The Roma people are the untouchables of Slovakia. When the country joins the EU in May, they are likely to head west. But the Church could yet help their plight
ON A dusty hillside in eastern Slovakia, wood smoke rises into the chilly air above a rustling tangle of bushes and evergreens. Children – half-naked and shoeless – scamper along the stony dirt track, across an iron footbridge and up to the two-room hovel which Sr Jana Kalova shares with her elderly parents.
Three decades ago, Jana ran and played with the Gypsy children she now cares for. Unlike them, she went to college, later studying at the Catholic university in nearby Poland. When she finally came home to live and work among her people, she was wearing the simple blue habit of Charles de Foucauld’s Little Sisters of Jesus. In 1999, the local Slovak council agreed to lay an electricity cable to the 27 houses in Jana’s settlement at Twarozec – but not street lighting or running water. It was a small but important improvement on the harsh conditions she had known all her life.
“Although most children go to school here now, I still don’t know how many actually live here,” the nun shrugs. “If you ask me what the future holds for us, I’ve simply no idea.”
When a national census was held in predominantly Catholic Slovakia two years ago, fewer than 90,000 citizens, or 1.7 per cent, gave their ethnic origin as Roma. But Gypsy leaders say the real number is closer to 600,000 and comprises more than a tenth of the population. With a birth rate four times the national average, the minority is expected to reach 1 million in a decade. If present demographic trends continue, Roma will make up half of Slovakia’s population by 2050.
Under Communist rule, Gypsies could obtain unskilled jobs, as well as housing and healthcare. Many say their situation worsened with the advent of a free-market economy, when welfare was cut back and the decline of traditional skills brought unemployment and homelessness. Today they have no representation in parliament, none in government. In the late 1990s, Mikulas Dzurinda’s centre-right government scrapped an annual register of Gypsy crimes and drafted anti-discrimination legislation. But it also halved unemployment benefit to £30 a month under an austerity package. The situation today has enormous implications for western European countries, particularly as Slovakia is set to join the European Union in May. The EU nations are likely to attempt to deter a mass Roma exodus with the reimposition of visa requirements.
“What the Roma most need is a general social and educational campaign, but the big institutions have focused instead on areas like communications and computers,” explains Bishop Bernard Bober, an auxiliary from Kosice who heads the Catholic Church’s Roma pastoral programme. “The Roma have strong marriage and family bonds, which priests and lay experts can work with. But our mission needs greater backing if it’s to supplement the efforts of the State.”
At Bardejov, a few miles along the valley, the winter sunlight streams through the plain windows of a pine-beamed church, against a backdrop of pot-holed walkways and blackened housing blocks.
When the Salesian order took over the Roma ghetto’s derelict community centre in 1991, it was unpainted and crumbling, a haunt for drinkers and gamblers. Today the building contains the church but also doubles up as a primary school and sports facility. Its leading light is another Roma nun, Atanazia Holubova, who joined the Greek Catholic Bazilian order secretly while training as a nurse in the 1970s.
Since starting First Communion classes for fellow Roma a decade ago, Holubova has noticed significant changes. After giving up on the Church under Communist rule, more and more parents are having their children baptised, sensing a Catholic identity will give them a better chance. Most Catholic Roma are marrying, furthermore, instead of cohabiting out of wedlock; and many are taking religious affiliations into account when choosing spouses. Although few Roma stay at school after the age of 16, one of Holubova’s former catechism pupils from nearby Jarovnice recently became the first to win a university place. There have been Roma vocations in Slovakia too. The Bazilians now have five Gypsy nuns, and there are six Roma priests, with another two in training – including one, Igor Cikos, at the Greek Catholic seminary in Presov.
