Timeline Gypsy
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1000 The Gypsy people (Romany) migrated from Rajasthan, India, about this time. They call themselves Rom, which is derived from their original Indian caste name Dom.
(Wired, 9/96, p.46)(SFC, 2/28/97, p.A24)(Econ, 6/21/08, p.35)
1658 Sep 3, Oliver Cromwell, Lord Protector of the New Commonwealth, i.e. ruler over England’s Puritan parliament (1653-58), died of malaria at age 59. Richard Cromwell had succeeded his father as English Lord Protector. Cromwell was responsible for shipping Romanichal Gypsies (i.e., Gypsies from Britain) as slaves to the southern plantations; there is documentation of Gypsies being owned by freed black slaves in Jamaica.
(http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oliver_Cromwell)(AP, 9/3/97)(http://tinyurl.com/q7kfjwn) (ON, 12/00, p.5)
1840-1860 Slavery existed on the territory of present-day Romania from before the founding of the principalities of Wallachia and Moldavia in 13th–14th century, until it was abolished in stages during the 1840s and 1850s. Most of the slaves were of Roma (Gypsy) ethnicity.
(http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Slavery_in_Romania)
1856 Feb 20, Romania abolished the slavery of Gypsies, or Roma, but discrimination persisted against the group.
(AP, 3/11/11)
1885 Oct 24, Johann Strauss' operetta, "The Gypsy Baron," premiered in Vienna.
(MC, 10/24/01)
1885 Bavaria issued measures aimed at controlling Gypsies and gathering information about them.
(WSJ, 1/19/00, p.A20)
1899 Munich police established a central office for Gypsy affairs.
(WSJ, 1/19/00, p.A20)
1911 Munich police began fingerprinting all Gypsies.
(WSJ, 1/19/00, p.A20)
1929 In Frankfurt the city council set up an official fenced concentration camp for Gypsies, but inhabitants could enter and leave at will.
(WSJ, 1/19/00, p.A20)
1936 Aug 1, The Olympic games opened in Berlin the homeless and itinerant Gypsies were sent into concentration camps.
(TMC, 1994, p.1936)(WSJ, 7/30/96, p.A12)(Hem, 6/96, p.104)(AP, 8/1/97)(HNPD, 8/1/98)
1941 Oct, Some 243 Estonian Roma (Gypsies) were killed in Estonia.
(www.historycommission.ee/temp/conclusions_frame.htm)
1941 Nazi documents from this year showed that the Einsatzgruppe, a Nazi-run Serbian police unit, executed 11,164 people, mostly Serbian Jewish men, suspected communists and Gypsies [see 1942]. The unit was allegedly run by Peter Egner, who emigrated to the US in 1960, and received citizenship in 1966. In 2009 Serbian authorities sought his extradition. In 2010 Serbia issued an international warrant for the arrest of Egner (88), who has denied the accusations.
(AP, 4/14/09)(AP, 4/2/10)(AP, 11/26/10)
1941-1945 Guenter Lewy in 2000 authored "The Nazi Persecution of the Gypsies."
(WSJ, 1/19/00, p.A20)
1941-1945 In 2000 Radu Ioanid authored "The Holocaust In Romania," which described how 250,000 people died under Ion Antonescu. 25,000 Gypsies were deported to Transnistria (later in the Ukraine), of whom 1,500 died.
(WSJ, 1/19/00, p.A20)
1941-1945 Croatia was occupied by Nazi forces and with its Moslem allies some 700,000 Serbs and 75,000 Jews and Gypsies were killed. The number of Gypsies killed during WW II range from 90,000 to 196,000.
(WSJ, 10/11/95, p. A-1)(WSJ, 4/3/96, p.A-22)(WSJ, 5/20/99, p.A21)(WSJ, 1/19/00, p.A20)
1942 A camp was set up for Gypsies at Lety in southern Bohemia. Some 1,300 inmates passed through and at least 300 died from the harsh living conditions. Communist authorities set up a pig farm on the site in the 1970s. Makus Pape later authored a book on Lety.
(SFC, 12/10/99, p.AA8)
1943 A Gypsy camp was set up at Auschwitz where an estimated 20,000 Roma died by the end of the war.
(WSJ, 1/19/00, p.A20)
1944 May 19, 240 gypsies were transported to Auschwitz from Westerbork Neth.
(MC, 5/19/02)
1953 May 16, Django Reinhardt (b.1910), Gypsy jazz guitarist, died in France. In 2004 Michael Dregni authored “Django: The Life and Music of a Gypsy Legend."
(http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Django_Reinhardt)(WSJ, 10/23/98, p.W12)
1966 Christian J. Modeste (b.1914), Gypsy king, died in Belgium.
(http://povodearuanda.wordpress.com/2009/11/28/reis-ciganos/)
1972 Gratton Puxon authored "The Destiny of Europe's Gypsies."
(WSJ, 1/19/00, p.A20)
1992 Sep, In Romania Ion Cioaba (1935-1997), had himself crowned as King of the Gypsies with a 13-pound crown in front of 5,000 followers.
(SFC, 2/28/97, p.A24)
1993 Jan 1, Czechoslovakia peacefully split into two new countries, the Czech Republic and Slovakia. The Slovak people never voted on the 1993 split with the Czechs. When the country split, all citizens were deemed to be either Czech or Slovak, based on their parentage. The vast majority of the Romany living in the Czech Republic are of Slovak descent, and they had to apply for Czech citizenship. Vladimir Meciar (b.1942) became the premier of Slovakia and Vaclav Klaus the premier of the Czech Rep.
(http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vladim%C3%ADr_Me%C4%8Diar)(AP, 9/21/02)(WSJ, 4/26/96, p.A-1)(SFC, 5/13/96, p.A-8)(AP, 1/1/98)
1995 Pres. Havel dedicated a small memorial to the victims of the WW II camp at Lety.
(SFC, 12/10/99, p.AA8)
1997 May 4, Pope John Paul beatified the Gypsy Jimenez Malla, killed by Republican forces in the 1936 Spanish Civil War.
(SFC, 5/5/97, p.A8)
1997 In Hungary a Y2000 report by the Parliamentary Commission said Roma children in this year accounted for 67.9% of the students in “special" schools. Roma children were commonly channeled into schools for the mentally handicapped.
(SFC, 6/26/00, p.A10)
1998 Otto Rosenberg (d.2001 at 74), a German Gypsy leader who survived Nazi death camps, authored his memoirs.
(SFC, 7/12/01, p.A23)
1999 Nov 20, In the Czech Republic some 30 skinheads broke into a restaurant in Ceske Budejovice and attacked a party of Gypsies. This prompted a dozen Roma families to leave the area and ask for asylum elsewhere.
