An 11-year-old Romani girl from the the Nadezhda (Hope) ghetto in the Bulgarian town of Sliven has given birth. Clearly, there has been a violation of the law (and, moreover, a moral wrong). This is not a Roma tradition, nor a widespread fact of Romani life.

It makes me angry and disgusted when great and “competent” Bulgarian journalists dissect a case that involves Roma. I would never comment on an issue that I am not qualified on or informed about.

The journalist from the TV program Cheliusti (Jaws), Diana Naydenova, treated the case of the 11-year-old girl superficially and disrespectfully. I do not know what kind of preparation goes into her show, but it smacks of unprofessional journalism. At university I was told that when I take up a case, I need to acquaint myself with its specifics and its background. A friend of mine, an American journalist living in Slovakia, calls the process “journalistic Darwinism.” Just as Darwin traced human evolution throughout the centuries, so must journalists track changes in a certain condition or issue throughout the years. Alas, our best journalists do not have a sense of this, or the motivation to think in terms of cause and effect. They prefer to make a sensation out of ugly “effects” while enjoying a cup of coffee in the warm, cozy studio. At the end of the day, my least favorite aspect of Bulgarian journalism resurfaces – a generalization is made about a whole group of people.

Unfortunately, Ms. Naydenova is ignorant of another lesson of journalism. Usually she hosts two guests. But her bias for one side never remains unnoticed. I know from another journalist, the editor of a popular Western newspaper, that a journalist must always be at war with his personal judgment. He calls it “journalistic jihad: for short. Reporters should fight their personal opinion by trying to keep it to themselves, and not show it and press it on their studio guests in order to channel the conversation into some preordained direction! After all, journalism has to be objective.

But in Bulgaria, anything goes. Not only is everyone an expert on football and politics, but every citizen and journalist is already competent on the problems of the Roma and DANS (State Agency for National Security, recently implicated in corruption scandals).

Whoever invented journalistic “areas of expertise” must have been an amateur. Look here, another “area of expertise”! Tough! There is only one big area and it’s apparently open for everyone.

- Ognyan Isaev

P.S. I am expecting Bulgarian cabinet members Boyko Borissov, Simeon Dyankov, and Tsvetan Tsvetanov to soon express their own expert opinion on the 11-year-old mother from Sliven.

Some 60,000 Madonna fans added a sour touch to the pop diva’s “Sticky and Sweet” tour when it touched down at Bucharest’s Parcul Izvor 26 August. The generally rapt crowd turned momentarily hostile, showering the star with boos when she briefly interrupted the show to speak up for Roma rights.

“It has been brought to my attention … that there is a lot of discrimination against Romanies and Gypsies in general in Eastern Europe. It made me feel very sad,” Madonna told the crowd, according to an Associated press report. “We believe in freedom and equal rights for everyone.”

Madonna spoke after mashing up her 1987 hit “La Isla Bonita” with the Roma song “Leila pala tute” (Crazy love) in collaboration with the Russian Roma band Trio Kolpakov. The performance was part of the “Gypsy” segment of her show, which included traditional Roma dancers and costumes and images of Roma people on a giant video screen. According to Laura Coroianu, one of the organizers of the event, the segment “had been part of Madonna’s ‘Sticky and Sweet’ tour ever since her first show and it wasn’t created especially for Eastern Europe. Elsewhere, the public enjoyed it.” Trio Kolpakov said at a press conference that the reaction from the Romanian audience was the “worst” they have seen on the tour.

Madonna declined to comment on the boos, but Bulgarian newspaper Novinite reported that she didn’t reiterate the speech at her next show, held 29 August in Sofia.

While Western media outlets such as the Guardian and the Telegraph covered the incident as a sign of Romanians’ prevailing anti-Roma sentiment, the domestic view was slightly different. Romanian journalist Cristian Tudor Popescu interpreted the incident as “a question of customer protection,” saying concert-goers had paid to see a show, not a political lecture. “Nobody can tell you who to love and hate,” he said. Romanian tennis legend Ilie Nastase, who also attended the concert, also thought that the moment had been inappropriate for Madonna’s declarations.

All in all, these two public figures seem to share the view held by many Romanians who expressed their take on the concert: it was not Madonna’s views that were inappropriate, but the context she chose to voice them in, given that most concert goers were expecting a night of sheer entertainment and not a discussion on issues thorny enough to begin with.

