The celebration of International Roma Day this month took place under particularly grim circumstances. Two weeks ago in France groups of teenagers attacked Roma communities after a rumour spread on social media that they were kidnapping children.
Not long after in Italy, neo-fascist group Casa Pound and the far-right Forza Nuova held violent protests against the transfer of Roma people, including 33 children, to a reception center in a Rome suburb.
Despite all attempts of extermination in European history, we Roma have kept our language, traditions and culture. This is the spirit of forty-seven years ago this month—April 8, 1971—when we decided at a meeting in London that we no longer would tolerate being described as “gypsies.”
We were Roma: one people across Europe, who, through our rights in a democratic and open Europe, could travel freely between countries to meet with others who shared the same culture and identity. Symbolically, we marked our newly-found unity by adopting the Roma flag and the Roma anthem.
Since then, Roma have continuously supported the European project, and in the past decade, the European Union in its turn has drawn attention to the plight of Roma and urged governments to do more to include Europe’s largest and most disadvantaged ethnic minority.
