“We are offering a 300 RON (around 70 euros) reward to every gypsy woman, in the Banat area (a small region in western Romania), who can show us a medical document that proves that she has voluntarily subjected herself to sterilization in 2013. If they cannot educate their offspring in such a way that they would stop being a burden on the Romanian society, we offer them 300 RON for any sterilization procedure that was voluntarily made in 2013. The offer is very serious and those who are interested are kindly asked to contact the Autonomous Nationalists of Timişoara”.
This was the message posted in the first week of 2013 on the blog of the Autonomous Nationalists in Timişoara (natm88.blogspot.com). Now this blog has been taken down after the Romanian authorities took notice about this awful text which started to circulate on news media. Both civil society organizations and the news media were outraged by this event and called upon the authorities to intervene. One week after the case was presented in the press for the first time; prosecutors searched the homes of a few members of the organization. The have arrested its leader who is now prosecuted for promoting fascist, racist and xenophobic ideologies.
But not everyone seemed to share the anger and disgust against this nationalist and xenophobic organization. A local online news site from Timişoara (debanat.ro)published some articles that declared the swift intervention of the police as being “hilarious”. The author of the article pointed out that the local authorities didn’t seem to be equally effective in cases where the citizens of Timişoara reported bullying and intimidation acts form the part of the Roma community. Indeed, Timişoara seems to be an interesting case for those who study corruption. In the last years it has been constantly reported that the city is incurably affected by the violence of a Roma clan that is using its financial power to illegally acquire real-estate assets with the tacit help of the local authorities. For years, the so called “Roma real-estate mafia” forged and falsified property rights documents in order to get as much real estate as they can. Of course, this phenomenon enhanced the xenophobic attitudes of the locals, to the point that all the guilt for everything that is going bad falls on the head of the Roma community.
My observation to this situation would be that if the local authorities had done their job in the first place we would not have had this discussion. It is almost unbelievable that in 20 years of democracy no one was able to fix the problem of “Roma real-estate mafia” in that city. Of course that the slow but steady growth of one’s group influence over property has infuriated the locals. However, what I want to emphasize here is that the fury is targeting an ethnic group instead of targeting the corrupt and the illegal. The media and the local public opinion seem to agree that the problem is the Roma minority, and they don’t even seem to think about the fact that corruption has nothing to do with ethnicity, but it is driven by money and power. Partly, this is why until the true causes of corruption will not be addressed in the city of Timişoara, organizations like the “Autonomous Nationalists” will flourish and their actions and opinions will continue be seen by many as “justifiable”. Or, it is clear that nothing justifies this kind of bullying and constant aggression against the Roma. Such behavior should be penalized through legal means as well as by social punishment.
Florin Zubascu, Romania
Department of Political Science
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