(SFC, 12/1/99, p.C3)
2000 Jun 30, Alphonse Juilland, former Stanford professor, died at age 77. His studies in linguistics included a Gypsy dictionary.
(SFC, 7/7/00, p.D5)
2004 Jun 21, A Swiss court cleared the way for Gypsies to sue IBM over allegations that the computer company's expertise helped the Nazis commit mass murder more efficiently.
(AP, 6/22/04)
2006 Apr 13, In Russia a group of young men beat inhabitants with metal bars, killing a man and a woman and leaving an 80-year-old woman and a 14-year-old girl gravely wounded. 9 people were later arrested in connection with the attack on the Roma camp in the southern Volgograd region.
(AP, 4/17/06)
2007 Aug 1, It was reported that more than 100 Serbian Gypsies have crossed the border illegally into neighboring Romania in recent days and filed applications for asylum claiming they were subject to abuse and attacks in Serbia.
(AP, 8/1/07)
2007 Oct 30, In Italy Giovanna Reggiani (47) was brutally attacked as she returned home in northern Rome. She died 2 days later. Nicolae Mailat, a Romanian Gypsy, admitted to snatching her bag but denied her murder. Her attack triggered a public outcry.
(Econ, 11/10/07, p.63)
2008 May 20, The European Parliament censured Italy for its treatment of Gypsies.
(Econ, 5/24/08, p.71)
2008 Jul 3, It was reported that Italian authorities have started fingerprinting tens of thousands of Gypsies living in nomad camps across the country, brushing aside accusations of racism by human rights advocates and international organizations. The Interior Ministry said prints will only be taken from people who do not have a valid Italian or EU document.
(AP, 7/3/08)
2008 Jul 10, The European Parliament called the fingerprinting of Gypsies in Italy a clear act of racial discrimination and urged the authorities to stop it.
(AP, 7/10/08)
2008-2009 In Hungary six Roma, including a 5-year-old boy, were killed in a series of attacks. In 2015 an appeals court agreed with the life sentences without the possibility for parole given to Zsolt Peto and brothers Arpad and Istvan Kiss. It also confirmed the 13-year prison sentence for Istvan Csontos, the driver in some of the attacks.
(AP, 5/8/15)
2009 May 2, It was reported that an estimated 250,000 Roma lived in the Czech Rep. A rising number of the gypsies were applying for visas to Canada. Of 861 applications in 2008, 84 were accepted.
(Econ, 5/2/09, p.54)
2009 Jun 16, In Northern Ireland racist thugs armed with bricks and bottles forced more than 100 Romanian Gypsies from their Belfast homes in a wave of attacks that sent them fleeing to the safety of a nearby church.
(AP, 6/17/09)
2009 Jun 23, Northern Ireland’s government said more than 100 Romanian Gypsies who suffered racist attacks and intimidation in Belfast are being flown back home at taxpayer expense.
(AP, 6/24/09)
2009 Jun 29, In Belarus Vasily Yusepchuk (30), an illiterate, itinerant Gypsy worker, was sentenced to death by Brest Regional Court. He did chores for elderly women, and allegedly would sneak back at night to rob and strangle them. Lawyers insisted the case hinged exclusively on a confession that they claim was obtained through torture.
(AP, 10/13/09)
2009 Aug 26, In Bucharest, Romania, fans at first politely applauded the Roma performers sharing a stage with Madonna. Then the pop star condemned widespread discrimination against Roma, or Gypsies, and the cheers gave way to jeers. Official Romanian data put the local Roma population at 500,000.
(AP, 8/27/09)
2009 Oct 8, Romania unveiled a monument in memory of some 300,000 Jews and Gypsies killed during the Holocaust in the country, which at times denied that the extermination even happened.
(AP, 10/8/09)
2010 Jan 13, Amnesty Int’l. said the Czech Republic is defying a European court by continuing to place thousands of healthy Gypsy children in schools for the mentally disabled.
(SFC, 1/14/10, p.A2)
2010 Jul 28, French Pres. Nicolas Sarkozy ordered authorities to expel Gypsy illegal immigrants and to dismantle their camps.
(SFC, 7/29/10, p.A2)
2010 Aug 12, French Interior Minister Brice Hortefeux said that over 40 illegal gypsy camps have been dismantled around the country in the last two weeks and that 700 people among those in the camps will be returned to Bulgaria and Romania.
(SFC, 8/13/10, p.A2)
2010 Aug 19, France deported nearly 100 Gypsies, or Roma, to their native Romania as part of a very public effort by conservative President Nicolas Sarkozy to dismantle Roma camps and sweep them out of the country.
(AP, 8/19/10)
2010 Aug 20, France put about 100 Gypsies, or Roma, on a charter flight headed to their native Romania, the second day in a row that it has expelled Roma in a much criticized government crackdown.
(AP, 8/20/10)
2010 Aug 26, The archbishop of Paris joined the tide of criticism over France's crackdown on Gypsies, calling it a "circus," while the EU's justice commissioner denounced French officials' discriminatory tone about the vulnerable minority.
(AP, 8/26/10)
2010 Sep 4, In France Roma migrants whose camp was bulldozed led a protest in Paris against the French government's security crackdown, with similar demonstrations taking place across the country and abroad.
(AFP, 9/4/10)
2010 Sep 9, The European Parliament called on France to suspend its expulsion of gypsies. The rare criticism of an EU state was backed by 337 lawmakers meeting in Strasbourg, France, with 245 opposed and 51 abstentions.
(AP, 9/9/10)
2010 Sep 14, The European Commission threatened legal action against France over its crackdown on Roma minorities, drawing a parallel between their treatment and World War II-era deportations.
(AFP, 9/14/10)
2010 Sep 29, The European Union decided to launch legal action against France over its expulsions of Gypsies, or Roma, to poorer EU nations.
(AP, 9/29/10)
2010 Oct 8, French President Nicolas Sarkozy met with the pope and top Vatican officials in a fence-mending visit following France's controversial crackdown on Gypsies, while a top Vatican cardinal urged France to welcome immigrants and those who have been persecuted.
(AP, 10/8/10)
2010 Oct 19, The European Commission said it will temporarily suspend its human rights complaint against France for its expulsions of Gypsies, or Roma, after Paris promised to alter some of its laws to match EU regulations.
(AP, 10/19/10)
2010 Nov 10, Human rights groups said they have filed a complaint with the EU accusing the Czech government of failing to comply with a court order that it stop placing thousands of healthy Roma children in schools for the mentally disabled.
