The Euro Dalits

[Guest guest]

The NY Times article below brings up an interesting issue: Since gypsies are

from India and many have reclaimed their Hindu origins, why is it that there

are no European scholars of subaltern studies, tribes, dalits, low caste,

etc. who want to study them? Rather, western scholars emphasize going all

the way to India to study India's underclass when they have 10 million right

in Europe crying for help. Also, there seem to be no academic chairs or

departments to study gypsies in Europe's universities. Why are these Dalits

within Europe being ignored? Their holocaust by the Nazis has been ignored -

no museums, no coverage in textbooks, no events in their honor, etc. -

unlike for the Jewish victims. Does anyone have knowledge of the major

funding sources in Scandinavia, Germany, including the church, doing serious

projects pertaining to the gypsies?

 

 

 

 

 

June 12, 2001 , New York Times.

Bulgaria Opens School Doors for Gypsy Children

By JOHN TAGLIABUE

IDIN, Bulgaria, June 8 - Linka Shankova, a Gypsy mother in her 20's, is

taking part in an unusual experiment intended to lift the lot of her people

in Bulgaria, and indeed across Eastern Europe.

For decades here, Gypsies, known as Roma in this part of the world, have

been segregated in their schooling, confined to the poorly run and badly

maintained schools like the one across a dusty lot from Ms. Shankova's

ramshackle one-story brick home. That education kept them on society's

lowest rungs, subject to the poverty and discrimination that has been their

lot for centuries.

So this past year, in a curious throwback to American desegregation of past

decades, Ms. Shankova has let her 10-year-old son, Bilian Mateev, join some

460 other Gypsy children who are bused from the dusty Nov Put neighborhood

each morning to schools in other parts of Vidin to be integrated with other

Bulgarian children. "My boy's lively," Mrs. Shankova said, praising a result

of one year's integration. "But he's quieter now. He's very wise now." In

September, her daughter Silvia, 8, will follow Bilian on the daily bus.

The struggle to integrate Vidin's Gypsy children has not been easy. Similar

efforts to integrate the children of Gypsies elsewhere in Bulgaria failed

after protests by non-Gypsy parents. Moreover, integration here was the

fruit of a local initiative - unusual in a region accustomed to awaiting

governmental remedy - that raised the hackles of education bureaucrats in

the capital of Sofia, a three-hour drive to the south.

If the efforts here succeed, the model could well spread elsewhere in

Eastern Europe, where Gypsies form a large part of the population. Vidin's

experiment is being imitated in cities in Hungary and Slovakia, and will be

repeated in September in four other Bulgarian cities. It has attracted the

attention of Western benefactors, including the George Soros Foundation,

which is paying salaries and providing books and other aid to Gypsy

schoolchildren.

The need for desegregation is in part the paradoxical result of decades of

efforts by former Communist governments in Eastern Europe to better

integrate Gypsies into society.

After World War II, Communist leaders forced the historically nomadic

Gypsies into a sedentary way of life, with fixed places of residence and

jobs. To eliminate widespread illiteracy, special schools were established

for Gypsy children.

For all the good intentions, the program masked racist undertones. In

Bulgaria, for instance, the Gypsy schools were officially dubbed `'schools

for children with inferior lifestyle and culture."

Overcrowded and underfunded, they often served as penal colonies for

uncooperative teachers. The results were abysmal. According to Bulgaria's

1992 census, while 36 percent of Bulgarian children graduate from high

school, fewer than 5 percent of Gypsy children do; 9 percent of Bulgarian

youths obtain university degrees, compared with one-tenth of 1 percent among

Gypsies.

Donka Panayotova, 45, a Gypsy teacher, daughter of a construction worker and

the guiding light of the integration here, got to know this situation in

1983, after finishing college and joining the faculty of Vidin's Gypsy

school.

"Officially, about 600 kids were registered," she said in a recent

interview. "In fact, no more than 280 to 300 were ever attending." The

conviction that integration was the sole solution came after she persuaded a

Bulgarian colleague to enroll her grandson at the Gypsy school. The boy's

presence forced Gypsy classmates to speak Bulgarian, sharply improving their

academic performance, she said.

