Europe's Roma Dilemma

For hundreds of years populations of Roma, more familiar to many as Gypsies, have wandered various European cities like a forgotten nomadic people without a country or a homeland.

Their sad plight, which began in medieval India, has recently become a lightening rod for media scrutiny of the broader immigration policies of the member countries of the European Union, most noticeably France, who deported more than 1,000 Roma immigrants in a one-month period during August and September.

The BBC reports that the recent expulsion of large numbers of Roma populations from France has divided the members of President Nicolas Sarkozy's own cabinet and pushed the already embattled leader of France to defend his policy both to his own government and to other members of the European Union vigorously opposed to the French policy of deportation.

The French foreign minister Bernard Kouchner, "said he has almost resigned over the issue" according to a small blurb in 'The World this Week' section of the September 4th issue of the Economist - which also reported that a gunman in the Slovak capital of Bratislava intentionally shot and killed six members of a Roma family inside their apartment in late August.

Various human rights groups have accused the French government of intentional discrimination against impoverished Roma immigrants based on a leaked memo sent from the Interior Ministry to regional police chiefs that specifically outlines a systematic policy of closing Roma encampments and settlements in France and expelling the people from the country.

Their peculiar status sadly parallels the plight of newly emancipated African-American slaves in the south after the Civil War, or Jews fleeing Europe after World War II; and Palestinians today.

For many Americans the image of the people known commonly as "Gypsies" has been formed largely from a simplistic romanticized stereotype crafted by Hollywood.

At the core of this distorted misrepresentation are a people trapped by their own identity according to an interesting piece by Suzanne Daley in the September 16th New York Times.

The all too common image of the violin being played by a mysterious dark-skinned man with a dashing head scarf tied around his head. Or the sultry bandanna-wearing Gypsy woman/sage figure reading the future through crystal balls in the back of colorful wagons at carnivals looms in the subconscious minds of many Americans who don't really understand the history and origins of the Romani.

As is often the case the media-created image is far different than reality for the impoverished, under-educated marginalized pockets of Roma people stretching from Western Europe to the borders of the middle-east.

For the more prosperous countries of the European Union struggling to manage their way out of the global recession, (each of which harbors thousands of migrant Roma populations within their borders) it begs the question of how an often-vilified and certainly ostracized population of people will survive in a Europe that seems to regard them as a problem no one wants to deal with, and no one owns.