(SFC, 11/11/10, p.A2)
2011 Mar 10, Romania's Pres. Traian Basescu signed a law making Feb. 20 an official holiday to mark when the slavery of Gypsies, or Roma, was abolished. Roma slavery was abolished Feb. 20, 1856, but discrimination persists against the group.
(AP, 3/11/11)
2011 Apr 7, Amnesty International urged Serbian authorities to "take urgent and immediate action" to halt forced evictions of Roma, also known as Gypsies, from their settlements in the capital Belgrade and prevent "systematic discrimination" against them.
(AP, 4/7/11)
2011 Apr 22, The Hungarian Red Cross evacuated hundreds of Roma women and children from their homes because they were frightened of a far-right vigilante group that was setting up a training camp near their village.
(AP, 4/22/11)
2011 Oct 18, Romania's anti-discrimination council voted 5-2 to caution President Traian Basescu for making discriminatory remarks about Gypsies and disabled people.
(AP, 10/18/11)
2012 Jul 24, In Montenegro some 850 Roma people, who had fled Kosovo during the 1998-99 war, lost their belongings in the fire that swept through the refugee barracks in the suburb of Konik. No one was injured.
(AP, 7/25/12)
2012 Aug, France launched its latest campaign to drive Gypsies from their camps.
(AP, 8/15/12)
2012 Oct 24, Germany opened a long-awaited memorial to the hundreds of thousands of Gypsies, or Roma, who were killed by the Nazis in what one survivor called "the forgotten Holocaust" — and pledged to fight the discrimination the minority still faces in Europe today.
(AP, 10/24/12)
2013 Jan 5, In Hungary journalist Zsolt Bayer, a founding member of the governing Fidesz party, wrote a newspaper column in which he said: "a significant part of the Roma are unfit for coexistence. They are not fit to live among people. These Roma are animals and they behave like animals."
(AP, 1/8/13)
2013 Jul 21, In France Gilles Bourdouleix, a member of parliament and mayor for the town of Cholet near Nantes, had a confrontation with Gypsies, when he visited a field owned by the town where Gypsies were illegally living in caravans. He asked them to leave. Some of the Gypsies made Nazi salutes at Bourdouleix and he responded by saying: "Maybe Hitler didn't kill enough of them."
(AP, 7/23/13)
2013 Aug 6, A Hungarian court jailed four neo-Nazis for killing Roma families in a spree of racist violence in 2008 and 2009 that shocked the country and led to accusations that police had failed to protect an historically persecuted minority.
(Reuters, 8/6/13)
2013 Aug 8, Nicolae Gheorghe (b.1946), Romanian Gypsy campaigner for rights of the Roma, died of cancer.
(Econ, 8/17/13, p.78)(http://tinyurl.com/pudxsh7)
2013 Sep 25, Amnesty Int’l. said more than 10,000 Roma, also known as Gypsies, have been evicted from French squatter camps from January to August, with many forced to return to Romania and Bulgaria despite EU rules requiring free movement for all EU citizens.
(SFC, 9/25/13, p.A2)
2013 Oct 9, In France Leonarda Dibrani, a 15-year-old Roma girl, was taken off a school bus and deported with her family to Kosovo.
(Econ, 10/26/13, p.60)
2013 Oct 11, A French court convicted 26 members of three Croatian Roma families of forcing children to carry out more than 100 robberies in European countries.
(AFP, 10/11/13)
2013 Oct 22, A top Greek prosecutor ordered an emergency nationwide investigation into birth certificates issued in the past six years after a girl was discovered living with alleged abductors at a gypsy camp.
(AP, 10/22/13)
2013 Oct 25, Authorities said DNA tests have confirmed that Sasha Ruseva, a Bulgarian Roma woman (35), is the mother of a mysterious girl in Greece known as Maria.
(AP, 10/25/13)(SFC, 10/25/13, p.A2)
2013 Oct 25, Greek police said they have arrested a childless couple in Athens on suspicion of buying an 8-month-old Roma girl and trying to register her as their own, amid international uproar over another little girl who was found living with unrelated Gypsies in Greece.
(AP, 10/25/13)
2014 Jan 28, A French court barred the return to France of a Roma family including Leonarda Dibrani, the teenage girl whose arrest in front of her schoolmates and expulsion to Kosovo became a cause celebre.
(AP, 1/28/14)
2014 Feb 16, In Macedonia an explosion wounded five Roma children in western town of Tetovo. Three people were soon detained in the case.
(AP, 2/17/14)
2014 Apr 30, The Council of Europe said Hungary's prison system needs to reduce overcrowding, stop discrimination against Roma prisoners and offer inmates work or recreational activities so they don't spend 23 hours a day in their cells.
(AP, 4/30/14)
2014 Jun 13, In France a Roma boy named Darius (16) was beaten into a coma in the town of Pierrefitte.
(AP, 7/12/14)
2014 Sep 26, In Serbia 3 Gypsy children died in a fire in a small wooden shack that has been their home on the outskirts of Belgrade.
(AP, 9/26/14)
2014 Sep, The European commission launched a case against the Czech Rep. over the one-third number of Roma in schools for the mentally disabled. The following April it did the same for Slovakia.
(Econ, 6/6/15, p.44)
2014 Nov 5, In southern France flamenco guitarist Manitas de Plata (93) died. He had sold nearly 100 million records worldwide and broke boundaries for Gypsy musicians.
(AP, 11/6/14)
2014 Nov 25, Bulgarian police raided a mosque in the town of Pazardzhik and detained Ahmed Mussa Ahmed, a Roma Muslim religious leader suspected of spreading propaganda for the Islamic State group.
(AP, 11/25/14)
2015 Aug 27, French police cleared out one of the country’s biggest Roma camps, dismantling a sprawling network of makeshift shelters next to a Paris region highway under pouring rain. The camp had housed 200-300 people for at least three years.
(AP, 8/27/15)
2015 Oct 10, In Ireland 9 people, including an infant, died in a fire at a Dublin mobile home camp for native Gypsies.
(AP, 10/10/15)
2015 Oct 19, Lawyers said Ireland has agreed to pay the Romanian Gypsy parents of a blond boy 60,000 euros ($68,000) in compensation after conceding that police in 2013 employed prejudicial racial profiling when seizing the child.
(AP, 10/19/15)
2015 Oct 26, Pope Francis called for a fresh start for Roma and Sinti communities, telling traveler families from around the world they could break free of prejudice by not falling into crime. The Sinti are a traditionally itinerant ethnic group that has been present in Italy for centuries.