The Roma parliamentarian Madalin Voicu further explains the issue: as an interpreter of pop music, and a “product of American kitsch” Madonna has a fan base whose education matches their kitschy music tastes. In other words, it was the interpreter’s credentials that undermined her sincerity, making her views seem just another quirk of a star well-known for her eccentricity, or perhaps a prop for show, in any case not a sign of deep felt concern for the discrimination against Roma.

Her declaration would have been met with cheers elsewhere”, he adds for Evenimentul Zilei, thus supporting the point of view held by the Western media: the lack of democratic education of the Romanian public was also to blame for their hostile reaction. However, according to Canada’s Globe and Mail, bloggers around the world echoed the boos of Madonna’s Romanian fans, and qualified her reaction as “deeply silly,” given her lack of information on the topic, coupled with her naivety that she could “deliver everyone a quick telling off at a pop concert, and solve all the world’s bloody problems in one fell swoop. Thus, to attribute the public’s reaction to their deeply ingrained anti-Roma feelings might seem like missing the point, given that most of her fans’ criticisms were directed to the inappropriate context of her gesture, and not to the statements themselves, seen as true by most them.

Commenting on the concert, the Romanian president Traian Basescu, present at the festival Romani Kultura (Roma Culture) held 28-31 August in Sibiu, declared that, despite Madonna’s claims, Romanian politics doesn’t discriminate against Roma. The president’s involvement itself testifies for the amplitude taken by the issue. The enduring Eastern European prejudices against Roma are old news, and, while people such as Radu Motoc from the Soros Foundation Romania are skeptical about the change brought about by Madonna’s declaration, the public debate that sparked in Romania brought the issue of discrimination into a spotlight that should make it hard to ignore.

On the evening of 9 July, all hell broke loose in the Romanian town of Sancraieni. Four hundred ethnic Hungarians, armed with scythes and pitchforks, descended on the town’s Romani neighborhood, where they set a haystack on fire and broke the windows of several houses. The trigger was an incident the previous night in a Sancraieni pub, where a Hungarian was allegedly stabbed by a local Romani man. Angered by the lack of intervention by Romanian police, who did not detain the pub assailant, the Hungarians decided to take the law into their own hands.

This is not an isolated incident, but a telltale sign of the inter-ethnic tensions in the area. Sancraieni is located in the county of Harghita in the heart of Transylvania. According to the 2002 census, the county population is 84 percent ethnic Hungarian; most of the remainder is Romanian, and about 1 percent is Roma.

Underlying the tension, and the suffering of law-abiding Roma, is the inability of the county’s mostly Romanian authorities to deal with the situation, says Boboly Szaba, president of the Harghita county council. He recommended, as a first step, more police (there are only three officers in Sancraieni, a town of more than 6,000 people, according to county police chief Radu Sandu Moldovan), and a more balanced ethnic composition on the force. “It is wrong to believe that all gypsies are the same,” Szaba told Romanian daily Cotidianul. “There are delinquents among them, and the state organs are not taking the appropriate measures to prosecute them.”

The idea that insufficient official action is helping turn small-scale incidents into full-blown ethnic conflicts seems plausible in light of other recent events in Harghita county. On 31 May in the town of Sanmartin, a Hungarian was injured in a fight with several Roma, who had left their horses grazing in his field. This enraged local Hungarians, who gathered in the Roma neighborhood, damaging houses and cars and killing dogs. Three days later a Roma house was set on fire, prompting a number of locals to flee their homes.

More than six weeks later, the atmosphere remains tense in Sanmartin. According to a report by the Romani Criss foundation, five Roma adults and 25 children are still living in the surrounding forest, and a pregnant woman and a group of kids have been living on the streets of Miercurea Ciuc, the Harghita county seat.

Daily Gardianul reports that several meetings took place between Hungarians and Roma, leading to the 8 June adoption of a protocol in which both parties stated they are open to dialogue. But to date, neither the Romanian authorities nor international organizations have taken any steps toward ensuring the safety and protection of the displaced Roma.

This was disturbing to see (care of the BBC):

The Czech government has expressed outrage over the broadcast of an anti-Roma (Gypsy) campaign advert by a far-right group on national television.

The head of Czech Television, Jiri Janecek, said the National Party (NS) video would not be broadcast again.

Interior Minister Martin Pecina has said he is now seeking to ban the NS.

The NS advert spoke of “a final solution to the Gypsy issue” and carried the slogan “Stop Favouring Gypsies” over images of Roma.

It’s pretty unbelievable that this ad was even allowed to air on Czech Television. The article mentioned a feeble excuse from a CT spokesman that the station had no legal right to edit the contents of a party’s announcement. But any mention of a “final solution” must contradict Czech legislation preventing speech and actions that threaten a particular group of citizens. I haven’t read the Czech media’s coverage of the incident yet, but I hope they look into that issue.