In 1997, Mrs. Panayotova decided to quit teaching and found an organization

called Drom - Bulgarian for "the road" - to fight for desegregation. Despite

the Bulgarian government's acceptance in 1999 of a framework agreement with

Gypsy leaders to integrate Gypsies more fully into Bulgarian society, the

government had dragged its feet on school desegregation. Seventy percent of

Gypsy children remained in Gypsy schools. That same year, after several

Gypsy families in Yambol, in southeastern Bulgaria, sought to enroll their

children in Bulgarian schools, Bulgarian parents blocked their entrance with

protests.

In Vidin, despite scattered resistance, preparations for desegregation began

in earnest last spring.

Katya Trifonova, the principal of a desegregated secondary school, said

meetings with Bulgarian parents and teachers who feared a drop in

educational standards were often heated and emotional. Gypsy parents, for

their part, had to be assured for the safety of their children, she said. In

scattered instances, teachers at the Gypsy school, apparently fearing for

the future of their jobs if children deserted the school en masse, suggested

that Gypsy children might face attacks from skinheads if they ventured out

of the Gypsy neighborhood.

"I was worried, because my boy is darker than the others," said Aneta

Sashova, gesturing toward her son, Goshko Kotsev, 11, a fourth grader.

Mrs. Sashova's situation is typical of many of Vidin's Gypsies, estimated to

number roughly one-quarter of the population. Her family lives with the

parents of her husband, who has never held a job. Until 1999, she worked in

a chemical factory but was laid off when it shut down, and has survived on

welfare ever since.

She overcame her worries for her children after learning that Drom would buy

them school books, materials like crayons for art lessons, and even shoes.

"I had about decided to stop sending them to school altogether," she said of

Goshko and his sister, who is in eighth grade.

Ms. Panayotova's experiment in desegregation was particularly risky as a

test of tolerance in times of high stress. Slowly and painfully, Bulgaria is

weaning itself from a Communist, centrally planned economy to a more open

market. Vidin's two biggest factories, once employing tens of thousands to

supply rubber tires and water pumps to markets in the old Soviet empire, are

closed. Unemployment is so widespread that, by some estimates, as much as

half the city's 1989 population of about 60,000 have emigrated in search of

work.

The economic battering heightened the isolation of the Gypsies, who once

came out of their isolated slum neighborhood to work with other Bulgarians

in local factories, but are now unemployed.

Rumyan Russinov, the director of a center in Budapest that is run by the

Soros Foundation's Open Society Institute to help Gypsies, called the

organizers in Vidin "the sappers that find the mines," to enable similar

desegregation to succeed elsewhere in Eastern Europe.

"Every Romany leader feels he's a Martin Luther King," said Mr. Russinov,

34, who was born in Dunavtsi, down the Danube from Vidin. "We don't need

that now, we need a movement, not just an individual. We need critical

mass." Future initiatives, he said, will include university scholarships for

Gypsy graduates of desegregated schools.

In Vidin, he said, despite initial acceptance of desegregation, the struggle

is not yet over. Few Gypsy children are in integrated schools, though more

are expected as the idea catches on among Gypsy parents. Moreover, the

long-term effect of desegregation has yet to be felt.

"This is not a one-act play: it will be a long-term process," said Mariika

Vasileva, vice principal of a primary school whose Gypsy pupils jumped last

year to 110, from 80. "Only teachers who never had the chance to work with

children of different ethnic backgrounds could believe that this would be an

easy and quick process."

Lingering differences were evident as the sixth-grade class of Julia

Petkova, who teaches Bulgarian language and literature at the school of SS.

Cyril and Methodius, had a last lesson recently. In the first row, Borislav

Borisov, a boy of 12 who is not a Gypsy, shared a two-seat bench and desk

with Alexander Danchev, also 12, a tousled Gypsy boy - one of 7 in the class

of 26. It was the last day of school, exams were over, everyone had passed,

and thoughts were on vacation.

Borislav, asked about his summer plans, said he hoped his parents would take

him, as in past years, to the Black Sea coast. Alexander, when asked the

same question, appeared confused. After a pause, he replied, "I guess I'll

play."

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