(AFP, 10/2615)
2016 Feb 3, In France police cleared a sprawling slum-like camp along railroad tracks on the edge of Paris that housed hundreds of Roma, citing sanitary concerns.
(AP, 2/3/16)
2016 Feb 9, A sweep involving teams of sniffer dogs and a helicopter was conducted simultaneously in Paris and Craiova, in southern Romania. The joint operation by Romania and France against pickpockets targeting visitors to Disneyland Paris and other French tourist sites nabbed the ringleaders. The probe began last March after local police noted a spike in pickpocketing by Romanians and ethnic Roma outside Disneyland and on the train that links Paris to the amusement park.
(AFP, 2/19/16)
2016 May 4, Three Bulgarian police officers were injured when anti-Roma protesters tried to break through a cordon during a demonstration in the southern town of Radnevo. Some 2,000 people took part in the protest over an incident two days earlier in which four Roma men have been charged with the attempted murder of three young men.
(Reuters, 5/5/16)
2016 May 26, The European Union issued a warning to Hungary about discrimination against Roma children in the country's education system.
(AP, 5/26/16)
2016 Jun 10, A Swedish court awarded 30,000 kronor ($3,700) each in damages to 11 Roma plaintiffs who sued the government for discrimination, saying they were registered by police due to their ethnicity.
(AP, 6/10/16)
2016 Jul 13, In central Romania anti-mafia police broke up a human trafficking gang which forced dozens of kidnapped victims including children into beggary and slavery, rescuing five people in the town of Berevoesti. 38 members of an extended Roma family in the village of Gamacesti were formally detained.
(Reuters, 7/13/16)(AP, 7/14/16)
2018 Apr 8, Pope Francis told worshippers in St Peter's Square that he hoped Roma Day could foster greater understanding of Roma culture through the "goodwill of getting to know one another" and "mutual respect". Matteo Salvini, the leader of Italy's far-right League, urged them to "steal less".
(AFP, 4/8/18)
2018 May 9, An international report was released into the situation of the Roma people in the Western Balkans. It showed that up to 93 percent of Roma women are unemployed, with one-third of all Roma families there going to bed hungry. The study covered Albania, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Macedonia, Montenegro, Serbia and Kosovo.
(AP, 5/9/18)
2018 Jun 23, In western Ukraine an attack on a Roma camp left one person dead and four others injured, including a 10-year-old boy on the outskirts of Lviv. Police soon arrested seven men aged 16 and 17 suspected of carrying out the attack and a 20-year-old man suspected of organizing it.
(AP, 6/25/18)
2018 Jun 27, Rome's city authorities began clearing 450 people out of an official Roma camp weeks after the new far-right interior minister, Matteo Salvini, said Italy's Roma should be counted and, if they are foreign, expelled.
(Reuters, 6/29/18)
2018 Jul 26, Police in Rome cleared nearly 400 people, including dozens of children, from a shanty camp inhabited for years by members of the minority Roma community, despite a European Union court ruling halting demolition.
(AP, 7/26/18)
2018 Sep 11, The European Commission backed a European Parliament report condemning Hungary for abusing human rights and for the mistreatment of Roma communities, Hungary's PM Viktor Orban rejected European Parliament efforts to impose sanctions on Budapest over accusations of corruption, rights abuses and authoritarianism, saying he had the right to ban migrants from the country.
(Reuters, 9/11/18)
2018 Oct 7, Czech Pres. Milos Zeman refused to back down from comments slamming what he called a 90 percent unemployment rate among the country's Roma, earning a rebuke from campaigners and rights activists.
(Reuters, 10/7/18)
2019 Mar 25, In France around 20 people were arrested late today after gangs of vigilantes attacked camps of ethnic Roma people in northeast Paris after false reports that they were responsible for abductions in the area using white vans.
(AFP, 3/28/19)
2019 Apr 3, Rome's Mayor Virginia Raggi pledged an investigation into possible inciting racial hatred against the organizers of a violent protest that rejected housing Roma families in a neighborhood government-run center a day earlier. Raggi blamed both Casa Pound and Forza Nuova for creating a hostile climate in the Torre Maura neighborhood, a low-income area on the eastern edge of the capital. City authorities moved several Roma families out of a public housing project in a Rome suburb after violent protests by neo-fascist groups threatened their safety.
(AP, 4/3/19)(AP, 4/4/19)
2019 Apr 11, In northern Bulgaria protests against the Roma community took place in the city of Gabrovo, sparked by an alleged attack by Roma men on a shopkeeper. Roma, or Gypsies, make up around 5-9% of Bulgaria's population of 7 million and are among the most disadvantaged groups in the country.
(AP, 4/12/19)
2019 Jun 2, Pope Francis apologized to the Roma ethnic minority for their history of discrimination in Europe and paid homage to Romanian Catholics persecuted during communist rule as he wrapped up his third and final day in the country.
(SFC, 6/3/19, p.A2)
2019 Dec 5, Slovakia’s police said they have charged former PM Robert Fico with racism for his comments about the embattled Roma minority.
(AP, 12/5/19)
2020 Feb 23, In Hungary more than 2,000 people, including Roma families and civil groups, marched to parliament to protest against the government's refusal to pay compensation to Roma children who had been unlawfully segregated in a school in eastern Hungary.
(Reuters, 2/23/20)
2020 Apr 7, Leaders of Hungary's Roma people said the coronavirus pandemic posed a grave threat to the already precarious status of the marginalized minority, with many Roma feeling abandoned by the nationalist government.
(Reuters, 4/7/20)
2020 May 11, Hungary's top court ruled that a school Gyongyospata unlawfully segregated minority Roma students for years, granting 100 million forints ($310,000) in compensation to the children's families.
(Reuters, 5/12/20)
2020 May 15, Slovakia lifted a quarantine on the last of five Roma settlements that were closed off in April to contain the spread of the new coronavirus.
(Reuters, 5/16/20)
2020 Sep 26, In North Macedonia hundreds of Roma protested against police brutality in Bitola, the country's second-largest city.
(AP, 9/26/20)
2020 Oct 14, It was reported that Roma communities in Bulgaria were sprayed with disinfectant from crop dusters this spring as coronavirus cases surged in the country. In Slovakia, their villages were the only ones where the army conducted testing. And across Central and Eastern Europe, reports of police using excessive force against Roma spiked as officers were deployed to enforce lockdowns in their towns.
(AP, 10/14/20)
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Return to home
Sinti or Sinta or Sinte is the name of a
Romani or Gypsy population in Europe. Traditionally nomadic,
today only a small percentage of the group remains unsettled. In
earlier times, they frequently lived on the outskirts of
communities. The Sinti speak the Sinti-Manouche variety of
Romani, which exhibits strong German influence.
