the
Serbs, the denial of citizens rights in the Czech Republic to Gypsies who
cannot speak the official language or have been found guilty even of minor
offences, and the recent clearance of Gypsies from slum settlements near
Athens executed with gratuitous brutality to make room for commercially more
desirable development.
An infamous wall recently erected in the depressed Czech petro-chemical town
of Usti nad Labem near the German border to segregate a Gypsy settlement has
now been torn down at the insistence of the EU. The structure reminded many
of the Nazi era which saw the systematic murder of hundreds of thousands of
Gypsies as well as six million Jews in Europe. The controversy surrounding
the Czech wall has come to symbolize the emergence of open racism throughout
the nascent democracies of this region since the collapse of communist
domination here a decade ago when its expression was routinely suppressed.
Many Gypsies are seeking their own, desperate solutions. Cases brought by
groups of Gypsies claiming racial discrimination are constantly pending
before the European Court of Human Rights in Strasbourg. Thousands of
families have sold all their possessions and fled to Western Europe and
North America in search of refugee status and a decent life. Most of them
are being turned back, but some have found a haven in generous countries
like Canada.
Hungary's National Gypsy Council does not endorse mass migration. Florian
Farkas, chairman of the Council, passionately believes that the problem of
East European Gypsies must be solved here in Eastern Europe. Like Zsolt and
his teachers at Pecs, Farkas has put his faith in the rule of law supporting
social reform led by a revolution in education. Prime Minister Victor
Orban's conservative coalition administration in Budapest has resisted
pressures for specific legislative remedies (see Contemporary Review,
January 2001). But a review of the Civil Code is already under way,
promising significant legal reforms to safeguard the rights of minorities.
Proposed legislation drawn up by Jeno Kaltenbach, the Parliamentary
ombudsman, prescribing tough sanctions against racial segregation of any
kind may well enter the statute books this spring.
The Hungarian government has committed 7.2bn forints ([pound]16.7m) this
year towards improving the plight of the Gypsy minority, 4.9bn of it
earmarked for medium-term projects. This level of expenditure is to be
increased in future budgets, promises Csaba Hende, secretary of state at the
Ministry of Justice. Further funds are available also from the EU's Phare
assistance programme.
Some Gypsy leaders have called for a 20-year, 200bn forint programme
covering education alone. Others are more moderate in their demands but
assert that only a fraction of the government funding actually reaches its
target. A joint commission answerable to the government as well as the
democratically elected, self-governing Gypsy council will now be created to
oversee disbursement by the ministries.
Hungarian specialists worry about a demographic time-bomb, which should make
the fate of the Gypsy minority of immediate interest to the whole of
society. The number of Gypsy school children is set to increase several
times very soon, Magda Kosane Kovacs, leader of the Parliamentary committee
on human rights, has just told an international conference in Budapest. She
projected an explosion of discontent unless society learns to integrate them
in time.
The government is committed to increased efforts at various levels of Gypsy
education. Pecs University has just launched the country's first
post-graduate programme in Gypsy studies after several years of
preparations. A high school with special responsibility for Gypsy education
has been opened at Szabolcs, a deprived region of Eastern Hungary. A
kindergarten catering almost exclusively for Gypsy pupils has also been
opened in Csepel, a poor Budapest suburb. And the cities of Ozd and Szolnok
have just signed a 350m forint accord with the Ministry of Education for the
creation of student hostels providing 400 spaces to Gypsy pupils engaged in
further education.
The Gandhi school was established in 1994, funded largely by the government.
Its first graduating class had 18 pupils, 16 of them seeking higher
education. Significantly, classes in at least two Gypsy languages are
compulsory at the school. This year, it hopes to produce 24 graduates. The
experience gathered by the school may well prove invaluable for similar
institutions elsewhere. Erika Csovcsics, Zsolt's principal at Pecs, regards
the human rights prize which she received late in December from Madeleine
Albright, the visiting American Secretary of State in a final goodwill
gesture by the outgoing Clinton administration, as a reward for a collective
effort. 'We are going in the right direction', she reflects. 'But we must be
very careful not to weaken the cultural roots of the students'.
Thomas Orszag-Land is a Hungarian-born author and foreign correspondent
who writes on global affairs.
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