By the way, good to hear Pecina’s talking about banning the party, but the last similar attempt–to ban the more powerful Workers’ Party–ended in embarrassment earlier this year. According to the weekly Respekt (see the TOL translation to be published this week), the Interior Ministry completely botched its preparation of the case against the Workers’ party, leaving the Supreme Administrative Court little choice but to reject the ban. (A party has evidently never been banned in the Czech Republic, so the courts are likely to be especially careful in such a move).

On the plus side, it’s inspiring to see new Prime Minister Fischer out in front with his comments about the incident (see the BBC article). In an interview with Respekt, he seemed to get the importance of taking a stand against anti-Roma sentiment, something rarely understood by his predecessors…

With another Eurovision Song Contest in the books (congratulations, Norway! Hope you do a classier job hosting than Russia!), I want to take a minute to give just due to one of this year’s least-loved entrants, Gipsy.cz.

Hand-picked by Czech Television to represent the country in Moscow, the Romani hip-hop/pop/traditional band carried on the burgeoning Czech tradition of Eurovision fiascos, finishing a dispiriting last in their semi-final. True, the song they did, “Aven Romale,” is far from their best, and frontman Radoslav “Gipsy” Banga’s unfortunate decision to perform it in a superhero outfit complete with orange tights and a red cape may have been a tactical error. (As my wife noted, you can’t out-kitsch Eurovision.) Well before last week’s telecast the band was being routinely in slagged in blogs and comment threads based on their pre-show video, and they were held up by both The New York Times and The Guardian as prime slabs as typical Eurovision silliness.

Nothing new in the international press not bothering to look a little deeper before passing a snarky snap judgment (although I might have expected a little better from savvy Guardian pop critic Paul MacInnes). But as the smoke – or rather, the dry-ice fog – clears from this year’s contest, it’s worth pausing to note that the Gipsy who flopped in Moscow is also the one I’ve seen blow away multiracial crowds in Prague clubs; who’s written great party jams and rapped biting commentaries about racism and Romani life; who has played Britain’s mammoth Glastonbury festival, made the world music top-10 and counts “gypsy punk” icon Eugene Hutz (of Gogol Bordello) among his fans; whose status as a pop star in his own country has not kept him from speaking openly about prejudice among the Czech majority and his own community’s failings; and who charmingly told TOL on the eve of Eurovision that he dreamed of winning so that country’s increasingly assertive neo-Nazis would “shut the fuck up.”

I don’t think the international music scene has heard the last of that guy. In the meantime, worth pausing, too, to give credit to Czech TV for selecting Gipsy and his bandmates to represent the Czech Republic on Europe’s biggest musical stage - an implied if not explicit rebuke to those voices of extremism, and to the less strident but more pervasive forces that casually keep segregation intact. And to note, in passing, that while Gipsy’s performance was certainly underwhelming, Eurovision voters and judges didn’t seem quite as put off by bad songs and goofy production numbers when they came in the form of, say, blond hair metallists and Nordic rappers. I’m just sayin’.

Welcome to Transitions Online’s Roma blog, a resource devoted to spotlighting issues concerning Europe’s Romani communities. With support from the Open Society Institute’s Media Program, TOL has since 2005 implemented projects aimed at helping professional Roma journalists from Central and Eastern Europe and the Balkans acquire new reporting skills. Journalists from these regions have taken part in a number of seminars and internship programs with TOL staff and many participated in collaborative reporting assignments, with TOL field trainers working side-by-side with the trainees on stories in their home countries, resulting in published articles in English and local languages. Many will take advantage of the opportunities offered by this blog.

Whether you are Roma or not, whether you are a journalist, activist or academic or simply someone with keen interest in, and knowledge of, Roma issues, you should feel at home at this blog. It will provide you with that crucial little bit of extra information and color you rarely find in traditional reporting. And if you have something interesting to say on issues related to Romani communities, consider sharing your information and views here. Whatever your way of keeping finger on the pulse of Roma life, others may be keen to hear your insights.

Clearly, banal or frivolous topics will be of little use to the blog users. Focus on real stuff that truly tells us something relevant about the life of Romani communities. If you are a journalist, tell others about stories you have worked on or those you are about to start researching. Share anecdotes that don’t make it into your published copy. Feature full-length interviews with your sources, or blog photos, video or audio you didn’t use. Tell others about articles and books related to Roma issues or public and social gatherings you attended.

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