(http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sinti)
1000 The Gypsy people (Romany) migrated from Rajasthan, India, about this time. They call themselves Rom, which is derived from their original Indian caste name Dom.
(Wired, 9/96, p.46)(SFC, 2/28/97, p.A24)(Econ, 6/21/08, p.35)
1658 Sep 3, Oliver Cromwell, Lord Protector of the New Commonwealth, i.e. ruler over England’s Puritan parliament (1653-58), died of malaria at age 59. Richard Cromwell had succeeded his father as English Lord Protector. Cromwell was responsible for shipping Romanichal Gypsies (i.e., Gypsies from Britain) as slaves to the southern plantations; there is documentation of Gypsies being owned by freed black slaves in Jamaica.
(http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oliver_Cromwell)(AP, 9/3/97)(http://tinyurl.com/q7kfjwn) (ON, 12/00, p.5)
1840-1860 Slavery existed on the territory of present-day Romania from before the founding of the principalities of Wallachia and Moldavia in 13th–14th century, until it was abolished in stages during the 1840s and 1850s. Most of the slaves were of Roma (Gypsy) ethnicity.
(http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Slavery_in_Romania)
1856 Feb 20, Romania abolished the slavery of Gypsies, or Roma, but discrimination persisted against the group.
(AP, 3/11/11)
1885 Oct 24, Johann Strauss' operetta, "The Gypsy Baron," premiered in Vienna.
(MC, 10/24/01)
1885 Bavaria issued measures aimed at controlling Gypsies and gathering information about them.
(WSJ, 1/19/00, p.A20)
1899 Munich police established a central office for Gypsy affairs.
(WSJ, 1/19/00, p.A20)
1911 Munich police began fingerprinting all Gypsies.
(WSJ, 1/19/00, p.A20)
1929 In Frankfurt the city council set up an official fenced concentration camp for Gypsies, but inhabitants could enter and leave at will.
(WSJ, 1/19/00, p.A20)
1936 Aug 1, The Olympic games opened in Berlin the homeless and itinerant Gypsies were sent into concentration camps.
(TMC, 1994, p.1936)(WSJ, 7/30/96, p.A12)(Hem, 6/96, p.104)(AP, 8/1/97)(HNPD, 8/1/98)
1941 Oct, Some 243 Estonian Roma (Gypsies) were killed in Estonia.
(www.historycommission.ee/temp/conclusions_frame.htm)
1941 Nazi documents from this year showed that the Einsatzgruppe, a Nazi-run Serbian police unit, executed 11,164 people, mostly Serbian Jewish men, suspected communists and Gypsies [see 1942]. The unit was allegedly run by Peter Egner, who emigrated to the US in 1960, and received citizenship in 1966. In 2009 Serbian authorities sought his extradition. In 2010 Serbia issued an international warrant for the arrest of Egner (88), who has denied the accusations.
(AP, 4/14/09)(AP, 4/2/10)(AP, 11/26/10)
1941-1945 Guenter Lewy in 2000 authored "The Nazi Persecution of the Gypsies."
(WSJ, 1/19/00, p.A20)
1941-1945 In 2000 Radu Ioanid authored "The Holocaust In Romania," which described how 250,000 people died under Ion Antonescu. 25,000 Gypsies were deported to Transnistria (later in the Ukraine), of whom 1,500 died.
(WSJ, 1/19/00, p.A20)
1941-1945 Croatia was occupied by Nazi forces and with its Moslem allies some 700,000 Serbs and 75,000 Jews and Gypsies were killed. The number of Gypsies killed during WW II range from 90,000 to 196,000.
(WSJ, 10/11/95, p. A-1)(WSJ, 4/3/96, p.A-22)(WSJ, 5/20/99, p.A21)(WSJ, 1/19/00, p.A20)
1942 A camp was set up for Gypsies at Lety in southern Bohemia. Some 1,300 inmates passed through and at least 300 died from the harsh living conditions. Communist authorities set up a pig farm on the site in the 1970s. Makus Pape later authored a book on Lety.
(SFC, 12/10/99, p.AA8)
1943 A Gypsy camp was set up at Auschwitz where an estimated 20,000 Roma died by the end of the war.
(WSJ, 1/19/00, p.A20)
1944 May 19, 240 gypsies were transported to Auschwitz from Westerbork Neth.
(MC, 5/19/02)
1953 May 16, Django Reinhardt (b.1910), Gypsy jazz guitarist, died in France. In 2004 Michael Dregni authored “Django: The Life and Music of a Gypsy Legend."
(http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Django_Reinhardt)(WSJ, 10/23/98, p.W12)
1966 Christian J. Modeste (b.1914), Gypsy king, died in Belgium.
(http://povodearuanda.wordpress.com/2009/11/28/reis-ciganos/)
1972 Gratton Puxon authored "The Destiny of Europe's Gypsies."
(WSJ, 1/19/00, p.A20)
1992 Sep, In Romania Ion Cioaba (1935-1997), had himself crowned as King of the Gypsies with a 13-pound crown in front of 5,000 followers.
(SFC, 2/28/97, p.A24)
1993 Jan 1, Czechoslovakia peacefully split into two new countries, the Czech Republic and Slovakia. The Slovak people never voted on the 1993 split with the Czechs. When the country split, all citizens were deemed to be either Czech or Slovak, based on their parentage. The vast majority of the Romany living in the Czech Republic are of Slovak descent, and they had to apply for Czech citizenship. Vladimir Meciar (b.1942) became the premier of Slovakia and Vaclav Klaus the premier of the Czech Rep.
(http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vladim%C3%ADr_Me%C4%8Diar)(AP, 9/21/02)(WSJ, 4/26/96, p.A-1)(SFC, 5/13/96, p.A-8)(AP, 1/1/98)
1995 Pres. Havel dedicated a small memorial to the victims of the WW II camp at Lety.
(SFC, 12/10/99, p.AA8)
1997 May 4, Pope John Paul beatified the Gypsy Jimenez Malla, killed by Republican forces in the 1936 Spanish Civil War.
(SFC, 5/5/97, p.A8)
1997 In Hungary a Y2000 report by the Parliamentary Commission said Roma children in this year accounted for 67.9% of the students in “special" schools. Roma children were commonly channeled into schools for the mentally handicapped.