Although most Gypsies speak Roma at home, learning their history and folklore from relatives, they live and act publicly as Slovaks. Yet even here educational chances are limited. Less than half the Roma population has work, and there are no associations or publications to promote Roma interests. When the local council sold the deserted community centre to the Salesians, all the renovation money had to be raised abroad. The Slovak Government contributed nothing. “They said it wasn’t important – that we were just thrusting religion on the Roma,” Sr Ata-nazia explains. “Yet they were wrong, since no amount of money will help unless the Gypsies can find a scale of values for life. Communism showed that spiritual poverty is as damaging as material poverty.” The problems facing the Roma extend far beyond Slovakia.
The Slavic word for Gypsies – Tsigani – means untouchable, and dates from the Middle Ages, when Gypsies reached Europe after migrating from India. Estimated at up to 7 million, eastern Europe’s Gypsies make up two-thirds of the world’s total. They are the region’s largest and poorest minority – as well as its least organised and most disliked. Although half a million were killed by the Nazis in the Second World War Porajmos, or Gypsy Holocaust, the massacre was commemorated for the first time only in 1993.
In Romania, the official Roma population of half a million is estimated to be five times greater. In the Czech Republic, where Gypsies officially number 12,000 but are put unofficially at twelve times that, a government report last November confirmed an upsurge in anti-Roma acts by political extremists. In Bulgaria, nine out of ten Gypsies have only primary education, while in Moldavia, over half of Roma men hold university degrees but virtually all Roma women are illiterate, according to Council of Europe figures.
Although Hungary’s 700,000-strong mostly Catholic Gypsy minority became the first to elect its own nationwide council in 1995, the school drop-out rate remains at 40 per cent and only one in seven Roma men have regular jobs. A poll last September suggested anti-Semitism had decreased in Hungary – but not anti-Gypsy feeling. In November, a court at Szeged cut the compensation awarded to two wrongly imprisoned Gypsy brothers after ruling that they were “more primitive than the average” and had therefore suffered less from incarceration. Roma leaders from eastern Europe who met in Hungary last year called for a 10-year campaign to counter poverty and exclusion. However, they also warned of worsening conditions, with infant mortality currently twice national norms, life expectancy 15 years below the regional average and poverty levels ten times as great.
Claude Cohn, an official from the European Roma Rights Centre in Budapest, thinks eastern Europe’s Churches can play a key role in fostering “social and community engagement” among the Gypsies. But church initiatives to tackle Roma problems, he believes, have so far been piecemeal and inconsistent. “While real advances have been made in countering racism and police brutality in eastern Europe,” he said, “some Churches have also discouraged Roma from asserting their rights in ways we consider essential.”
If true, that could now be changing. In neighbouring Poland and the Czech Republic, the Catholic Church has been running pastoral commissions for Gypsies, while Hungary’s Bishops’ Conference began training seminarians a year ago in Roma language and culture. Croatia’s bishops organise a Gypsy summer school each year, while the Church in Romania runs several social projects, including a home for Gypsy single mothers in Bucharest.
Back in Slovakia, where reports are being investigated that Gypsy hospital patients were forcibly sterilised as late as the mid-1990s, church leaders are keen to stress the varied nature of Roma life. While some Gypsies live in extreme poverty in separate, isolated communities, others are comparatively integrated, living and working normally alongside other citizens. A third group exists in between, on the margins of assimilation. It is people like this that the Catholic Church is trying hardest to reach. Besides the pastoral programme headed by Bishop Bober, the Slovak Church runs Roma parishes at Bardejov and Brezno, as well as at Jarovnice.
In the late 1990s, the Slovak Church turned down calls for a non-territorial bishop for the Roma minority. But it would welcome more Roma priests, nuns and trained laity, Bishop Bober says, to strengthen its expanding pastoral work.
“The system in place here has made it hard to assimilate the Gypsies, and no government has so far devised a really effective response,” the bishop concedes. “But as we prepare for EU membership, we have to do better. Like a sick younger brother, the Roma need a helping hand. They’re spread out all around our republic, from the cities to the mountains. But each bishop should know his flock and encourage his clergy to do the same.”
Jonathan Luxmoore
is The Tablet’s correspondent in Poland.