Rudko Kawczynski - White majority must also adapt to Roma minority
Welcome to One on One, joining in me the studio this week is Rudko Kawczynski, chairman of the Roma National Congress, the political body that represents the interests of Roma worldwide. Born in Poland, Rudko has lived for much of his life in Germany, but has also spent time in Austria, the Czech Republic, Slovakia and Sweden. He speaks half a dozen European languages as well as several dialects of Romani itself. I asked Rudko if he saw his own personal and linguistic journeys as a reflection of the traditionally nomadic Roma people themselves.
"Well this is a major misunderstanding of our people in Europe. Everybody recognises us as migrants or people who are travelling - gypsies. Nobody recognises that we have been forced to travel, forced to leave, have been expelled throughout our history. This was the case with my own family. I was born in Cracow, and when I was two years old we had to leave the country because it was absolutely impossible to live there during the Communist era, especially during the Stalinist era. My parents decided to leave this part of the world and flee to the West. So this is our fate, and it was misunderstood by majority societies everywhere because we are not connected to an international state. And this is the main problem facing us today."
So it might have been migration but it was very much involuntary migration, forced migration.
"Yes, it's forced migration. In fact it's not even migration, it's expulsion. It's like the history of the Jews in Europe."
Of course the Roma have lived in Europe for centuries, they arrived in the Middle Ages.
"Yes, that's correct. We came to Europe with the Islamic raids of Sultan Mahmud of Gazna in the 11th century. The Roma were captured as slaves in India and then brought to Europe with the Islamic invasion, and when the Sultan's armies left Europe they left us behind. The Roma were kept in slavery until the 19th century. So it was more or less comparable with the history of the blacks in the United States."
Tell me more about the Roma National Congress, of which you are the head.
"The Roma National Congress is a network of about 500 organisations throughout Europe, and we have similar networks in Australia and the United States. The Congress is led by a board of directors, and I'm the head of the board. We're not working on the basis of cultural development or education, we are a civil and human rights organisation which tries to influence European governments and European policy in a bid to improve the living conditions and the human and civil rights of our people."
So it's fair to say that the Roma National Congress is the main political body voicing the aspirations and the fears and the concerns of the Roma in Europe.
"Yes."
The Roma National Congress supports greater political organisation among Roma, it wants Roma to become politically involved to defend their rights. The problem - at least it seems to me on a local level in the Czech Republic - is that Roma organisations remain splintered, there seems to be an inability to unite and speak with one voice. Is that a common problem for Roma throughout Europe?
"Well it's funny because we heard the same things about South Africa, during the black civil rights movement. The white people did exactly that - they split the movement. It's nothing new, it's an old tradition: to split movements and blame the victims before they can get organised. We're facing the same thing not only in the Czech Republic but all over the former Eastern bloc."
But a lot of people would say the Roma themselves are incapable of uniting politically and speaking with one voice.
"No, I can only tell you about our experience. The Roma National Congress is not organised in a traditional 'up-down' approach. We're organised in a very modern way, it means we recognise Roma organisations on a local level. The problems are on a local level, they're not national. Even if you want to change them on the national level you will discover that this is almost impossible in a democracy, because there is no directive from 'up-down' in the state. You have to face and fight problems on a local level."
There is a great deal of residual racism and hostility among the majority populations towards the Roma. If I can just quote a survey carried out recently by the CVVM agency: 50 percent of Czechs say Roma must adapt to majority society and not the other way round. Just one third of Czechs say they are prepared to be tolerant towards the Roma, and only 3 percent of respondents believe offering help to Roma community will improve coexistence. It's a rather bleak outlook isn't it?
"Yes, and they're relatively nice statistics, so to speak. I know in Germany more than 70 percent of people are hostile towards the Roma. These are stereotypes. What we are facing in Europe is a deeply-rooted cultural codex called 'anti-gypsysm' or 'anti-ciganism', that is really part of society. Walk down the street and ask a normal guy what he knows about gypsies, about Roma, and he will come out with 'they're thieves, they're beggars' and so on: all the stereotypes that we've known for centuries. We know about that. But how to overcome it? That's the next question. We will not overcome it by simply helping the Roma, by treating the Roma as a social group. No, we have to work with the majority, we have to work at school level and so on, on the level of society's thinking about Roma. We have to fight racism, to improve the civil society. Until now what we have seen is working on the Roma to make them adaptable, whatever that means. People are speaking about integration and meaning assimilation, whatever that means. The Roma are always seen as foreigners in their own country."
So you're saying it's the majority that's the problem - they must adapt to the minority and not the other way round.
"Of course. Both of them must adapt. Roma have lived in this part of the world for more than 600 years. How long do we have to live in a country, in a state, in a part of the world, to be recognised, to be integrated? What we're facing, as the Roma National Congress, is that the majority are not even willing to live together. Look at the Czechs and the Slovaks - they split the country, each of them tried to create their own ethnically pure state. Look at what we're facing in the former Yugoslavia: ethnocentricism, racism, ethnic cleansing. The Roma - who in the eyes of the majority don't belong to any of those groups - are always the foreigners. In Germany they call them 'frendkorper' - a foreign piece in their own body. So the majority wants to exclude them. But at the same time, we're also facing a uniting Europe, so it's like wanting to take a shower without getting wet."
Are you confident of seeing in your lifetime the continent's 12 million Roma become regular, equal citizens in a united Europe?
"Well there's no way out of this. We have to be recognised in Europe as people who are living not only inside majority societies but also as a part of the majority, of the states of the nations where we are living. So what we are fighting for is a united Europe where the Roma are one of the majorities like all the others, and this is the only way we can overcome this, and of course in a civil society."
To find out more about the Czech Republic's Roma minority, see Radio Prague's own Roma pages - http://www.romove.cz/roma/ - and to find out more about Roma in Europe go to http://www.romnews.com/