(SFC, 6/26/00, p.A10)
1998 Otto Rosenberg (d.2001 at 74), a German Gypsy leader who survived Nazi death camps, authored his memoirs.
(SFC, 7/12/01, p.A23)
1999 Nov 20, In the Czech Republic some 30 skinheads broke into a restaurant in Ceske Budejovice and attacked a party of Gypsies. This prompted a dozen Roma families to leave the area and ask for asylum elsewhere.
(SFC, 12/1/99, p.C3)
2000 Jun 30, Alphonse Juilland, former Stanford professor, died at age 77. His studies in linguistics included a Gypsy dictionary.
(SFC, 7/7/00, p.D5)
2004 Jun 21, A Swiss court cleared the way for Gypsies to sue IBM over allegations that the computer company's expertise helped the Nazis commit mass murder more efficiently.
(AP, 6/22/04)
2006 Apr 13, In Russia a group of young men beat inhabitants with metal bars, killing a man and a woman and leaving an 80-year-old woman and a 14-year-old girl gravely wounded. 9 people were later arrested in connection with the attack on the Roma camp in the southern Volgograd region.
(AP, 4/17/06)
2007 Aug 1, It was reported that more than 100 Serbian Gypsies have crossed the border illegally into neighboring Romania in recent days and filed applications for asylum claiming they were subject to abuse and attacks in Serbia.
(AP, 8/1/07)
2007 Oct 30, In Italy Giovanna Reggiani (47) was brutally attacked as she returned home in northern Rome. She died 2 days later. Nicolae Mailat, a Romanian Gypsy, admitted to snatching her bag but denied her murder. Her attack triggered a public outcry.
(Econ, 11/10/07, p.63)
2008 May 20, The European Parliament censured Italy for its treatment of Gypsies.
(Econ, 5/24/08, p.71)
2008 Jul 3, It was reported that Italian authorities have started fingerprinting tens of thousands of Gypsies living in nomad camps across the country, brushing aside accusations of racism by human rights advocates and international organizations. The Interior Ministry said prints will only be taken from people who do not have a valid Italian or EU document.
(AP, 7/3/08)
2008 Jul 10, The European Parliament called the fingerprinting of Gypsies in Italy a clear act of racial discrimination and urged the authorities to stop it.
(AP, 7/10/08)
2008-2009 In Hungary six Roma, including a 5-year-old boy, were killed in a series of attacks. In 2015 an appeals court agreed with the life sentences without the possibility for parole given to Zsolt Peto and brothers Arpad and Istvan Kiss. It also confirmed the 13-year prison sentence for Istvan Csontos, the driver in some of the attacks.
(AP, 5/8/15)
2009 May 2, It was reported that an estimated 250,000 Roma lived in the Czech Rep. A rising number of the gypsies were applying for visas to Canada. Of 861 applications in 2008, 84 were accepted.
(Econ, 5/2/09, p.54)
2009 Jun 16, In Northern Ireland racist thugs armed with bricks and bottles forced more than 100 Romanian Gypsies from their Belfast homes in a wave of attacks that sent them fleeing to the safety of a nearby church.
(AP, 6/17/09)
2009 Jun 23, Northern Ireland’s government said more than 100 Romanian Gypsies who suffered racist attacks and intimidation in Belfast are being flown back home at taxpayer expense.
(AP, 6/24/09)
2009 Jun 29, In Belarus Vasily Yusepchuk (30), an illiterate, itinerant Gypsy worker, was sentenced to death by Brest Regional Court. He did chores for elderly women, and allegedly would sneak back at night to rob and strangle them. Lawyers insisted the case hinged exclusively on a confession that they claim was obtained through torture.
(AP, 10/13/09)
2009 Aug 26, In Bucharest, Romania, fans at first politely applauded the Roma performers sharing a stage with Madonna. Then the pop star condemned widespread discrimination against Roma, or Gypsies, and the cheers gave way to jeers. Official Romanian data put the local Roma population at 500,000.
(AP, 8/27/09)
2009 Oct 8, Romania unveiled a monument in memory of some 300,000 Jews and Gypsies killed during the Holocaust in the country, which at times denied that the extermination even happened.
(AP, 10/8/09)
2010 Jan 13, Amnesty Int’l. said the Czech Republic is defying a European court by continuing to place thousands of healthy Gypsy children in schools for the mentally disabled.
(SFC, 1/14/10, p.A2)
2010 Jul 28, French Pres. Nicolas Sarkozy ordered authorities to expel Gypsy illegal immigrants and to dismantle their camps.
(SFC, 7/29/10, p.A2)
2010 Aug 12, French Interior Minister Brice Hortefeux said that over 40 illegal gypsy camps have been dismantled around the country in the last two weeks and that 700 people among those in the camps will be returned to Bulgaria and Romania.
(SFC, 8/13/10, p.A2)
2010 Aug 19, France deported nearly 100 Gypsies, or Roma, to their native Romania as part of a very public effort by conservative President Nicolas Sarkozy to dismantle Roma camps and sweep them out of the country.
(AP, 8/19/10)
2010 Aug 20, France put about 100 Gypsies, or Roma, on a charter flight headed to their native Romania, the second day in a row that it has expelled Roma in a much criticized government crackdown.
(AP, 8/20/10)
2010 Aug 26, The archbishop of Paris joined the tide of criticism over France's crackdown on Gypsies, calling it a "circus," while the EU's justice commissioner denounced French officials' discriminatory tone about the vulnerable minority.
(AP, 8/26/10)
2010 Sep 4, In France Roma migrants whose camp was bulldozed led a protest in Paris against the French government's security crackdown, with similar demonstrations taking place across the country and abroad.
(AFP, 9/4/10)
2010 Sep 9, The European Parliament called on France to suspend its expulsion of gypsies. The rare criticism of an EU state was backed by 337 lawmakers meeting in Strasbourg, France, with 245 opposed and 51 abstentions.
(AP, 9/9/10)
2010 Sep 14, The European Commission threatened legal action against France over its crackdown on Roma minorities, drawing a parallel between their treatment and World War II-era deportations.
(AFP, 9/14/10)
2010 Sep 29, The European Union decided to launch legal action against France over its expulsions of Gypsies, or Roma, to poorer EU nations.
(AP, 9/29/10)
2010 Oct 8, French President Nicolas Sarkozy met with the pope and top Vatican officials in a fence-mending visit following France's controversial crackdown on Gypsies, while a top Vatican cardinal urged France to welcome immigrants and those who have been persecuted.
(AP, 10/8/10)
2010 Oct 19, The European Commission said it will temporarily suspend its human rights complaint against France for its expulsions of Gypsies, or Roma, after Paris promised to alter some of its laws to match EU regulations.
(AP, 10/19/10)
2010 Nov 10, Human rights groups said they have filed a complaint with the EU accusing the Czech government of failing to comply with a court order that it stop placing thousands of healthy Roma children in schools for the mentally disabled.
(SFC, 11/11/10, p.A2)
2011 Mar 10, Romania's Pres. Traian Basescu signed a law making Feb. 20 an official holiday to mark when the slavery of Gypsies, or Roma, was abolished. Roma slavery was abolished Feb. 20, 1856, but discrimination persists against the group.
(AP, 3/11/11)
2011 Apr 7, Amnesty International urged Serbian authorities to "take urgent and immediate action" to halt forced evictions of Roma, also known as Gypsies, from their settlements in the capital Belgrade and prevent "systematic discrimination" against them.
(AP, 4/7/11)
2011 Apr 22, The Hungarian Red Cross evacuated hundreds of Roma women and children from their homes because they were frightened of a far-right vigilante group that was setting up a training camp near their village.
(AP, 4/22/11)
2011 Oct 18, Romania's anti-discrimination council voted 5-2 to caution President Traian Basescu for making discriminatory remarks about Gypsies and disabled people.
(AP, 10/18/11)
2012 Jul 24, In Montenegro some 850 Roma people, who had fled Kosovo during the 1998-99 war, lost their belongings in the fire that swept through the refugee barracks in the suburb of Konik. No one was injured.
(AP, 7/25/12)
2012 Aug, France launched its latest campaign to drive Gypsies from their camps.
(AP, 8/15/12)
2012 Oct 24, Germany opened a long-awaited memorial to the hundreds of thousands of Gypsies, or Roma, who were killed by the Nazis in what one survivor called "the forgotten Holocaust" — and pledged to fight the discrimination the minority still faces in Europe today.
(AP, 10/24/12)
2013 Jan 5, In Hungary journalist Zsolt Bayer, a founding member of the governing Fidesz party, wrote a newspaper column in which he said: "a significant part of the Roma are unfit for coexistence. They are not fit to live among people. These Roma are animals and they behave like animals."
(AP, 1/8/13)
2013 Jul 21, In France Gilles Bourdouleix, a member of parliament and mayor for the town of Cholet near Nantes, had a confrontation with Gypsies, when he visited a field owned by the town where Gypsies were illegally living in caravans. He asked them to leave. Some of the Gypsies made Nazi salutes at Bourdouleix and he responded by saying: "Maybe Hitler didn't kill enough of them."
(AP, 7/23/13)
2013 Aug 6, A Hungarian court jailed four neo-Nazis for killing Roma families in a spree of racist violence in 2008 and 2009 that shocked the country and led to accusations that police had failed to protect an historically persecuted minority.
(Reuters, 8/6/13)
2013 Aug 8, Nicolae Gheorghe (b.1946), Romanian Gypsy campaigner for rights of the Roma, died of cancer.
(Econ, 8/17/13, p.78)(http://tinyurl.com/pudxsh7)
2013 Sep 25, Amnesty Int’l. said more than 10,000 Roma, also known as Gypsies, have been evicted from French squatter camps from January to August, with many forced to return to Romania and Bulgaria despite EU rules requiring free movement for all EU citizens.
(SFC, 9/25/13, p.A2)
2013 Oct 9, In France Leonarda Dibrani, a 15-year-old Roma girl, was taken off a school bus and deported with her family to Kosovo.
(Econ, 10/26/13, p.60)
2013 Oct 11, A French court convicted 26 members of three Croatian Roma families of forcing children to carry out more than 100 robberies in European countries.
(AFP, 10/11/13)
2013 Oct 22, A top Greek prosecutor ordered an emergency nationwide investigation into birth certificates issued in the past six years after a girl was discovered living with alleged abductors at a gypsy camp.
(AP, 10/22/13)
2013 Oct 25, Authorities said DNA tests have confirmed that Sasha Ruseva, a Bulgarian Roma woman (35), is the mother of a mysterious girl in Greece known as Maria.
(AP, 10/25/13)(SFC, 10/25/13, p.A2)
2013 Oct 25, Greek police said they have arrested a childless couple in Athens on suspicion of buying an 8-month-old Roma girl and trying to register her as their own, amid international uproar over another little girl who was found living with unrelated Gypsies in Greece.
(AP, 10/25/13)
2014 Jan 28, A French court barred the return to France of a Roma family including Leonarda Dibrani, the teenage girl whose arrest in front of her schoolmates and expulsion to Kosovo became a cause celebre.
(AP, 1/28/14)
2014 Feb 16, In Macedonia an explosion wounded five Roma children in western town of Tetovo. Three people were soon detained in the case.
(AP, 2/17/14)
2014 Apr 30, The Council of Europe said Hungary's prison system needs to reduce overcrowding, stop discrimination against Roma prisoners and offer inmates work or recreational activities so they don't spend 23 hours a day in their cells.
(AP, 4/30/14)
2014 Jun 13, In France a Roma boy named Darius (16) was beaten into a coma in the town of Pierrefitte.
(AP, 7/12/14)
2014 Sep 26, In Serbia 3 Gypsy children died in a fire in a small wooden shack that has been their home on the outskirts of Belgrade.
(AP, 9/26/14)
2014 Sep, The European commission launched a case against the Czech Rep. over the one-third number of Roma in schools for the mentally disabled. The following April it did the same for Slovakia.
(Econ, 6/6/15, p.44)
2014 Nov 5, In southern France flamenco guitarist Manitas de Plata (93) died. He had sold nearly 100 million records worldwide and broke boundaries for Gypsy musicians.
(AP, 11/6/14)
2014 Nov 25, Bulgarian police raided a mosque in the town of Pazardzhik and detained Ahmed Mussa Ahmed, a Roma Muslim religious leader suspected of spreading propaganda for the Islamic State group.
(AP, 11/25/14)
2015 Aug 27, French police cleared out one of the country’s biggest Roma camps, dismantling a sprawling network of makeshift shelters next to a Paris region highway under pouring rain. The camp had housed 200-300 people for at least three years.
(AP, 8/27/15)
2015 Oct 10, In Ireland 9 people, including an infant, died in a fire at a Dublin mobile home camp for native Gypsies.
(AP, 10/10/15)
2015 Oct 19, Lawyers said Ireland has agreed to pay the Romanian Gypsy parents of a blond boy 60,000 euros ($68,000) in compensation after conceding that police in 2013 employed prejudicial racial profiling when seizing the child.
(AP, 10/19/15)
2015 Oct 26, Pope Francis called for a fresh start for Roma and Sinti communities, telling traveler families from around the world they could break free of prejudice by not falling into crime. The Sinti are a traditionally itinerant ethnic group that has been present in Italy for centuries.
(AFP, 10/2615)
2016 Feb 3, In France police cleared a sprawling slum-like camp along railroad tracks on the edge of Paris that housed hundreds of Roma, citing sanitary concerns.
(AP, 2/3/16)
2016 Feb 9, A sweep involving teams of sniffer dogs and a helicopter was conducted simultaneously in Paris and Craiova, in southern Romania. The joint operation by Romania and France against pickpockets targeting visitors to Disneyland Paris and other French tourist sites nabbed the ringleaders. The probe began last March after local police noted a spike in pickpocketing by Romanians and ethnic Roma outside Disneyland and on the train that links Paris to the amusement park.
(AFP, 2/19/16)
2016 May 4, Three Bulgarian police officers were injured when anti-Roma protesters tried to break through a cordon during a demonstration in the southern town of Radnevo. Some 2,000 people took part in the protest over an incident two days earlier in which four Roma men have been charged with the attempted murder of three young men.
(Reuters, 5/5/16)
2016 May 26, The European Union issued a warning to Hungary about discrimination against Roma children in the country's education system.
(AP, 5/26/16)
2016 Jun 10, A Swedish court awarded 30,000 kronor ($3,700) each in damages to 11 Roma plaintiffs who sued the government for discrimination, saying they were registered by police due to their ethnicity.
(AP, 6/10/16)
2016 Jul 13, In central Romania anti-mafia police broke up a human trafficking gang which forced dozens of kidnapped victims including children into beggary and slavery, rescuing five people in the town of Berevoesti. 38 members of an extended Roma family in the village of Gamacesti were formally detained.
(Reuters, 7/13/16)(AP, 7/14/16)
2018 Apr 8, Pope Francis told worshippers in St Peter's Square that he hoped Roma Day could foster greater understanding of Roma culture through the "goodwill of getting to know one another" and "mutual respect". Matteo Salvini, the leader of Italy's far-right League, urged them to "steal less".
(AFP, 4/8/18)
2018 May 9, An international report was released into the situation of the Roma people in the Western Balkans. It showed that up to 93 percent of Roma women are unemployed, with one-third of all Roma families there going to bed hungry. The study covered Albania, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Macedonia, Montenegro, Serbia and Kosovo.
(AP, 5/9/18)
2018 Jun 23, In western Ukraine an attack on a Roma camp left one person dead and four others injured, including a 10-year-old boy on the outskirts of Lviv. Police soon arrested seven men aged 16 and 17 suspected of carrying out the attack and a 20-year-old man suspected of organizing it.
(AP, 6/25/18)
2018 Jun 27, Rome's city authorities began clearing 450 people out of an official Roma camp weeks after the new far-right interior minister, Matteo Salvini, said Italy's Roma should be counted and, if they are foreign, expelled.
(Reuters, 6/29/18)
2018 Jul 26, Police in Rome cleared nearly 400 people, including dozens of children, from a shanty camp inhabited for years by members of the minority Roma community, despite a European Union court ruling halting demolition.
(AP, 7/26/18)
2018 Sep 11, The European Commission backed a European Parliament report condemning Hungary for abusing human rights and for the mistreatment of Roma communities, Hungary's PM Viktor Orban rejected European Parliament efforts to impose sanctions on Budapest over accusations of corruption, rights abuses and authoritarianism, saying he had the right to ban migrants from the country.
(Reuters, 9/11/18)
2018 Oct 7, Czech Pres. Milos Zeman refused to back down from comments slamming what he called a 90 percent unemployment rate among the country's Roma, earning a rebuke from campaigners and rights activists.
(Reuters, 10/7/18)
2019 Mar 25, In France around 20 people were arrested late today after gangs of vigilantes attacked camps of ethnic Roma people in northeast Paris after false reports that they were responsible for abductions in the area using white vans.
(AFP, 3/28/19)
2019 Apr 3, Rome's Mayor Virginia Raggi pledged an investigation into possible inciting racial hatred against the organizers of a violent protest that rejected housing Roma families in a neighborhood government-run center a day earlier. Raggi blamed both Casa Pound and Forza Nuova for creating a hostile climate in the Torre Maura neighborhood, a low-income area on the eastern edge of the capital. City authorities moved several Roma families out of a public housing project in a Rome suburb after violent protests by neo-fascist groups threatened their safety.
(AP, 4/3/19)(AP, 4/4/19)
2019 Apr 11, In northern Bulgaria protests against the Roma community took place in the city of Gabrovo, sparked by an alleged attack by Roma men on a shopkeeper. Roma, or Gypsies, make up around 5-9% of Bulgaria's population of 7 million and are among the most disadvantaged groups in the country.
(AP, 4/12/19)
2019 Jun 2, Pope Francis apologized to the Roma ethnic minority for their history of discrimination in Europe and paid homage to Romanian Catholics persecuted during communist rule as he wrapped up his third and final day in the country.
(SFC, 6/3/19, p.A2)
2019 Dec 5, Slovakia’s police said they have charged former PM Robert Fico with racism for his comments about the embattled Roma minority.
(AP, 12/5/19)
2020 Feb 23, In Hungary more than 2,000 people, including Roma families and civil groups, marched to parliament to protest against the government's refusal to pay compensation to Roma children who had been unlawfully segregated in a school in eastern Hungary.
(Reuters, 2/23/20)
2020 Apr 7, Leaders of Hungary's Roma people said the coronavirus pandemic posed a grave threat to the already precarious status of the marginalized minority, with many Roma feeling abandoned by the nationalist government.
(Reuters, 4/7/20)
2020 May 11, Hungary's top court ruled that a school Gyongyospata unlawfully segregated minority Roma students for years, granting 100 million forints ($310,000) in compensation to the children's families.
(Reuters, 5/12/20)
2020 May 15, Slovakia lifted a quarantine on the last of five Roma settlements that were closed off in April to contain the spread of the new coronavirus.
(Reuters, 5/16/20)
2020 Sep 26, In North Macedonia hundreds of Roma protested against police brutality in Bitola, the country's second-largest city.
(AP, 9/26/20)
2020 Oct 14, It was reported that Roma communities in Bulgaria were sprayed with disinfectant from crop dusters this spring as coronavirus cases surged in the country. In Slovakia, their villages were the only ones where the army conducted testing. And across Central and Eastern Europe, reports of police using excessive force against Roma spiked as officers were deployed to enforce lockdowns in their towns.
(AP, 10/14/20)
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End of file
